On our last studio night, KB and I spent the evening (and I mean the entire evening) getting two good guitar tracks for an upcoming song (currently called “What’s Mine Is Mine”). We wanted to get a good dose of feedback, and a nice crunchy tube sound for the tracks. We’ve been using the Egnator Tweaker and of course the Marshall JCM800 (RIP Jim Marshall 🙁 ) with pretty good results, but KB recently acquired a little box that may improve things even more.

It’s a speaker attenuator made by the folks at Weber, and it’s called the “Mini Mass“. In our typical verbal shorthand we now refer to it as “los Mass”. Essentially it allows us to drive the tubes in the amp harder without deafening ourselves or the neighbors. We match the impedance of los Mass with the speakers we’re driving, select some amount of treble to restore to the signal, and then control the output volume using the rheostat-like dial.

We found that generating very tasty feedback was a snap, even at lower speaker volumes, and the tone we got from the amps was smooth and crunchy. Like, you know, peanut butter on melba toast.

I surmise that we will be using this little devil a lot in the future.