Spider Jam Modeling Guide
By David J Davis
By David J Davis
I saw a lot of questions on the old forum that had to do with people not understanding the way the modeling and tone settings work on the Spider Jam. I decided to write this document to try and answer some common questions. I hope some people find this useful and I welcome any feedback or corrections.
NOTE: This guide is based on the Spider Jam amplifier, but many of these concepts will also apply to the JM4 Looper and other Spider III series amps.
The Spider Jam has what I will call an active tone configuration. The active tone configuration determines what settings are actively being used to produce the guitar tone at that given time. The active tone configuration is comprised of all of the follow settings:
The status of all these settings determines the particular tone that will be produced by the Spider Jam.
It's important to note at this point that the position of the front panel controls do not necessary reflect the actual settings being employed in the amp's active tone configuration. Changing amp models, loading a tone preset, or even loading a song, drum track, or recording can alter the active tone settings of the amp from what the front panel controls indicate.
The Spider Jam comes with hundreds of built in Artist and Song based presets, which can not be altered. The amp also comes with 36 user programmable tone presets that can be overwritten and changed.
A tone preset is basically a snapshot of the amp's active tone configuration stored to memory so it can be recalled later. If the amp is configured to produce a tone you like you can save the current active tone configuration to one of the 36 user programmable tone presets. You can even load an Artist or Song based preset, modify it, then save it to one of the 36 user programmable locations. This will not change the original built in Artist or Song preset though.
When you select a tone preset the amp's active tone configuration is changed to match that of the preset. If you change any of the settings that are part of the active tone configuration, say by turning the Bass knob, the bass setting for the active tone configuration will instantly change to the knob position. This means the active tone of the amp no longer exactly matches that of the tone preset. This is shown on the display as the Tone Preset name preceded by an "*". This simply means you have modified some of the active tone configuration settings to differ from those of the last tone preset applied.
There are two variations of each amp model on the Spider Jam. Each model determines how the Spider Jam will process the guitar signal to model the desired amp. It's important to note that each amp model contains a preset for the amps active tone configuration. So when you change the amp model all of the settings in the active tone configuration are changed also.
Each of the built in song and drum tracks have a tone preset stored with them. Also when you save a recording, the active tone configuration is saved with that recording. By default, when you load a song, drum track, or recording, the amps active tone configuration is set to match the one stored with the song, drum track, or recording. You can disable changes to the active tone configuration when loading songs, drum tracks, or recordings by turning the Songs Set Tone and Recordings Set Tone options to OFF.
* Guitar Gate chops-off background hiss and noise on high-gain amp models. It is not a good idea to use it for clean amp sounds as it affects the picking dynamics.
** Guitar Boost is like adding a distortion stomp box in front of any amp model.