musings on amp tone,...

[pinkjimiphoton]

from an email from a friend recently...:

"For a lot of years, I used a 60 watt Mark III Boogie. With that amp, I got used to getting my lead sound by stomping a footswitch. I'm still trying to get comfy with working the volume knob. The amp I'm using is a Budda Superdrive 18 combo, with 2 channels. I was advised to set the amp up so that I could roll back the volume for both channels on the guitar, then roll it up when lead time came around. But the clean channel is WAAAAY quieter than the dirty channel, and it feels weird to me to have one channel set so much lower than the other to achieve balance between them."

 

hey pickers,

listen, here's the deal...in either case with your amp, the key is cranking that shit. that way, if the volume on the clean channel is pegged, you have crunch/overdrive/distortion when the guitar is cranked, and shades of increasing clarity as the guitar goes down.

the lead channel is often used by a lot of guys like me STRICTLY FOR RHYTHM....so you can have plenty of crunchy chords and riffs at a lower volume.

that may seem counterintuitive to the way people portray shit, but it's the truth...you're not gonna get a decent crunchy rocknroll rhythm tone outta the clean channel. it don't work that way. by the time ya crank a clean channel to the point where ya gotta decent crunch tone, it's too loud...that's why alot of folks began offering three (or more) channel amps...then you can have that crystal clarity that nobody uses, a crunchy rhythm, and a hyper distorted lead.

that said, i hardly ever use channel switching.

if i play blues, i will either crank the clean channel full blast, and control it with pick dynamic and my volume pot onboard the guitar, or more likely, just use the "distortion" channel all nite long, again, using playing dynamics and my onboard volume pot.

tho i tend to use effects, i don't NEED any. i can go all night with the right guitar into the right amp.

the big secret is settings. yah, fizzy preamp distortion sounds fine at low volumes in your bedroom, but take that shit out to the streets and it's unusable. it's thin, it doesn't cut, and tends to make everything sound like a broken telecaster pickup...like crap.

 

the key here is the master volume. it should be set THE SAME NUMBER AS THE PREAMP VOLUME. this effectively "scales" the amp to whatever size you want, and is the key and secret behind control. you can run the pre volume a point or two above if you want, but you WILL begin to lose tone and definition. even van halen's brown tone is pretty freekin' clean if ya listen to it. when preamp and power amp are at the same level, that's the sound of "dimed" at any volume you want or need. most folks who don't do this for a living never figure this out, but it's the key to controlling ANY guitar amp and getting it to do what ya want.

that little tube amp i built rarely goes above about 3 on the master or preamp, and i get more tone out of that with just a fuzzface and a strat than 99% of the guys i know or have heard. all i need is the volume control on the strat, and i actually use the damn fuzz so it's CLEANER when the guitar is turned down, not so it's more distorted.

folks can argue semantics all they want, but i'd go head to head with anybody and be able to match their tone...unless it's that droppped drop-d spam sucking trailer trash death metal tone with no mids, which i would never use.

i have to play everything from freekin' hendrix to lady gaga, and i don't even turn the fuzzface off or adjust the amp. it's all right there on the guitar.

i MAY need to adjust the amp slightly different when using a strat or a bird or my paul, but not really.

the secret is "scaling"...making the amp think it's as big as the setting on them two knobs. once ya get that down, you can get your tone outta anything.

once a friend stopped over to jam....but didn't wanna play, cuz the only spare amp was a crate 100 watt bass amp with a 15" speaker. so i let him play thru my marshall, set the damn crate like i would anything else, and enjoyed playing a "clean" amp that still sounded like me. people get too hung up on thinking they NEED too much distortion to sound good. they don't...less is definitely more here, and what seems highly distorted listening, is far less distorted than 99% of peeps think.

and that's how come your amp doesn't do what ya want. not to be crass, but any other way is never gonna get ya what ya want, if you aspire towards the classic guitar tones of the last 50 years or so. ya gotta let the ass-end of the amp do it's thing.

 

some folks may argue the point, but they'll never get what they seem to want...CONTROL.

 

peace, and happy new years, mates..

jimi

[Scott Fraser]

A very fine treatise on tone-ology. A copy should be taped to all amps before being sold.

And a big +1 to the notion that the tonemonsters of the past were way less distorted than people think. Page's tone actually cleaned up a bit when he gave up the Tele for the LP & went from the little Supro to Marshalls. And because of this there's vastly more definition & dynamics going on in Zeppelin than any of the supposedly heavy bands of today.

 

 

[pinkjimiphoton]

why, thank ya, mistah fraser!!

 

it's true...it really is. people always ask what i'm using to get "that tone"...and the truth is, just like brother carlos says, "your tone is your face"...it's all in your fingers, not your gear.

you can dick around for years buying junk ya don't need that you'll sell and get raped on, when all ya need is pretty much any decent amp and a guitar that resonates with YOU.

 

i mean, if i use the same damn settings on everything and can go from hendrix's purple haze to lady gaga's bad romance, that's telling ya something..

[Dannyalcatraz]

I have read the original post, copied it, pasted it into the Notes app on my iPad2, and will make sure it resides on all my other computers from this point forth.

[LeftyBlues]

I never gave it much thought but there it is right there! I will adjust my Peavey thusly and bask in the glow of Jimi approved tone...ahhhhhh....."drop-d spam sucking trailer trash death metal tone" would be a good name for a band too. Cheers!

L.B.

[Scott Fraser]

it's true...it really is. people always ask what i'm using to get "that tone"...and the truth is, just like brother carlos says, "your tone is your face"...it's all in your fingers, not your gear.

 

Verily it is so. Now, I don't play rock, I do electronic music with tons of processing & loops, but underneath that there is a basic guitar tone. Some years back my gig axe was a Steinberger copy equipped with single coil EMGs. Then I switched to a PRS with humbuckers. Pretty radical shift you'd think, BUT, when I listen to recordings taken directly out of my mixer I can't tell which gigs were with the single coils & which were with the humbuckers. Not because I'm deaf to the difference, but because no matter what the axe, it ends up sounding the way I want it to sound, i.e. like me.

[pinkjimiphoton]

exactly, scott...it doesn't seem to matter what guitar, pickups (other than maybe gretsch filtertrons), i can get virtually the same tone out of every guitar i own...there may be subtle differences, but they all sound like me...i know it may seem crazy, but it's true.

 

now, that gretsch sound...THAT IS different than pretty much all the other electric tones...can even cop rick kinda sounds, but that gretsch tone is different. but...everyone that plays them may have that tone, but it's still somewhat different from picker to picker.

[Gabriel E.]

I prefer using amps that don't have a master volume. I dime them and use a Weber Mass speaker attenuator to vary the overall volume. "Channel Switching" is achieved by varying the guitar's volume control.

[pinkjimiphoton]

that's another way to do it. i have a ps systems power tool (precursor of the groove tubes/palmer reactive load thing) i use with some amps. same ultimate result, but gives you more control, and more dstortion, if that's what you want. but even then, if using a high-gain amp, it'll sound better if not dimed...a non master amp is a different animal completely.

[Caevan O’Shite]

What can I say here, that I haven't already said before? Other than, yhup, largely agreed!

 

i have a ps systems power tool (precursor of the groove tubes/palmer reactive load thing) i use with some amps.

 

Actually, for what it's worth, the original, first version of the GT Electronics Speaker Emulator (I've got one) came out before the PS Sysytems Power Tool. (There have been at least two different models of the GT E Sp Emu.) I do remember when the Power Tool came out, I was mighty curious about it and would have loved to have tried one out, but I never saw one in real life.

[Scott Fraser]

My old studio partner had installed a Variac in the back of his Twin Reverb across the speaker terminals. This was in the late 70s, so the idea of a power soak has been around since at least then.

[Caevan O’Shite]

My old studio partner had installed a Variac in the back of his Twin Reverb across the speaker terminals. This was in the late 70s, so the idea of a power soak has been around since at least then.

 

Attenuation- and even EQ-type filtering- is one thing, but a reactive-load that mimics a specific speaker within the output-section is another.

 

ANYWAYS- agreed that "playing the amp" and actually using the controls on the instrument and playing dynamics/"touch" is an important and too often forgotten part of playing the instrument.

[picker]

Has anybody tried this new speaker deal with the variable "field coil" that raises and lowers the efficiency of the speaker, which in turn raises and lowers the amount of output the speaker develops?

[desertbluesman]

I usually use my Hot Rod Deluxe or Valve Jr Head set for a clean tone and a variety of tube stomps for various levels of crunch and distortion. I have had several expensive amps in the past, actual tone monsters. and a variety of vintage Fender amps starting with a black face bassman head and black face Deluxe Reverb both late 50's or early 60's probably, and many other versions from Deluxe Reverb all the way to Twin Reverb. I have had 4 boogies a Mark IIC+, a Mark 4, a Strategy 400 with a quad preamp, and a Lonestar Classic. Of all the amps I ever owned I like my cheapo Hot Rod Deluxe with tube distortion stomps. I get better tone from that unit even at lower volumes than I ever got from any of my Mesas. I ain't saying it will compete with a wall of Marshalls, but in a small room, I can get some sweet tone from that little cheapo amp.

 

But tone is also subjective what I like may not be what some other picker would like.

[Winston Psmith]

Ah, Jimi, thank you! Unless you're a Jazz guy playing through a Polytone, "Clean" isn't the path to tone.

[Scott Fraser]

Ah, Jimi, thank you! Unless you're a Jazz guy playing through a Polytone, "Clean" isn't the path to tone.

 

I'm not a jazz guy & I've never liked Polytones, but for me clean's the thing.

[Caevan O’Shite]

Ah, Jimi, thank you! Unless you're a Jazz guy playing through a Polytone, "Clean" isn't the path to tone.

 

I'm not a jazz guy & I've never liked Polytones, but for me clean's the thing.

 

(NOT an argument- just response to the above being a catalyst, a muse for thought)

 

Funny thing is, I've noted more and more that many of the better "clean" and "dirty" tones are a bit dirtier and cleaner, respectively...

 

When I was younger and all into metal and hard rock, some of the well known recorded tones that I thought of as "clean" were actually quite overdriven; for example, I thought of SRV's tone as being very clean, somehow I didn't perceive the bite and overdrive. Wes Montgomery is often more overdriven than I originally percieved, if I listen closely, especially when he really lays into it. And some of my favorite recorded overdrive and distortion tones were a lot 'cleaner' than I realized at the time- Malcolm Young, Jimmy Page...

 

It took me a while to realize why super saturated distortion and fuzz pedals and preamps, while cool in their own right, didn't sound or feel the same as what I was often referencing.

 

And likewise, playing through a bass amp, a Polytone, a JC120, D/I, etc. didn't do it "clean" for me the way a good Fender Twin, Vox AC50, Matchless JJ30, or Tone King Comet did; the former examples all sounded way too sterile, the latter sounded great clean while technically being distorted and of lower fidelity.

 

And all of the above got better and better as my "touch" and approach to "playing the amp" improved. I get some of my best "clean" tones from the cranked up "lead/overdrive/distortion" channel of a channel-switching tube-amp (ignoring the allotted "clean/rhythm" channel), by rolling back my guitar's volume-controls and putting a little "English" on my "touch". Sometimes I might use a "clean/rhythm" channel of a tube-amp for biting overdrive, cranking it up and attacking the strings just-so.

[LeftyBlues]

Jimi, I set my Peavey last night just like you say and lo and behold it sounds much better! You're one of the reasons I love this forum and thanks again for the wisdom.

L.B.

[pinkjimiphoton]

i can remember my friend don leffingwell used to wire diodes across his speaker terminals to get a wicked distortion back then, lol.

 

but...a power soak is a different animal...as is an attenuator..than a reactive load like the power tool.

[pinkjimiphoton]

what we guitar players call "clean" is actually pretty severely clipped and overdriven, whether a jc120 or a 5150. a "clean", truly clean, tone is lacking harmonics and definition. a guitar with fresh strings may have a response up to maybe 6k, if that..but when you add overdrive (distortion) you begin to hear the harmonics amplified and a much sweeter tone. if you REALLY want clean, plug your guitar into a power amp and a full range cabinet. i doubt you'll like it, it will sound dull and flat, and lack harmonic response.

ya know, it's funny...so many "purists" will want a great tube amp, then stick a solid state distortion in front of it cranked.

i do that all the time myself (tho again, rarely with the drive much higher than the volume on it) and it's a useful sound, particularly at low levels. but the magic still resides in the guitar's knobs and your touch.

like i said, i leave a fuzzface on probably 99% of the time..when the guitar is cranked, if ya heard it in a "clean" amp, it would sound fuzzy and fizzy and frankly horrible. but put it into a guitar amp, and the sound will bloom. turn the guitar full blast, and it "sounds like" hendrix...cuz he used plexis, which are CLEAN sounding amps with a lot of power...and he used 6550's, which made it louder, cleaner, and colder (looking for volume i think more than tone)...but turn the guitar down, and it changes...by the time the guitar knob is at one or two, it's cleaner than wth the fuzz off. some is because of the inherent compression created in the fuzz itself, some in the fact that driving the input of the amp creates more compression, but mostly it has to do with how much more harmonics are evident. that's why so many of us since Jimi have used these kinda pedals. there's true magic in there, sure, but all the MOJO comes from the PLAYER, not the RIG.

that said,

picker, yah, i tried one of them speaker cabs..it's an interesting concept, to my ear (probably from the fletcher munson effect...less harmonics/bass/treble at lower physical volumes) they sounded a little "dead" to my ears...but not bad, they actually were a bit warmer cuz of the attenuation.

lefty, glad it worked for ya...this is especially important playing blues dynamically.

caev...as always, right on the money.

wp..it's in ya...

scott..if ya looked at your "clean" tone on an oscilloscope, the amount of distortion would probably blow your mind!!

dbm, what you're describing is quite typical of the way it works with (particularly) smaller tube amps..a sweet, controllable tone at reasonable volumes. them little fenders can be extremely dynamic..i'm not crazy about the silicon diodes they use to help the amp distort (most "tube" amps use them, believe it or not) but i've used them too at gigs where backline was provided, and they sound pretty good.

it all is subjective, really, but the reason i posted this was that i realized so many people never learn how to actually run their amps so they can get what they need out of them...so they keep buying more and more hype, and never are happy with their tone...they keep spending money, and never find it. manufacturers and guitar players are horrible...they keep telling people they can dime their preamps and get great tone...but they leave out that that's at low volumes. play at stage volumes, and it sounds like dreck...fizzy, compressed, no dynamics, too much microphony from even good quality gear.

but "scale" the amp to the room, and you have a completely different animal.

 

now...if i could actually build a "clean" volume boost pedal that actually just makes it louder without messing up the tone...

lol...

 

the sho is close...but...more of distortion than a boost.

 

seriously thinking of just adding a box to my little amp i built that sits on the floor, with a stompswitch and a secondary master volume so i can set it to be about 4db louder when i need to cut more...lol

 

well, a boy can dream....lol

(trust, i already figured it out, but am plain too lazy to implement it at this time, and don't really wanna have to add buffered line drivers to make it work...it CAN be done...but i'm lazy!!!)

[Dannyalcatraz]

i can remember my friend don leffingwell used to wire diodes across his speaker terminals to get a wicked distortion back then, lol.

 

I had to read that sentence twice...I have a dirty mind.

[picker]

Jimi, I'm curious about how you set your treble/bsss/mid/presence controls when you match the preamp and master volumes. I've heard some guys say they turn the treble control all the way up because it clamps down on the amp's gain. Hendrix dimed everything. Johnny Winter dimes the treble and turns the bass and mid all the way off. Other folks do other things. What do you think, PJ?

[pinkjimiphoton]

i crank the midrange. on my princeton, to save a knob, i put a 100k resistor in its place.. if there's a midrange knob, it's pegged most of the time, depending on the circuit. treble til it's sweet and warm with the guitar down low, bass cranked to just before woofiness. i usually disconnect presence circuits..but if there's one on an amp i'm using, again, just to the point where it's sweet but not grating when the guitar's turned down.

 

a big part of it too is my tone controls, which are usually rolled down some most of the time. almost off with the volume pegged on the guitar for that woman tone, up more when the guitar's real low if it seems muddy. i use ALL the knobs on my guitar....

too fat? turn the tone up...too thin? turn it down. there's myriad shades of tone between the tone and volume controls.

 

turning up the treble won't clamp down on an amps gain...turning it DOWN will do that, as it's a subtractive eq. when the treble knob is cranked, it's just a shade less from not being in the circuit at all...see, it doesn't boost the treble...on 10 is all the treble the amp will produce, and from there ya turn it downwards, which "steals" gain from the circuit as you selectively start sending signal to ground. that's all tone controls do. on alot of tube amps, if ya turn the tone knobs down all the way the amp will not pass signal...cuz ALL the signal is being shunted to ground, with me?

 

with me tho...say with a stock marshall style (or any other tube amp that's designed to distort)...

i start with the master and preamp on about 3 or 4, wherever it needs to be at for the size of the room i'm in. scales the amp to the room this way. i start with all eq flat, in the middle.

if too much pokes out at me, i turn it down a little bit...if something needs more hair, i turn it up. you can quite quickly and easily "tune" your guitar to your amp this way...make sure the tone knob on the guitar's about half way down...wherever the "sweet" spot is...but keep the guitar cranked. play a little, hit a hammer chord or something, and sweep each knob a little til it sounds good to your ear, and the guitar seems to be resonating and feeding back some in a musical way. every amp is different slightly, but not all that much.

 

or, sometimes i'll just dime the whole fugging thing (if playing heavier stuff that i do sometimes...mostly i'm a classic rock guy, but sometimes i play with some of the dropped-d dropped tuned metaloid guys..) and just use the knobs on my guitar.

 

i mean, there's no "one magic setting"...ya just gotta tune it so it sounds good to you, and so ya have control. if ya gotta sacrifice a little distortion to make it clean when ya turn down, so be it..just hit the damn strings harder, believe me, it'll still go crunch.

 

believe it or not, i hardly ever touch the knobs on the amp. i pull off the gig bag, plug in and that's it. i don't even look at 'em, usually..unless something sounds "off" or something.

 

don't know if this answer clarified the waters any more, or muddied 'em deeper...but if ya start with everything on about 50%, you can add or subtract 50% of whatever ya got to work with till it works for/with you, got me?

 

[picker]

turning up the treble won't clamp down on an amps gain...turning it DOWN will do that, as it's a subtractive eq.

 

Yeah, I know, I forgot to put in the tail end of the sentence, which should have read "...if you don't." when I was editing my typos. I guess most amps tone stacks are set up that way. DO you know what the tone stack on a Dumble amp is like, if & how it differs from, say a Fender Twin.

 

How do you take the Presence control out of an amp?

[pinkjimiphoton]

a dumble is just a stock fender tone stack pretty much. a couple values are subtly different, but they're all pretty much the same thing from boogie to dumble to fender to marshall. it depends on where the tone stack is located, ie: how many gain stages between input and tone stack, whether it follows or preceeds a cathode follower(kinda like using both halves of a 12ax7 in parallel and taking the output from the cathode, for more gain as used in marshalls). you can find dumble tone stacks on the net, but they aren't all that different. values are different..but they don't have as dramatic effect as some may think, it all comes down to the SOS.

dumbles are pretty much just somewhat hotrodded fenders. they're not common enough for me to have seen up close or worked on one, but looking at the schems on the net, i don't see anything particularly magickal...it's more like howard takes the time to tune and balance each part of the circuit til it's optimized to his ear. i mean, amps are made to meet a price point, and once a stable prototype is built, they settle on "stock" parts to make it. that way they can reproduce it easy, rather than using custom parts for each unit. mass quantities can then be produced fairly cheaply.

a small guy like dumble can take the time and effort to optimize each amp he builds, which adds mojo tone and price. is it worth it? to me, NONE of 'em are worth it, as it's so easy to do yourself once ya wrap your mind around it a little. but that said, to some it is. to me, the dumbles i have heard really reminded me tonally more of an earth amp than a marshall...nothing like a boogie, and very much in the fender camp.

tone stacks are pretty damn close to all the same. the dif between a fender and marshall is the fender has a 6.8k resistor for the midrange (for all intents, preset at 7 with a stock 10 k fender midrange pot, if it has one) and marshall replaces t with a 25k pot. that effectively doubles the amount of midrange, and marshalls sound great with a 50k replacement, or even up to 1 meg. depends on the amp. there's so much component variation to begin with, before "drift" from aging parts going off spec.

 

to take a presence control out of the amp, locate the feedback resistor from the speaker output and either disconnect it completely, or add a pot as a variable resistor. i don't like the presence thing too much, it gives more balls without it, but can make some amps unstable. try doubling or tripling the resistor value, or the pot value. it may make the amp unstable and start to oscillate. if it does, put it back the way it was. FWIW, turning it off pretty much is the same thing...all the feedback is shunted to ground instead of being fed back into the circuit.

[pinkjimiphoton]

a diode clipper. oppose two diodes. connect one end to each terminal of your speaker jack. this will cause severe clipping, and may well blow your amp or speakers, as it will pretty much cause severe square wave clipping. it sounded kinda like a cross between a big muff and a distortion plus, he used to run a v4 as a head into that. it works, you can find reference to it on the internet, but...

 

hell, ya may like it. lol. try some 1n4001's...they'll crunch like hell on peaks, but don't say i didn't warn ya...great sound when you're 13, dunno how it would stand up now.

 

[Rampdog]

the key here is the master volume. it should be set THE SAME NUMBER AS THE PREAMP VOLUME.

jimi

Ya know... This is some damn good info... I mostly use my Blues Jr...and an amp tech once told me that on the Jr. dime the master and just bring up the amp volume as needed... So.... Last night I matched both the Master and the Volume on Jr. (around 5)and what a difference...!!! Using my Tele and my Strat I could get a sweet little crunch by just rollin' the guitar volume up...But a nice clean/slight breakup by rolling the guitar volume down... And never loosing the true sound of the guitar...I also use a Fulton Fulldrive 2 Mosfet and a Seymor Duncan pickup booster and they seemed to work into the scheme of things ok... Gotta' experiment more with those though... I never had a chance to try it with my LP but today I'm going to... I also have a Peavey Classic 30 that's been modded with a 80wt 16ohm Marshall Wolverine Celestion speaker... I'm going to give that a go also...

Thanks again for the tip...

[pinkjimiphoton]

no worries, rampdog...glad it helped ya man.

it's all a balancing act...but you'll get more mileage generally outta stacking several stages at a lower gain, than one dimed.

 

keeping the master full up and just turning the preamp up is fine, as it will sound like the amp on whatever level you have it set on...but if you have the preamp and master set to the same (relative) setting, the amp will *THINK* it's whatever size you have it set at.

 

with a les paul, you may find you'll want to turn the preamp down 1-3 notches from unity with the master...humbuckers have a lot more power when used like this than single coils..the VOLUME won't be much different, really, but the amount of distortion will increase somewhat, and may make it seem louder...

also, while a strat may seem linear with it's volume pot, a gibson may not be, as they often use an audio taper...not a smooth transition from off to full, gibsons are more like 10-6 just a change in distortion, and from 5-off a different "feel"...it's weird, and can throw ya a little bit. i believe it's cuz with a strat, leo fender figured you could adjust your volume with your pinky...les paul probably chose audio taper so if he needed to turn down some, he could hit the knob just a little and knock it back.

if ya think about it, most strat players are all over the place with their volume knob, where as most gibson players tend to be full blast or off most of the time. a quick tweak of a gibson, tho not as precise as a strat, will get ya what ya need...quieter.

[Caevan O’Shite]

the key here is the master volume. it should be set THE SAME NUMBER AS THE PREAMP VOLUME.

 

More often than not, specifics depending on the amount of gain in a given amp and how hot the guitar's pickups are, I find that setting the pre-gain lower and the master-volume higher is a particularly great way to go. I get less mushiness from the preamp and more articulate grind, bite, and final compression from the output tubes, transformer, and speakers.

 

On a typical modern high or medium-high gain tube-amp, a great place to start with the guitar's volume-knob rolled way down, is to set the pre to about 8:30 to 10:00 "O' Clock", and the master-volume to 11:00 O' Clock, "Noon", or higher, depending on what maximum volume can be gotten away with.

 

Gradually bringing the guitar's volume-knob up, you'll go from a clear, throaty but clean, to mild overdrive, more bite and chunk, heavier overdrive, and on through out-and-out distortion and compression.

 

On my 33 watt, essentially all-tube* Carvin 1x12 combo, I set the "Soak" (preamp-gain) to about 9:00 O' Clock or 9:30, the master Volume to 11:00 or "Noon", the Treble and Bass maxed all the way up, and the Middle to about 11:30, using my guitar's volume-controls to go from clean to mean to scream.

 

 

*(I say "essentially all-tube" because the amp has some diodes in a clipping circuit; but in this amp, the way I set the pre-gain and my guitar's volume-knobs, they're rarely engaged.)

[pinkjimiphoton]

yep. works for me. i do that too sometimes, but not too anal about it...pull off the bag, plug in and go...lol