Previously I wrote about why Allan Holdsworth chose solid-state amplifiers. Tube sag and power-stage compression disturbed the "time" he was trying to build. He wanted to erase the instant of the pick.
In the same era, another player chose the same solid state for exactly the opposite reason.
Dimebag Darrell.
What he wanted at the instant of the pick is the reverse of Holdsworth. Not erase it — protect it. Do not let it round off. Do not let the amplifier touch it.
The technology is the same; change the requirement and the conclusion moves this far. That is the subject here.
A transistor amp at the centre of 1990s metal
Pantera's Cowboys from Hell came out in 1990. The guitar sound on that album is not a tube amplifier.
The Randall RG100ES. A 150-watt, two-channel solid-state head.
According to guitar tech Grady Champion, Dimebag obtained the amp as a prize in a guitar contest. It was not even something he chose and bought.
But he did not let it go. In a 1994 Guitar World interview he said he had simply kept using what he had always used — Randall amps. By the period of Far Beyond Driven he had moved to Century 200 heads and cabinets, and he stayed with Randall through the 1990s.
Seen against the common sense of the time, this is a strange situation.
The late 1980s into the early 1990s is when the high-gain race rushed toward boutique tube amps. The Soldano SLO-100 in 1987, the Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier in the early 1990s, the Diezel VH4 in 1994. The premise that good distortion comes only from tubes went almost unquestioned.
Behind that, transistor amps were being fixed in position as cheap substitutes.
Right in the middle of it, one of the most influential metal guitarists of the era recorded his defining work on a transistor amp.
Why did it have to be a transistor?
The reason becomes visible when you list the properties of sound he was after.
The outline of the chug standing up. The instant the pick meets the string coming straight forward. The head of the note not flattening and lagging even when the low strings are hit hard.
In other words, preserving the attack transient.
A tube amp always does something here. Voltage drops through rectifier sag, and the sound swells a moment late. The power stage flattens the peak of a strong input. The output transformer dulls the rise of the low end.
These have long been described as virtues in rock amplification. As written previously, the design history of high-gain amps is also an accumulation of refinements for extracting that temporal distortion deeply without muddying it. What the phrase "feel under the hands" points to is mostly this.
But in music that places riff articulation at the centre, that is not necessarily an ally.
The head of each note swells slightly and lags slightly. In a slow song that becomes pleasure; in fast articulation the outline blurs.
Solid state does nothing there. Play hard and it comes out hard, at that timing. The supply does not sag, so the shape of the moment you played does not change.
The property Holdsworth sought in solid state — that the player's control of time passes through intact — applies to Dimebag equally. But what he wanted to pass through was not an extending line. It was a sharpened point.
The same property, used for opposite music.
So the general claim that solid state is hard and thin carries little meaning. There is music where hardness is a flaw, and music where hardness is a requirement.
Solid state was not a minority choice at the time either
To be clear, using a transistor amp in the 1980s was not in itself unusual. What was unusual was recording a defining high-gain work with one.
Roland's JC-120 had been close to an industry standard since the mid-1970s. Unshakeable as a clean reference, it was used widely from jazz to new wave. Norlin's Lab Series L5, mentioned previously, held a solid position in jazz and fusion.
Peavey too released large numbers of solid-state and hybrid products. Transistor machines like the Bandit and Renown supported practice rooms and small venues for a long time.
Transistors, then, were not "unused." They were used as the clean department.
Distortion from tubes, clean from transistors. That division of labour was more or less fixed through the 1980s.
What Dimebag did was ignore the division. He brought transistors over to the distortion side.
And the result became a sound that represents 1990s metal. Which means the division had been fixed by custom, not by technical necessity.
That Randall later developed his signature models, and has continued to hold a "metal-specific machine" category since, has its origin in this.
The design already began at the pickup
One more thing that cannot be left out, and it sits before the amplifier.
Dimebag's guitars carried Bill Lawrence L-500-type pickups. High output, with a pronounced character in the upper midrange — a pickup with a very definite personality.
This is not decoration; it is a functional choice.
A high-output pickup pushes the amp's front end harder. With the same amp, a different incoming signal changes how distortion is generated. A solid-state preamp is less forgiving of input than a tube one, so the difference shows up more clearly.
He was, in other words, designing the signal going into the amp before making the sound at the amp.
This is now an entirely ordinary way of thinking in modern metal. High-output pickups, boosters, filters that cut low end. Arranging input conditions before the amplifier has taken a place close to the centre of tone-building.
That approach was already functioning at the end of the 1980s.
Calling his sound "the Randall sound" explains only half. That sound emerged as the result of a signal pushed by an L-500, received by a transistor preamp, shaped by external EQ, split across three amps and recorded simultaneously.
Remove any layer and it does not come out the same.
Recording three amps at once
What is interesting about Dimebag's method is that it does not complete itself in one amplifier.
One track from Far Beyond Driven.
He explained the album this way. The guitar signal was split to three Randalls, all three recorded at once and combined into a single track. One went through an MXR flanger for a slightly hollow sound. One was completely plain. The third was set almost identically to the plain one, with a little more gain.
This is not layering merely to thicken the sound.
The plain sound carries the attack and the core, the modulated one carries width, and the added-gain one adds density. Roles are divided and sounded simultaneously.
Ask one amp to do everything and a compromise appears somewhere. Raise the gain and the core loosens; lower it and density is insufficient. In that case, split it.
The idea itself connects to 1990s rack culture. What differs in his case is that what he split into was not "effects" but the amplifiers themselves.
The period of shaping with a rack, and the day he abandoned it
His gear history contains one clear turning point.
Through the 1990s, Dimebag's rack held Furman parametric EQ — a PQ-4 from around 1991, a PQ-3 in the late 1990s. He also used a six-band EQ alongside. A period of shaping frequencies fairly aggressively outside the amplifier.
Then in later years he stopped all of it.
In the Damageplan period he began using the Krank Revolution, and went on to build a model called the Krankenstein with Krank's designer Tony Dow. His words from that time survive.
He threw out everything in the rack. Now he went straight from guitar into the Krank and let it sound. The fewer things the signal passes through, the purer the sound. He had once believed he needed the six-band EQ and the PQ-4.
As gear history this looks like the common story of simplification. But the substance is a little different.
He moved what the EQ had been doing into the design of the amplifier. He took part in designing an amp himself, giving it from the start the characteristics he had been correcting outside. So the external gear became unnecessary.
If the control layer moving outward is the large modern trend, this runs the opposite way. It is a movement returning externalised control back inside the amplifier.
But what he returned it to is not an off-the-shelf product. It is an amplifier built to his requirements.
Correct outside, or design it inside. The means are opposite, but the aim sits in the same place: to have the gear carry your requirement.
Two players who look like they reached the same conclusion
By this point the comparison with Holdsworth comes into focus.
Both placed solid state at the centre in an era when tubes were treated as correct. Both had input into a manufacturer's design (Holdsworth on the Pearce G1's lead channel, Dimebag on the Krankenstein). Neither accepted an off-the-shelf product as it was.
But the requirements are exactly opposite.
Holdsworth wanted to erase the instant of the pick, because he wanted to draw sound as a line.
Dimebag wanted to protect the instant of the pick, because he wanted to place sound as a point.
The same technology, used for opposite purposes.
This says something about the nature of evaluating gear. The question of whether solid state is good or bad has no answer. An answer appears only the moment you decide what you want to preserve.
The reason the tube-versus-transistor argument went so long without meeting is probably here too. The two people arguing were discussing the merits of devices without agreeing on what they wanted to preserve.
Which do you want to protect?
When you are stuck choosing an amp, entering from specifications or topology is usually the long way round.
What should be decided first is probably this.
Do you want to protect the sharpness of the instant you play? Or the sustain while the note rings?
Is the outline of the chug the point, or the flow of the phrase?
Do you want to place sound as a point, or draw it as a line?
Settle that, and the question of tube or transistor drops to being one option among others. Leave it unsettled, and no matter which classic you bring in, "somehow not quite right" continues.
Dimebag could keep using an amp he won as a prize for more than ten years because he knew what he wanted to protect.
The gear, most likely, is never decided first.
Sources
- Dimebag Darrell's Randall RG100ES — Ground Guitar https://www.groundguitar.com/dimebag-darrell-gear/dimebag-darrells-randall-rg100es/
- Dimebag Darrell Guitars & Gear — Ground Guitar https://www.groundguitar.com/dimebag-darrell-gear/
- Dimebag Darrell's Guitar Rig, Gear & Amps — Equipboard https://equipboard.com/pros/dimebag-darrell
- Audio in the text: Pantera,
Strength Beyond Strength(fromFar Beyond Driven/ ℗1994 East West Records), from the official "PANTERA - Topic" channel. Note: a 2010 remaster and a compilation version of this track also exist; the 1994 original is chosen here.