Pacific Dual Tremolo 100W Black

Introduction

100 watts, a stylish black panel, two 12-inch Oxford drivers, weighs a ton. Built in 1966 and regarded as one of the most classic amps ever. The sound of a Pacific Dual depends a lot on the unit, and during the development we visited a collector with 60+ amps, all from the same brand, all 100W 2x12 combos, and played them all. This particular unit was selected because of its distortion, it was easier to overdrive than other amps. However, if you need a super-clean sound, just turn down the Volume knob until you get that sparkly clean sound, and compensate the volume with the output control in Extended Features.

Create Default Setting

To always get a great starting point, make a default preset for your standard use-case

1. Dial in your preferred tone
2. Save a preset by clicking "Add Preset..." in the preset menu at the top
3. In the same menu, click "Set Current Preset As Default"

You will now have a good starting point everytime you load up Pacific Dual Tremolo!

User Interface

The user interface of Pacific Dual Tremolo is very similar to Amplifiers, our easy-to-use amp-and-cab plug-in. In Amplifiers you can choose between a selection of amplifiers and cabinets, while Pacific Dual Tremolo only uses a single amp and cab. If you have a platform product, such as Amplifiers, Amp Room or Flow Mixing Suite, you can load Pacific Dual into those platforms.

Top Row

The top row consists of the amplifier and cabinet selectors and bypass for the amp and cab.

Amplifier Bypass

Bypasses the amplifier.

Cabinet Bypass

Bypasses the cabinet

It's also possible to right-click on the amp and cabinet icon in the bottom row to bypass the section.

Main Area

The main area will either show the current amplifier, or the current speaker cabinet with its controls. The amplifier controls vary between each amplifier, and are described in respective manual, but the cabinet controls are common for all cabinets.

Clicking on the either the amplifier or the cabinet icon at the bottom will take you to the controls.

Amplifier

Pacific Dual Tremolo 100W Black is based on one of the most versatile classic amplifiers in music history. It’s been used in all kinds of genres, and with all kind of instruments, thanks to a sound that is clean, crisp and clear, but also warm, thick and punchy. This specific amplifier, with a black front panel, has a slightly more distortion and crunch than the silver panel models that came out in the 70s.

It can produce anything from the clean country tones for steel guitars, to a dirty, bluesy guitar sound. It works for both funky rhythms and mellow electric piano chords. It has a notoriously warm sound with a massive bass and a shimmering treble. Versatility embodied, it can do more or less whatever you want it to do. Except high gain heavy metal. And baking pizzas.

Knobs

The functionality of the knobs on the front panel of the plugin corresponds to the front panel of the real amplifier, except the spring reverb, which hasn’t been included in this plugin. We have also added a “Vibrato” switch, which on the real amplifier is a foot switch. There is also a difference when all the tone controls are set at 0, see “Treble, Middle, and Bass” below.

Bright

Turn on this switch to get a high frequency boost. Works only at low to moderate Volume settings.

Volume

This amplifier doesn’t have a Master Volume control, so the Volume knob controls both the preamplifier and power amplifier distortion.

Treble, Middle, and Bass

These knobs are the tone control of the amplifier, but they also control the amount of distortion. If you, for example, have too much distortion in the bass frequencies, try turning down the Bass knob. (Electrically speaking, the tone controls are located before the preamp distortion.)

The tone controls behave exactly like the real thing, except when all the controls are set fully counter clockwise. On the real amp, the amplifier would have become silent, as if you turned down the volume. A lot of reasons made us exclude this “feature,” so now when you turn the Treble, Middle and Bass knobs fully counter clockwise, that actually corresponds to the knobs being set to a little bit over nothing on the real amp.

Vibrato, Speed and Intensity

Turn on the vibrato (which is in fact a tremolo) by turning on the Vibrato switch. Use Speed to control the speed of the tremolo, and Intensity to control the amount of the tremolo effect.

Cabinet Controls

The original 1966 Pacific Dual amp is a combo amp with two 12-inch Oxford 12T6 Blue drivers.

There are seven different moveable microphones for each cabinet. Click on a microphone to select it. Grab the microphone icon to move it around the speaker field. Pushing the microphone icon up against the speaker will increasingly angle the microphone up to a maximum of 55 degrees.

Position

Sets the sideways position of the microphone. You can either use the Position slider or simply drag the mic around in the graphics above.

Distance

Sets the distance and angle of the microphone. When the microphone is close to the speaker, it will change the angle of the mic instead of the microphone. You can either use the Distance slider or simply drag the mic around in the graphics above.

Mic

Selects microphone type, choose between these models:

• Dynamic 57
• Dynamic 7b
• Dynamic 421
• Condenser 47
• Condenser 414
• Ribbon 121
• Dynamic 112

The tone section is a powerful tool to tone shape a cabinet.

Resonance

Move the slider to the right to add more “thump”/low end and brightness to the sound. Moving it to the left does the opposite.

Punch Gain, Punch Freq

Pinpoint the frequency that you wish to address with Punch Freq. In-/decrease the affected frequency amount with Punch Gain.

Low Cut

A low cut filter ranging from (left to right) 20Hz (off) to 250Hz.

Tone

Move the slider to the right to tilt the frequency curve towards less low-end and more-high end.Moving the slider to the right does the opposite.

Bottom Row

Gate

Engage the noise gate and increase the amount of gating.

Drive

Engage the Tube Screamer drive pedal and increase the amount of distortion and level from the drive pedal.

Reverb

Engage the reverb (post cabinet) and increase the amount of reverb.

The pre and post effects (Gate, Drive and Reverb) are completely bypassed when set to its minimum position (0.0).

Amplifier and Cabinet icon

Press to show the amplifier or cabinet controls respectively

Right-click to bypass the amplifier or cabinet section.

Credits

Pelle Serander - product design, framework programming
Niklas Odelholm - product design, UI design
Oscar Öberg – preamp modeling, sound and DSP-programming
Arvid Rosén – Power amp modeling and sound programming
Thomas Andersson - DSP programming