OLA ENGLUND Makes Every Amp Sound The Same

Everybody’s favorite Swedish gear demo master Ola Englund gets the same complaint a lot of us YouTube gear guys get – “You make every amp sound the SAME!”. Of course, this is an obvious bullshit comment for many reasons (they don’t ACTUALLY all sound the same – if you listen to them one after the other, you’d hear that they’re quite different; if they all sounded DRASTICALLY different, there would be complaints that there’s no consistency for viewers to follow from video to video; when you use all the same other gear than what’s being demo’d, it’s easier to track what’s changing; when you get good at getting tones, you tend towards the same types of sounds and they get more and more consistent; the differences between good amp tones are a lot smaller than you think; shall I go on?) but Ola takes a minute to take the criticism to heart, for the sake of argument – does he make every amp sound the same?

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As Editor-in-Chief of Gear Gods, I've been feeding your sick instrument fetishism and trying unsuccessfully to hide my own since 2013. I studied music on both coasts (Berklee and SSU) and now I'm just trying to put my degree to some use. That's a music degree, not an English one. I'm sure you noticed.

Latest comments
  • The same could be said about your boy Fluff. And of course they don’t all sound the same. I think people often have a “go to” sound for certain situations, and they try to make whatever amp they’re playing through sound like their sound.

  • A lot of people have optimal settings for their ear when it comes to dialing in a tone, so they are going to sound somewhat similar. Ola has an idiosyncratic taste in tone, or at least seems to.

  • Turn the gain down, man.

  • Using this much preamp distortion really seems to compress the frequency response. I’ve noticed this a lot with pickup shootouts, where demonstrating with a modern metal tone is much harder to differentiate than something lower-gain. If you want “that sound”, crank it up, but if you want to be unique, back it off a bit.

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