Guitar blah blah blah amplifier blah blah blah
My brain hurts! I've immersed myself in this all day, trying to design a new circuit for my big amp...
It's been years since I thought about this stuff and there's a pretty steep learning curve right at first. Granted, it's 1950's technology, and it's a lot simpler than modern stuff, but still...
See, I built an amp a few years ago. I took two old Fender tube amps (that means they use vacuum tubes instead of transistors (tubes sound WAY better)), one amp had been through a fire, the other had been through a flood. I completely disassembled both amps, cleaned and salvaged and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned the parts, then used parts from both amps to build one amp that I called the FireWater. It was loud as hell and sounded like a classic Fender, only beefier (if you've ever heard Junior Brown, you know the kind of tone I'm talking about). At the time I was plugged into the Texas music scene, so I took it on the road with the band and had lots of great professional musicians play through it and they all gave it rave reviews.
Flushed with success, I gutted my 1967 Fender Bassman Amp that I'd had since 1986. When I first started getting into working on amplifiers I looked inside this one and corrected some mistakes they'd made at the factory, then made some improvements on top of that. It sounded incredible! Mike Ness of Social Distortion uses a hotrodded Bassman like this. Well, even after the corrections I'd made there were still some problems. It'd make some odd buzzes and pops, which usually went away after I pounded on it a few times, but I wanted to rebuild it to the standards of the FireWater amp, so I ripped out the circuit board...
Along about that time... my life started falling apart.
I had been building the FireWater amp for a steel guitar player named Emmet Roch. This guy had been a good friend of mine for years at that point... or so I thought. He never paid me for the work, just walked into my house when he knew I'd be out of town, said hi to my roommate and walked out with the amp -- then left the country. That kind of soured me on the whole experience.
Then my girlfriend left me. Then my roommate joined the Navy and sold the house, which meant that I had to move. Then I lost my road gig. Then I lost my local gig running sound. Then I lost the repair contract for the local music store. Then my best friends moved away. Then I tried to kill myself. By this time systemic lupus was eating me alive, and I moved back to Oklahoma in defeat.
So now I've gotten my shop (at least somewhat) set up and I'm trying to get back on track. My best friend and I had set up a company to build amps, and we made a beautiful prototype amp along the lines of the FireWater, but then he moved and all that kind of went away. So now maybe I can get this thing together and make it rock, then look ahead to the next one.
For those of you who know anything about guitar amps, I'm planning to make one channel like the the Normal channel on a blackface AB763 circuit (Deluxe, Super, Twin, Pro, Vibrolux, Vibroverb, etc). The other channel on the Bassman will be from the AB165 circuit, which rocks pretty hard and was the circuit that Marshall copied to make some very successful amps. The power section will be from the AA864 Bassman circuit.
I'm also doing something different with this one. I need some sort of grid to lay out the circuit on, and in the past I'd used a square grid, which is sort of the industry standard. Well, I was in the Goodwill Store one day and had a brainwave: I bought an old Lite Brite for a buck and pulled the front grill off (you know, where you stick the colored pegs).
Today I scanned this grill, played around with the image, et voila!
Anyway, I don't know if any of this means anything to y'all, but it's kind of important to me. If I can make this thing work like it's supposed to... well, that'd be just swell!
I talked to an old friend from music school recently, and he wants me to design and build him a custom amp. He's fairly well off, makes decent money, never married and has no kids so he can afford to invest in nice instruments and such. He has several modern amps with a fuckload of knobs on each one and they all make a bunch of different sounds that are pretty good, but none of them make any great tones, so I'm going to make him an old fashioned hand-built guitar amp with one knob that makes killer tone!
Look, I even have a logo...
My brain hurts! I've immersed myself in this all day, trying to design a new circuit for my big amp...
It's been years since I thought about this stuff and there's a pretty steep learning curve right at first. Granted, it's 1950's technology, and it's a lot simpler than modern stuff, but still...
See, I built an amp a few years ago. I took two old Fender tube amps (that means they use vacuum tubes instead of transistors (tubes sound WAY better)), one amp had been through a fire, the other had been through a flood. I completely disassembled both amps, cleaned and salvaged and cleaned and cleaned and cleaned the parts, then used parts from both amps to build one amp that I called the FireWater. It was loud as hell and sounded like a classic Fender, only beefier (if you've ever heard Junior Brown, you know the kind of tone I'm talking about). At the time I was plugged into the Texas music scene, so I took it on the road with the band and had lots of great professional musicians play through it and they all gave it rave reviews.
Flushed with success, I gutted my 1967 Fender Bassman Amp that I'd had since 1986. When I first started getting into working on amplifiers I looked inside this one and corrected some mistakes they'd made at the factory, then made some improvements on top of that. It sounded incredible! Mike Ness of Social Distortion uses a hotrodded Bassman like this. Well, even after the corrections I'd made there were still some problems. It'd make some odd buzzes and pops, which usually went away after I pounded on it a few times, but I wanted to rebuild it to the standards of the FireWater amp, so I ripped out the circuit board...
Along about that time... my life started falling apart.
I had been building the FireWater amp for a steel guitar player named Emmet Roch. This guy had been a good friend of mine for years at that point... or so I thought. He never paid me for the work, just walked into my house when he knew I'd be out of town, said hi to my roommate and walked out with the amp -- then left the country. That kind of soured me on the whole experience.
Then my girlfriend left me. Then my roommate joined the Navy and sold the house, which meant that I had to move. Then I lost my road gig. Then I lost my local gig running sound. Then I lost the repair contract for the local music store. Then my best friends moved away. Then I tried to kill myself. By this time systemic lupus was eating me alive, and I moved back to Oklahoma in defeat.
So now I've gotten my shop (at least somewhat) set up and I'm trying to get back on track. My best friend and I had set up a company to build amps, and we made a beautiful prototype amp along the lines of the FireWater, but then he moved and all that kind of went away. So now maybe I can get this thing together and make it rock, then look ahead to the next one.
For those of you who know anything about guitar amps, I'm planning to make one channel like the the Normal channel on a blackface AB763 circuit (Deluxe, Super, Twin, Pro, Vibrolux, Vibroverb, etc). The other channel on the Bassman will be from the AB165 circuit, which rocks pretty hard and was the circuit that Marshall copied to make some very successful amps. The power section will be from the AA864 Bassman circuit.
I'm also doing something different with this one. I need some sort of grid to lay out the circuit on, and in the past I'd used a square grid, which is sort of the industry standard. Well, I was in the Goodwill Store one day and had a brainwave: I bought an old Lite Brite for a buck and pulled the front grill off (you know, where you stick the colored pegs).
Today I scanned this grill, played around with the image, et voila!
Anyway, I don't know if any of this means anything to y'all, but it's kind of important to me. If I can make this thing work like it's supposed to... well, that'd be just swell!
I talked to an old friend from music school recently, and he wants me to design and build him a custom amp. He's fairly well off, makes decent money, never married and has no kids so he can afford to invest in nice instruments and such. He has several modern amps with a fuckload of knobs on each one and they all make a bunch of different sounds that are pretty good, but none of them make any great tones, so I'm going to make him an old fashioned hand-built guitar amp with one knob that makes killer tone!
Look, I even have a logo...
VIEW 16 of 16 COMMENTS
how i wish i could get you to hot rod my amps, i'm sure your work is awesome!