How to Use Your Tube Amp at Home (Without Getting Divorced!)

Loud amps sound great! But here's the problem... They're LOUD! In this video, we checkout an excellent solution for getting cranked-amp tones at bedroom volumes. Today we'll be looking at the Driftwood Reactive LoadBox. How does this little-known gem stack up against the competition? Sounds like a shootout is in order.

​Products Featured

Driftwood Reactive LoadBox: https://driftwoodamps.com/reactive-loadbox
​Suhr Reactive Load: https://www.suhr.com/electronics/tone-tools/suhr-reactive-load

​Video Transcript

Are you a guitar player that likes tube amps and dabbles in home recording from time to time? Then this little box that you've probably never heard of might be an absolute Game Changer! Let’s check it out…

Hey friend, you’re here in the studio with Luke from GuitarIQ.com. In today's video, we're going to be checking out a little box of joy by the team over at Driftwood Amplifiers. If you're not familiar with Driftwood amps, they're are small boutique amp builder out of Germany. They make these really excellent, exquisite looking, high-end amplifiers. They also make one little product that I haven't seen that many people talking about. Which is kind of surprising when you hear how this thing sounds. Today we're going to be looking at the Driftwood amps Reactive LoadBox.

So what exactly is a load box and why should you care? Well, a load box is an excellent solution for being able to get cranked tube amp tones at home—but at bedroom volumes without waking up the kids, or upsetting the neighbors, or causing your partner to file for divorce! The way this works is that a reactive load box allows us to connect our tube amp head or combo to a piece of recording software like GarageBand or Logic. So that we can play, practice, or record at really manageable bedroom volumes through a small set of studio monitors. Or even completely silently through a set of headphones.

The reason we need a load box to do this is that we can't just take the speaker output from our tube amp and plug it directly into an audio interface—like we would a guitar or a microphone. First of all, the signal is probably going to be way too hot for your interface to be able to deal with. And secondly—and most importantly—cranking up your tube amp without any kind of speaker or load attached to it is an excellent way to fry the power section of your amplifier! Which is clearly something we want to avoid. A load box allows us to solve both of those problems. It converts that speaker level signal down to something that our audio interface can work with. And it does this in a way that mimics the real world behavior of a speaker. So that we can do this safely without damaging our amplifier.

But here's the thing—and this is one really important takeaway from today's video—not all load boxes are created equal. As you're about to hear, the load box you choose can have an enormous impact on the sound of your guitar tone. Almost as much as the type of speaker cabinet or microphone you might use in the real world. Which kind of makes sense given that we're using a load box to essentially replace those things. So now that you have some context, let’s head over to the computer and hear this thing in action.

Okay, so here we are within my recording software—this is Logic Pro. Now, the first thing to note here is that, because we're essentially using a load box to replace our speaker and cabinet in the real world, we need to emulate the sound of those things here within our software. Fortunately, there are a bunch of different solutions for doing this. Probably my favorite of which would be this plug-in right here by a company, rather ironically, called Get Good Drums. This is their gold stack plug-in. It gives you a bunch of different cabinet and microphone combinations for you to play around with. It’s relatively affordable and it sounds really fantastic in my opinion.

So you can see that I have a bunch of sound samples here. In order for me to showcase what the Driftwood Reactive LoadBox is doing, I need to have something to compare it against—so you have some kind of context for what you're listening to. So I've decided to set up a little shootout here between the Driftwood reactive load and a similar product from a different brand that's designed to do the same thing. Today we're going to be comparing the Driftwood Reactive LoadBox to the Suhr reactive load box. Now, the Suhr Reactive Load is a very popular tool for this type of thing. It’s been around for a very long time—they’re currently in their second edition of this unit. If you Google reactive load box shootouts, you will often see the Suhr Reactive Load featured. And notably, a lot of the time, it actually performs really well. So that makes it a great candidate for being a bit of a touchstone for judging just how well the Driftwood reactive load stacks up.

Okay, so to keep this shootout as neutral as possible, in all of these examples you'll hear that I've re-amped the exact same performance, through the exact same amplifier, using the exact same settings. I've also selected the same cabinet and mic combinations across all of these channels. So the only differences you're hearing here are going to be me switching out the different load boxes. For those of you who are interested, the amp in question for today's shootout is my 50w Series One tube head. And I've left the EQ at the neutral noon position for each of these examples—just to keep things as fair as possible. Now, if you're enjoying this video, as always, please click that like button to let me know. And with that let's take a listen:

[Music]

Okay, so there you have it… A super interesting, perhaps even somewhat surprising, shootout there. I'm really keen to hear your thoughts and comments in the comments section below. For me personally, a couple of things stood out there. First of all, I felt like there was a really noticeable difference between these load boxes. Usually in shootouts like this you can certainly tell the difference between different units. But it can be quite subtle. Here, I felt like the difference was really night and day. Not just in terms of the tonal characteristics of both units, but also in terms of the dynamic response looking at the metering here within Logic. And second, at least for me, in this particular shootout on this particular amplifier I felt like there was a really clear winner. I much preferred the low-end response on the Driftwood reactive load. I felt like the guitar tones were bigger and rounder sounding. And there was also a really noticeable difference in the upper mid-range response. I felt like the Suhr Reactive Load was a much more mid-forward, almost hyped sounding unit in that frequency range. Whereas, in comparison, back-to-back the Driftwood unit felt a lot more neutral or balanced in those upper frequencies.

Now, to clarify, that doesn't mean that the Suhr Reactive Load is necessarily an inferior unit. There might be situations, based on the guitar and amp that you're using, where you'd actually prefer to go for that more mid-forward characteristic of the Suhr Reactive Load. But it certainly does go to show what an excellent job Driftwood have done with their arguably much lesser known reactive load box. Especially, again, when you compare it back-to-back with something that a lot of guitar players would probably consider one of the better solutions going around for this type of thing—in the Suhr Reactive Load. So there you have it. Based on this shootout, if you are in the market for a super simple, no bells and whistles, relatively compact, excellent sounding reactive load box, then I can absolutely recommend checking out the reactive load by Driftwood Amplifiers.

Well, there you have it. Thank you once again for sticking around to the end of this video. As always, it’s important for me to let you know that the Driftwood Reactive LoadBox was sent to me to check out and to demo for you. But this was not a paid promotion or a sponsored advertisement. No money has changed hands, all thoughts and opinions are my own—as always. If you'd like to check out either of the load boxes featured in today's shootout, then I will leave links in the description. If you liked this video and you want to see more content like this, then please consider subscribing to the channel. And finally, before you go, I'd like to welcome you to check out the website GuitarIQ.com to take a look at some of the books and other learning resources we have waiting for you over there. Well, that’s it from me. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video!