How's your weekend going? Not terrible here.
Last night I took my amp to my buddy's house, he knows guitars and amps so I was eager to get his opinion.
The amp shit the bed and I fucked up my shoulder carrying the big son of a bitch to and from the car! Hahahaha! My buddy played through my amp for probably half an hour and it sounded good, he seemed to be enjoying himself. I plugged in the Test Probe guitar and played for about five minutes and was really getting into it when it blew it's fuse.
Hmmm...
I had packed extra power tubes, extra preamp tubes, the digital multimeter, an extra guitar and even an extra speaker cable... but no extra fuses! Even funnier is that my friend didn't have any, either! Two guys who're really into vintage amps and neither of us had a fuse.
So we jammed through his amps, I got him to try the Test Probe, and it proved to be a bit hit. It's such a comfortable guitar, sort of goofy and even cartoonish with it's dinky scale, but it has great pickups and plays very easily.
If you close your eyes, it sounds expensive!
So today I opened up the amp and looked inside to see what might've gone wrong. Did I not use enough diodes? Did the old power tubes finally lunch? No, everything looked fine... I poked another fuse in the holder, fired it up and found to my slightly confused relief that everything works perfectly (and sounds killer). I went ahead and installed a newer set of power tubes and set the bias and played through it some more. I'm constantly surprised at how good it sounds, how brutal the sonic impact from the speakers -- you can feel it on your skin when you're that close to an amp this size. It's a real Godzilla.
As I'd promised myself, I started work the custom amp for my friend in New Orleans. I found this chassis in the junk pile down by the garage. No telling what it used to be part of but it held rotting leaves and rainwater for probably the last 20 years, so there was some pitting and a lot of scratches and a patina from the elements.
I started to sand it down, but quickly realized that this would take way too much time, so I chucked a nylon rotary brush in the drill press and went crazy for a couple hours.
Stay tuned for more on this project...
Last night I took my amp to my buddy's house, he knows guitars and amps so I was eager to get his opinion.
The amp shit the bed and I fucked up my shoulder carrying the big son of a bitch to and from the car! Hahahaha! My buddy played through my amp for probably half an hour and it sounded good, he seemed to be enjoying himself. I plugged in the Test Probe guitar and played for about five minutes and was really getting into it when it blew it's fuse.
Hmmm...
I had packed extra power tubes, extra preamp tubes, the digital multimeter, an extra guitar and even an extra speaker cable... but no extra fuses! Even funnier is that my friend didn't have any, either! Two guys who're really into vintage amps and neither of us had a fuse.
So we jammed through his amps, I got him to try the Test Probe, and it proved to be a bit hit. It's such a comfortable guitar, sort of goofy and even cartoonish with it's dinky scale, but it has great pickups and plays very easily.
If you close your eyes, it sounds expensive!
So today I opened up the amp and looked inside to see what might've gone wrong. Did I not use enough diodes? Did the old power tubes finally lunch? No, everything looked fine... I poked another fuse in the holder, fired it up and found to my slightly confused relief that everything works perfectly (and sounds killer). I went ahead and installed a newer set of power tubes and set the bias and played through it some more. I'm constantly surprised at how good it sounds, how brutal the sonic impact from the speakers -- you can feel it on your skin when you're that close to an amp this size. It's a real Godzilla.
As I'd promised myself, I started work the custom amp for my friend in New Orleans. I found this chassis in the junk pile down by the garage. No telling what it used to be part of but it held rotting leaves and rainwater for probably the last 20 years, so there was some pitting and a lot of scratches and a patina from the elements.
I started to sand it down, but quickly realized that this would take way too much time, so I chucked a nylon rotary brush in the drill press and went crazy for a couple hours.
Stay tuned for more on this project...
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
Well that it good, I bet you were happy nothing was wrong with it.
That sure is shine