Rocktron Juice Extractor: Difference between revisions

To create the tones customized for the specific tracks on Secrets, Allan cross-matched ideas, ingenuity and his inventions until he struck on a tasteful variety. Using his Steinberger GM2T, loaded with two custom Seymour Duncan Allan Holdsworth humbuckers and refretted by luthier Bill DeLap with Dunlop 6000 wire, Allan created "City Nights" by running a Boogie Mark III head through the Extractor prototype, into an equalizer, and back into a Boogie Simulclass 295 power amp, using only one side of the unit to drive his speaker box. There, the signal from a Celestion KS speaker was brought to tape via a Neumann TLM 170 microphone. The inline processing for his lead tone included an ADA Stereo Tapped Delay, two ADA mono delay lines and a Lexicon PCM60. Formulas differ on each track; there are few constants. "I used that power amp and the speaker box on all the tracks, with different variables," Allan reports. "On ‘Peril Premonition,’ for instance, I substituted a Boogie Quad preamp, and used a combination of a Shure SM58 and an AKG 460 on the same Celestion I’m very flexible, because it’s all a big experiment to me. If I thought that I’d gotten a really good guitar tone and just left the mike and everything in the same position and used it, I know I’d die after-wards. I wanted to get back to using tube amps. Since I started using the Juice Extractor with the Boogies, I’ve fo und that I can get more flexible variations of tone than ever before. I find myself customizing the amp from the outside."

GW: What exactly is "The Extractor"?

HOLDSWORTH: Well, a lot of guys use a load resistor on an amplifier so they can come off the amp’s line output and use that to drive all their effects, because everybody knows how useless a tube amplifier is in terms of utilizing effects sends and returns. For example, once you push a power amplifier into distortion, everything you return in that insert will be distorted: the reverb, the delay everything will just be a mess. And, in my opinion, if you’re using a tube amp, a big part of the tone - if not eighty per cent of the beef, the actual quality of the sound - comes from the output section. I realized that I wanted to tap the output of the amplifier, but I didn’t want to use a load resistor. So the Juice Extractor uses a different principle. For live use, the advantage is that you can use any kind of a head - a Fender, a Boogie, a Marshall or whatever - and just come off the output and into the Extractor. It’s got eight multi - pie outs, so you can send and return for eq and gatin g and make the amp totally invisible to your ears. The outs can be sent to as many pieces of processing equipment as you can afford, and that signal just returned to a stereo power amp via a mixer of some description.

For recording, I take an amplifier whose sound I really like and put it into the Extractor. Then I take the line out of the Extractor - it has only a line out; there’s no output - and feed it into a solidstate power amp. That drives the box that’s going to be recorded at an absolutely minimal level, so the speaker’s not experiencing any pain, and the cabinet’s not experiencing any undue resonance from overloaded air inside it. Plus, the microphones are happy because they’re not dealing with huge air excursion. And it’s unbelievably quiet. I can get a big, reaming guitar tone on tape, with no noise whatsoever.

For his guitar tones, Allan worked with several pieces of MESA/Boogie equipment, running either a Mark III, Quad Preamp, or .50 Caliber through various combinations of custom enclosed speaker boxes, prototypes of what Rocktron now markets as the Allan Holdsworth Juice Extractor load box, and other assorted gear that best suited each situation. And although his mastery of the SynthAxe controller has taken considerable strides over three years of exploratory use, Allan’s loss of contact with the company over unresolved design flaws has cast the instrument into a position of liability, especially for stage work. "It’s really hard to push forward," he points out, "because I’ve got four consoles of which only two work properly, and even those screw up. The last time I went to Japan, it was dropping memory all the time. It’s bad enough when you’re a guitar player who’s already got mission control there, but with all the synthesizers, when the stuff starts going wrong, boy, it starts going wrong. On that last Jap anese trip, I just wanted to throw it away and start playing guitar again.

I play almost constantly, but it’s something organic, I don’t have a schedule or something. I play when I feel like it. My major hobby is cycling. The advantage of California over England is that the weather is good here throughout the year and I can always go out if I feel like it. Furthermore, I’m brewing my own beer. I’m trying to get it on the market for a while now, but as always, money is the problem. I’ve also developed my own beerpump. It gets rid of the CO2 in the beer so it doesn’t have any head anymore and it tastes much more powerful. That pump is a huge success here in the neighbourhood. Every pub has one. I’m also building my own power soaks, called the Harness. It’s almost the same thing Rocktron still releases as ‘The Juice Extractor’. But I went into a disagreement with the company and I broke the contract. Their box doesn’t resemble the original in any way. It’s all a matter of mass production. My own, handbuilt power soaks a re available in a small amount at local music stores.

- I call it "The Harness". Together with Rocktron, I developed "The Juice Extractor", and the harness does the same thing, but in a much better way. I’ve always hated to feel controlled by the amplifier. The harness allows me to convert the signal from the Rectifier on full throttle to line level, and then let it pass into the Carvin power amp. It does not work like a power soak; as the signal never reaches the speakers. I get the sound of the entire amplifier, both the preamp and power stages, and also get the feeling of it. All components remain intact. I use the box both live and in the studio, where I record at conversation levels! I have developed two models. One is suitable for amplifiers with master volume controls, the other is for those without.

A lot of that is because I started using Boogie stuff. One of the other things I’d been perfecting over time was my little load box, the Juice Extractor. When I combine that with certain miking methods, it worked great. On this track, I ran a Mark III Boogie with the Juice Extractor into the Boogie 295 [power amp], and recorded if with a Neumann TLM17D microphone with a James Demeter mike preamp. I used that mike setup for all the guitar solos.

I also took a really different recording approach: I ran the output of a Boogie Quad Preamp into the power amp of the .50 Caliber, and put that into the Extractor. Everybody knows now that 75% or more of the tone of a great tube amplifier comes from the power amp. If you plug a preamp straight into a recording console, it’s the worst sound ever. You have to use power tubes, and since the Quad is a preamp, I needed to feed it into a power amp before I could Extract it. I didn’t want to use a big power amp, because I would have had to make the Juice Extractor glow red.

TCG: Well I think for a while, you were distributing the Juice Extractor under your own name, weren’t you?

AH: Well, originally I think Rocktron licensed it for a while, the Juice Extractor, but then they discontinued it because one of the problems you had was that you actually changed the way that the load section was really responsible for the sound, so in my opinion, even though it was a great device, they never sounded as good as the ones I made myself. They discontinued it mostly because of people who don’t know how to use things like that, and through misuse, it would blow up amplifiers, because if you don’t think about what you’re doing, you just plug an amplifier into it and turn it up to ten and then all of a sudden they wonder why their amp blows up, you know.

TCG: All I remember bout the Juice Extractor, other than your publishing notes about it, is that I can remember your kids coming out of the bathroom and complaining "Dad, you’ve taken the springs out of the bathroom heaters again!"

TCG: Well I think for a while, you were distributing the Juice Extractor under your own name, weren’t you?

AH: Well, originally I think Rocktron licensed it for a while, the Juice Extractor, but then they discontinued it because one of the problems you had was that you actually changed the way that the load section was really responsible for the sound, so in my opinion, even though it was a great device, they never sounded as good as the ones I made myself. They discontinued it mostly because of people who don’t know how to use things like that, and through misuse, it would blow up amplifiers, because if you don’t think about what you’re doing, you just plug an amplifier into it and turn it up to ten and then all of a sudden they wonder why their amp blows up, you know.