Any Guitar Gearheads?

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Title says it all
Who here plays guitar (or bass) and is also obsessed with their equipment?

*raises hand*

Yup, I have to confess I have a bit of an obsession with my guitar rig. GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) is a chronic condition.

I saved up for a second-hand Korean Squier Strat when I was 16 after hearing stuff like Nirvana, Green Day and the first Verve album, and it took off from there (my dad got me into the old classics like Led Zep and Pink Floyd, so I was doomed from the start!). I went from bashing out power chords as loud as my parents would let me to amassing an embarrassingly large array of effects pedals, guitars and amps...appropriately enough, the latest addition to my "want to try out" list is a distortion pedal called the OCD!

I used to be part of a regular open mic night at a nearby pub, and that was a lot of fun. It taught me a bit about what equipment sounds good, how to jam with other people and also gave me an incentive to practise regularly.

I'm a bit late in getting into bass too, but I recently started to plan a home recording project and realised I didn't have anything to record the bass parts with. I'll have to have a look around my hard drive and see if I have photos of all this stuff uploaded...

I have some cheap strat called a "starcaster" its basically a strat (even made by Fender) that you can pick up at a best buy for $200. it's actually not too bad for the price....
Anyway, I just run it through a Zoom G1X multi fx/amp pedal.
Its kinda sad cause I'll actually look through those AMS catalogs like theyre Playboys or something. Im a nut

I used to be, not so much anymore. Maybe it's just because, after trying out countless amps and guitars, I found what I wanted. Took 16 years. Wasn't what I was expecting at all.

I like to play hand wound single coils through a discrete JFET preamp into a clean MOSFET power amp into two 4x12 cabinets with alnico speakers and at least 5/8" thick ply sealed back cabinets. ACOUSTIC cabs are my favorite, for off the shelf.

Used to work in a classic tube amp & speaker reconing repair shop. I'm happy to answer any tube amp questions anyone has.

Used to play through a THD Bivalve head, that was fun. 2 Class A amps in parallel, sounds combined in the output transformer. Weird little bugger. You could run two different tubes in it from any of the following: 6V6, EL84, 6L6 & 6L6GC, EL84, KT-66, KT-77, KT-88, 6550, & KT-90s. Would take 12ax7, 12at7, 12ay7, or 12au7 tubes. I used to have quite a collections of tubes, including JJ, Groove, Sovtek, Svetlana, RCA, Mullard, JAN, EH, Tung Sol and SED.

All that, and I still prefer JFETs. Never would've thought I'd like solid state more, because I'd only ever been exposed to Op-Amps before I bulit a recording studio and accidently tried a JFET mic pre for the guitar, just on a whim. WOW.

Tubes are like wine vintages. Same brand's tube of a particular model sounds different year by year, sometimes even month by month.

Most collectible stuff I ever had were: 1947 Fender Super (a stereo Deluxe, back then), 5 Roland Space Echoes, most of them RE-120s, a '65 Danelectro Hornet (wood body, not formica,) a G&L ASAT that I had custom made, and a radioactive Univox Oil Can Delay (which was illegal in 48 states.)

All in all, I owned 15 guitars and 27 amps at various points since '93.

Now I have one guitar that I hand built and don't own an amp. I just borrow them as need be. Biking cross country with a full stack would just be silly.

However, I can talk amps and effects and pickups and so on for days if you let me. Days.

How much do I like amps?

Thiiiiiiis much:

Right here

Is that a 5E1 Fender Champ schematic? --It looks quite similar.

We have a winner! You are now the 3rd human to ever guess correctly what amp it is. The only things are, I took the tone circuit out (because I always do that to my amps, I want more clarity out of them) and I redrew it so that the power supply would fit on one side and the signal path on the other.

Also, I used a different variation on the 12ax7 triode halves, because drawing them that way not only makes them look like a surly emoticon, it also resembles the I Ching symbol "li" meaning "to cling to something," and also "brightness." Two Li stacked together (twin triode) means: "radiance:" radiance illuminates and bathes objects in a warming glow, it gives the power to see objects and things more clearly giving a focus to goals and ideas. I find that appropriate for a tube amp.

I got the tattoo because I kept having to explain how amps work when I'd play through my own at shows and kept drawing the diagram on my arm with a sharpie. Now I can just point at it and say "this is the rectifier, where it converts AC to DC..." and so on.

I'd like to get a JFET mic pre on my other arm for the left arm/right brain/emotion/tube amp vs right arm/left brain/logic/recording balance. And then put a heart shaped oscillator on my chest. :D

Oh, also I chose that 5e1 champ because it's one of the easiest amps to understand, for instructional purposes. That design is only loosely modified from the 6v6 amp design published in the back of the old RCA receiving tube manuals, basically the first amp design tried out by fender, ampeg, marshall, gibson, supro and others before they developed their own styles. The mother of all amps.

AT LAST! I've been wondering about that. I'm sure a lot of guitarists are familiar with the fact that the first Marshall amps were based on the Fender Bassman, but apparently Randall Smith started Mesa Boogie after he hot-rodded Fender Princeton amps for fun! I can certainly see how many amp designs are related to one another, and it's really interesting to read up on how various pieces of equipment are designed to make the sounds they do.

I really like Fender amps, personally. I've tried some made by Marshall (good for gritty rock but nothing special otherwise), Mesa Boogie (nice, but expensive), Blackstar (Marshall-y but slightly more versatile), Gorilla (horrid)...I'm now saving up for either a Supersonic 22 or a Deluxe Reverb reissue. I'll be doing recording at home or (maybe) small pub gigs; I really don't need a big, loud amp but if I want to appreciate the sound of a valve-powered one, I can't use a high wattage one.

I have a 40 watt Marshall combo at home, and don't really like it. It runs on EL84s, but it's either the characteristics of the valve type or it's simply a so-so amp...not as good as I'd hoped it would be. The little 5 watt Blackstar HT-5 is great though - it might look small, but it's loud enough (the circuit is weird; it has an ECC83 preamp valve but the output one is a 12BH7 or something)!

I know valve amplifiers are heavy, expensive and require periodic maintenance but a good valve amp sounds better for guitar or bass. I've tried one or two very good transistor amps though, so it's one of those 'trust your own ears' things. I find valve amps are inconsistent - some sound very different from others and I'm still learning what's suitable for different playing styles and situations.

As far as I know, those are both preamp tubes in the blackstar and the output is solid state power amp. Tube pre, transistor power. ecc83 is the english designation for 12ax7, and 12bh7 is about the same as a 12au7...



I like heavy boxes! They sound goooood. The thing I dislike about tube amps isn't the cost or maintainence or anything. Of course, they have to be set up right to sound good at all, the output tubes have to be perfectly matched and all that, otherwise they'll sound like poop. Probably 19 out of 20 tubes amps I've ever heard didn't do themselves justice because they weren't set up well.

the thing I don't like about playing through tubes is that they're slow. I play fast. Sometimes stupid fast. And tubes just don't keep up as well, especially amps with a tube rectifier. Transistors have a way faster response, no vacuum for the little electrons to fly through. So the transients are more intact, even when you're playing hard and fast and it's distorted. Intact transients mean you can hear every note even when the rest of the band is slamming, without turning up so loud you just drown everyone else out. JFETs play "team!"

However, I freaking love the sound of a tube amp that has a clean preamp section, like 12ay7s, and then pushing the power tubes too hard. Like 6550 power tubes in an SVT pushed to their limit. It's growly, muscular overdrive...not like the "breaking glass on fire" sound that you get from pushing your preamps too hard, or pushing the 6L6GCs in a fender too hard.

I like that sound, but the way I play, when I really start punching it the tubes compress the sound down too much. I want it to get louder and harder when I pluck harder, but tubes make the opposite happen.

If I played slowhand blues, I'd try to go the Neil Young route and play a half dozen different 5 watt amps at the same time. Neil wants to play a one note guitar solo? Fine by me, that one note sounds AMAZING over and over again.

Your amp doesn't sound good because of whether it has little chunks of semiconductor metals or little glowy lightbulbs in it. It sounds good or bad if it used good quality components in a smart designed circuit or not. The circuit design is way more important than tubes v transistors. Transistors are just like a different flavor of tube. Crisp bright white wine instead of a big robust red.

I read somewhere that the HT-5's power section uses both halves of the valve in push-pull (I'm assuming it's a dual triode since it's usually used in a preamp stage). That said, it's super-loud for two valves!

I've tried one or two solid-state amps and was pleasantly surprised - as you say, they're tighter and crisper than valve amps and don't have that 'sag' and compression when playing fast. The Roland Jazz Chorus is popular with keyboard/synth players apparently, because it's loud and clear-sounding.

I wholeheartedly agree that quality of circuitry and components is the most important thing though; there are good solid-state amps (the Roland JC-120) and mediocre valve amps (e.g. my Marshall DSL combo). Sadly it's only when you play live and get to crank it up a bit that you really hear the difference with a valve amp! They 'behave' differently at different volumes, while transistor amps just get luder or quieter.

I have a 'thing' for reverb though. Whatever the amp, a spacey reverb sound makes it sound like the instrument is in a large, but confined, space. Some settings sound a bit cheesy, but when you tweak it right the notes just hang there for ages. I'm not into the warbly modulation types of effects these days, but I like 'atmospheric' styles of playing with interesting textures.

I disagree entirely that transistor amps "only get louder." A lot of what happens when you crank up an amp is speaker distortion, which is the same for both.

Anyway, some Jazz Chorus amps use discrete transistors, some use Op Amps. Op Amps are the worst. I'd rather play acoustic to five people than subject anyone to an Op Amp cranked up.

Old ACOUSTIC heads and Kustom heads are nice, discrete amps, even some Shure PAs are real nice. Most companies that made good discrete amps switched to Op Amps when they got more business and couldn't keep up with hand wiring anymore. It's cheaper and faster to drop some ICs in there. You need to look at the guts of the amp to know what you're getting.

Me? I won't buy an amp I can't fix myself, so I always open it u and check out the guts in the store. If they won't let me do that, I shop somewhere else.

Oh, and I was just looking at the blackstar Ht-5, and it only uses the tubes for "color," not for amplification. It's mostly Op-Amps, with a few JFET stages tossed in. The guitar signal hits an Op Amp first thing after it comes through the jack.

Jim Marshall copied the Fender Bassman circuit due to the fact that in 1961-62 Fender amps were incredibly rare and expensive gear in the UK. His first amps were nearly identical copies of the Bassman and ran on 6L6/KT66 tubes just like the Bassman. --AFAIK the Bassman circuit originally laid out by Western Electric, and available for free. All Leo Fender did was lay out and dress the physical circuit, and chose components until it sounded right to his ears. Jim Marshall did the same thing albeit with componentry that was readily available in the UK at the time. --IE, What Radiospares had in stock.

A few years later, he changed the Power amp over to EL34's due to the fact that they were much more readily available in the UK and Europe than 6L6/KT66. 6L6's were American imports, and there was only one UK company,(MO/GEC) that made them, whereas EL34's were a standard European power tube. The early (non Master Volume Marshall amps essentially sounded about the same as Fender amps aside from the fact that EL34's generally have brighter sound and clipped earlier than 6L6's . Another very large contributing factor to Marshall's sound was the fact that they used Celestion speakers which had a differant frequency response curve than the Jensen speakers that Fender used, add on top of this the fact that Marshall stuck the Celestions in a sealed back cabinet which boosts LF response and cancells out soume of the midrange response in an open baffle design, and you have the classic early Marshall sound.

As far as the 40 watt Marshall that sounds incredibly gritty, these are more modern high gain amps that still somewhat loosely follow the classic circuit, however they use diodes in preamp to clip the input and provide distortion, due to the fact that if they used extra preamp gain stages, they would have to pay a LOT more attention to circuit layout and dressage due to the fact that the more gain you add to a circuit the more unstable it becomes, and becomes more susceptable to parasitic oscillations. --Using clipping diodes to distort the preamp is essentially easier anp cheaper than designing a high gain tube circuit, it is essentially nothing more than a built in distortion box.

With guitar amps, the simper the circuit, the purer the sound. I can't say much about the amp that you have, but you might want switch the power tubes out to something decent like JJ's/Tesslovak's and change the speaker out a something decent like a Celestion Vintage 30, as the cheaper lines of Marshall no longer use Celestions, they use Eminence speakers. After changing the power tubes out to the JJ's be sure to rebias the circuit, as a lot of cheaper amps overbias the circuit to get longer life and more reliability at the expense of tone.

Another thing you might want to try is removing the outer pair of power tubes and setting the speaker ohmage selector on the back of the amp at the next lower setting to compensate for the internal ohmage differance removing half of the power tubes causes. --This will in turn give you a 20 watt amp and backup pair of power tubes.

With the lower wattage, if you use the clean channel of the amp, you will notice that the amp not only sounds a little better, but has somewhat less headroom and will be quicker to get power tube distortion (The stuff you really want, not the high gain preamp) without much loss in volume from the amp.

I read an interview with Jim Marshall in a magazine, where he said he tried out the EL34s because Pete Townsend and some others were complaining about the amps being too clean ... Marshall thought it was all crazy talk, but just threw some EL34s in there because he knew they would break up at a lower threshold than the 6L6s ... they were considered inferior tubes because they weren't as clean, but the British Invaders loved them, so he just kept making dirty amps. That's where the money was.

Of course, he could have been lying, trying to cover his cheap a%* after the fact, to add to his mystique.

[bolds mine]

Amen to this!

Another good principle to know about tube amps is that is takes 10 times the wattage to double the sound. That's why a 100W Fender Twin isn't twice as loud as a 50W Fender Bassman. The Twin is just cleaner, and like Fogman says, if you pull the two outer tubes from a Twin you can dirty up the sound real nice.