After about a year of not playing my favorite guitar amplifier because it was not functioning, I fixed it. It’s a tube amp, was my second amplifier and I built it myself from the AX84.com project forums. The other day I was browsing there and stumbled upon a post about the amp I had built. It has since been removed from the site and a guy was wondering about it. Remembering old times, I decided to open it up and poke around a little for a bug. The only thing wrong with it was that one wire had popped loose from a poor soldering joint. All of this time I never bothered with it because I’d assumed that it was a transformer failure, a much bigger problem, when in fact it took about five minutes to debug and fix.
Never assume that a problem is as bad as it could possibly be right away, that is, unless you’re a lot less lazy than me.
Since there’s a small group of guitar players out there, what kind of amps do you play? After owning a tube amp no solid state amp feels the same to me. To me digitally programmed amps sometimes emulate the tone, but never the response. How do you guys feel about this?
All I have is a Behringer Firebird. A broken one, at that. I love guitar but I got too many things to spend my money on (or rather save it for.) Maybe someday I’ll finally get a nice Vox and an Ernie Ball or Rickenbacker. Someday . . . %|
I didn’t have the money then and don’t now either. That’s why I went through the trouble of learning to build it myself from junk on the internet, haha.
i was thinking about building one, had plans and everything. Instead I bought I fender 1973 super reverb. Its a silverface (couldn’t afford a blackface), but it is a relatively low year for the silver faces. No master volume switch at least. Works great except for the vibrato which is broken, and i dont feel like putting the money into something i wont use.
Between that and a TS-808 reissue, I can get some pretty good tones.
It’s a wonder that you’re overly concerned with signatures when you’re so willing to act like a jerk in the actual post.
I love Super Reverbs. The guy that taught me to play blues had one, could blast your eardrums out. Are you sure the vibrato tube didn’t die? They don’t last forever, and the vibrato tubes tend to die faster than pre-amp tubes for some reason.
There isn’t a huge difference between the early silverface amps and blackfaces, you could mod it if you wanted, but I don’t really think the early silverfaces sounded so terrible as people make them out to.
i appreciate the link, if i decide to change it, that link will help. Plus I have always wondered what the exact pieces that had to be replaced were. Yeah I have thought about changing out the pre-amp tube and just have never gotten arround to it. Do you have any pictures of your amp?
Aha, well if I had a place to play it I probably would have been right on it but I didn’t mention that an additional hinderance to me bothering with it was that all of this time I haven’t had a place to play it. It’s rather loud and I live in family-oriented apartments, so I’m headphones-only right now. Ironically it’s cool for the neighbors to have kids running back and forth across my ceiling in between domestic disputes but I can’t play loud guitar. This weekend I passed it on to a friend who will get more use from it than I for the time being.
Well, yeah and no. I’d love a SR, but right now I’ve nowhere to play/store it and shipping that sucker would definately be a pain. Also I’m a college student with the usual financial perks and I scrounge dead equipment for parts. That Vox I made is a rather eclectic mix of antique military equipment, dead amplifiers and long-forgotten soviet tube types. I think it costed me <$100 to build all-in-all, though gathering the parts for it took about 8 months. I’ve a stack of dead Peavey amps taller than me that I got for free or junk cost which I’m hoping to transform soon.
Here it is in all its blurry glory:
The pre-amp tubes stick out of the top because I built it inside a dead SS amp chassis and there was nowhere to mount the pre-amp tubes on the bottom.
Tremolo tubes usually modulate the entirety of the amplifier output, so to test you should be able to replace it with one of your pre-amp tubes temporarily to see if the volume of the hiss/hum variates. It won’t harm your amplifier to be without its pre-amp tubes while in use, though it won’t amplify your guitar that way.
Two words: speaker coffin (aka isolation box). I’m looking for a good 15" that will make my 50 watt Marshall JCM 800 head sing without driving my familly crazy. As soon as I find one I’m converting my old road case into a speaker coffin. I’ll let you know how it works out.
someone once told me about a device you can connect between the amplifier “line out” and the speakers. It will draw power from the amp so you can still overdrive your tubes to get that good warm tone. I can’t remember what it is called though.
It would have to be “speaker out”, not “line out”. Tube amps traditionally don’t have a line output unless yours has an effects loop.
There are several devices that will do what you are talking about, generally speaking they are a bad idea. If you care at all about your tone and the contribution made to it by the interaction of the power tubes and speakers you’ll know what I mean. If you’re really into heavy-metal, compressing the piss out of your sound, then go for one of those gadgets.
It would have to be “speaker out”, not “line out”. Tube amps traditionally don’t have a line output unless yours has an effects loop.
There are several devices that will do what you are talking about, generally speaking they are a bad idea. If you care at all about your tone and the contribution made to it by the interaction of the power tubes and speakers you’ll know what I mean. If you’re really into heavy-metal, compressing the piss out of your sound, then go for one of those gadgets.[/quote]
I believe my friend has one of these. He has a full tube amp and has a little box on the top but I can’t remember what it is called. Anyway, it overdrives the tubes to get the nice tone that you can’t get unless you turn the volume way up. He really likes it and it works nice.
It’s called an attenuator and they’ll have a large resistor and a frequency emulator typically. For a while Weber Vintage Sound Technology had a device that was basically a speaker without a cone so that the emulation was exact, but I don’t think they sell them anymore.
What I’m thinking about doing is building a mini-amp, a 1/2 watt combo that is still full-tube and uses typical pre-amp tubes for output. It’d be somewhere along the lines of a Firefly. Cheap too, since all of the parts are so small.
I’ve always thought it was funny that a Line6 amp will go obsolete before a tube amp will.
The reason they don’t make the Weber Mass is that even though it emulated the impedance of a speaker exactly it did not emulate it’s sound (as a matter of fact it made no sound). You still had to eq your sound or run it through various “speaker emulation” digital trickery.
I have experimented with “dummy loads” quite a bit and they simply don’t do what a speaker does other than to mimic it’s electrical properties. They lack a speaker’s acoustical/mechanical properties which to many purist is where a big chunk of the sound comes from. As for purely resistive attenuators, they change the impedance of your speaker (reducing, in effect, the reactive component) messing with the way your power tube/output transformer interacts with it.
Even Eddie Van Halen (who is greatly responsible for making dummy loads such hot sellers) still pumped is signal back through a power amp and a 4 x 12 cab for miking just to get that speaker “thump” back in his sound.
Lastly, as nifty as the firefly sound, a 12AX7 simply does not have the same sonic qualities as an EL84. It may sound cool but it will sound different than what you are accustomed to.
i just dont like you very much 
This weekend I passed it on to a friend who will get more use from it than I for the time being.
