cathode follower, purpose? and effect on tone.

10/21/2000 4:57 PM

Ricky

cathode follower, purpose? and effect on tone. what exactly is the purpose of the cathode folower stage? I know it dosen't have any gain of its own, so is it there to ballance the signal somehow before the tone stack? also, how does it sound when it clips as opposed to a regular gain stage?   another thing, my amp is set up like this; stage1> volume> stage2> tonestack> long tail PI> cathode-biased PP 6V6s. my amp has too much gain, so if I converted stage 2 to a cathode follower stage, would it bring down the gain to more reasonable levels?   My goal here is to turn the amps gain down some so I am just getting clean and lightly overdriven sounds from it. I have a soldano preamp I use to get medium and heavy sound with. as it is, I am only using half of the volume knob and the other half is unusable because there is too much gain. this pushes the 6V6s into "flub zone" way too early. I have used lower gain tubes(12ay, 12au7) and they bring down the gain significantly, but I wanted to experiment with other ways to bring down the gain as well(with the cathode follwer) especially if they impart a tone of their own.   thanks, Ricky