How To Get Good Guitar Tone
 
"Guitar and Amp Hire" provides high end Electric, Acoustic and Bass Guitars not generally available in the Middle East.
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Guitars of any type are only as good as the audio equipment used to project volume and tone. 
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Digital recording is the norm nowadays. However, the best  true satisfying tone for the discerning guitarist has always been delivered by analog tube/valve amps. Transistor based amps have all the bells and whistles on them but the sound from them is much less fulfilling. 
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To get analog (tube) amps to deliver the tonal holy grail they are renowned for, tube amps have to be driven hard and played loud in order to get the output tubes to deliver. If a valve (tube) amp is not driven to the point where the output tubes are just about overdriven (known as clipping) valve amps are not much better than transistor based amps.
 
If you want to sound like Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), Angus Young (ACDC), Slash (Guns and Roses), Joe Bonassama etc... they use tube amps  and they drive them hard and play them loud. 
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Billy Gibbons recorded "Cheap Sunglasses" on a 18 Watt rated 62 Fender Deluxe tube amp (2 x 6V6 tubes). The volume he recorded at to get that tone would still be very loud and not what the neighbors would be happy with.
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There are ways round this of course, and generally the workaround is associated with attenuation (THD Hotplate, Tong King Ironman, Dr Z Airbrake). Most of the big names use some form of attenuation. Many use load boxes and speaker simulators (Fryette Power Station, Palmer PGA-04) and feed their  output signal from their amps direct to the front mixing desk and then into to the PA. Joe Bonassama, in particular, uses Palmer speaker simulators (Palmer PDI -03 JB and PGA-04) to get his sound.
 
Load boxes, in our opinion, offer the best attenuation. Resistive based attenuation works well reducing sound volume off the top by knocking off the top few decibels, but the tone degrades as the sound volume is attenuated to bedroom levels. However, to get to bedroom noise levels, reactive load attenuation will get you there. It should be noted that tone is also a component  of "pushing air" through speaker cabinets. Ultimately, you can never really replicate a Marshall 100 Watt amp's tone in ones bedroom. But  load boxes through front desk mixing desks and in to PA's or computers will get you very close.
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Many guitarists record via load boxes through a DI Box (we use Apogee Duet 2) direct  in to a lap top into Logic Pro 9 or something  similar. 
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The key to good tone is : a good quality guitar, a good tube amplifier and then how to get that analog power to someone's ear at lower volumes. 
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We at "Guitar and Amp Hire" know how to do this and therefore, along with the hire of our equipment, we provide advise on how to get good clean and overdriven guitar tone at lower more manageable volumes. 
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Also of interest, some smaller  single channel tube amps deliver great clean tones (a Victoria 20112 - 2 x 6v6 and delivers about 12 Watts) but its clean tone sits at a lower sound volume which  is not loud enough for live situations. The solution would be to use a Fryette Power Station or a Palmer PGA-04 through a front mixing desk in a form of re-amping.
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There are draw backs with attenuation, some approaches are better than others (Load boxes being the best approach, followed by reactive and then resistive approaches to attenuation).
 
The bottom line is, if you have a tube amp and wish to get good tone, you would not go far wrong talking to us.