What’s up Gear Mortals, Trey Xavier here. On today’s edition of Gear Gods Quality Control, we’re going to see if we can take a classic sound into the modern era with the Orange TH30!
When speaking in a recent interview with Orange Amps founder Cliff Cooper, we talked about the future of Orange, and how the Orange sound isn’t going to change anytime soon and he told me he wasn’t really sure of their place in the modern music world. Of course, there’s plenty of room for Orange and no shortage of rock and metal musicians looking for classic guitar tones that the different Orange amps offer.
But I wanted to try a little bit of an experiment today, as to whether I can make a classic sound like this Orange TH30 more tight, aggressive, bright, and cutting for a dense modern metal mix. There’s nothing wrong with the tone straight from the amp – it’s big and fat and warm, with a very full sound, as you heard, and I do think it sounds awesome all by itself, but I wanted to just kick it in the ass a little bit to show that Orange is more flexible than you might think and with a little tone sculpting and boosting, I think I managed to bring it into the 21st century.
You might think that it sounded better without any boost or tweaking, and if so, great, you’re gonna have a great time with this amp as is and you don’t need me telling you how to live your life. But if Orange is looking to the future, I think they might consider making an amp that sounds like this – it’s still Orange, but now it’s got cool sunglasses on.
The TH30 is a super simple, 6-knob amp, with a 2-band EQ for the clean channel and a single Shape knob on the dirty channel that takes you through a multiverse of tone combinations with the sweep of a single pot.
What you’re hearing in the demo is the same performances reamped through the same amp, same settings, and same cab sim. All I’ve done is placed the Airis Savage drive in front and cranked up the tight and bite settings to emphasize the parts of the sound that will make it cut, and trimmed out the woofy low end that will muddy the mix. I liked the raw sound to start, but this made me REALLY like it, and I think if you were worried about buying an Orange because you didn’t think it could be made to sound like the contemporary high gain guitars you’re hearing in modern heavy mixes, this should assuage some of your worries.
