The Amp Garage

Furniture, rugs, bookshelves, curtains, etc. can all go a long way in making a room sound good. It takes more work to make a room with bad dimensions sound good, a room with good dimensions on the other hand with a high ceiling and some broken up parallel surfaces will need less treatment overall to...

I totally get it, I have a pointy guitar with a Dimarzio X2N, a 15k+ bladed style pickup. It's basically my heavy metal guitar, but it has the most amazing clean tone, bold and with tons of fundamental and clarity that my single coils or PAF style pickups just can't touch, they sound so colored in c...

Hi low inputs are good, you see the same thing on bass preamps with different hi/lo inputs for passive or active pickups. But is it something you really need? Build whatever sounds best on your other guitars, I wouldn't do anything that much different. The chosen input resistor is mostly part of the...

Over tightening can be an issue, I had one guy bring me a constipated Princeton that had been modded a bunch and besides messing with the power supply and negative feedback, de-torquing the speaker nuts was one of the key things that let that amp really open up. They guy had a green back in there ti...

If you ever want to come up, anytime, PM me and I can show you how I do it on my crusty old craftsman 100. I'm about 30 mins North of Chico. I made a sled with a back fence from scrap plywood that slides in both table grooves with hardwood guides and a finger the width of the dado on it a distance e...

When ever I've done an amp like that, I go with a single input and an A/B/Y switching configuration onboard the amp kinda like Martin describes. No use for the second jack really.

I wish I still lived over there, had to move to the central valley to afford to stay in California and haven't been back since the fires. Sounds like a great trip, I love that area!

I don't know where she get's that stuff from either, I think it just comes out. They weren't doing stuff like that when they were younger, more musical theater and pop stuff, and they were quite a few years younger than me. Her dad was way into deep folk stuff, must have rubbed off. He showed me a f...

I'm going to see Jesca Hoop in Seattle on Friday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpig7uyd7M8 I grew up with the Hoop Family. They're all super talented, and her dad was an excellent finger-picker and great guy. Jessica was Tom Waite's Nanny for a while, between that and her parents, a lot of inspi...

Hey Blindog! Glad to see you're still around. I remember that amp, that was my last Hiwatt I got, glad you got it up and running! I gotta say I kind of miss that one, not as much as I miss my first custom 50, but still that lead 100 was a good all-rounder. That was the amp that finally made me take ...

Unfortunately we didn't have phones that took picture back then, no pictures of my old junk. These are what made me want Hiwatts though. I had a Rush poster where Alex had a bunch of Hiwatts on my wall as a kid. Ans if you want to hear some killer Hiwatt tones and playing listen to Tommy Bolin on Bi...

You don't need to crank a Hiwatt to get it to sound good (but it helps) and they're less picky about what you put in front of them (pedals, single coils, cables). The old Marshalls you need to goose a bit to get them warmed up, all those marshall mods were attempts to try and overcome these things. ...

Back in the old days I played Hiwatts, everything from a custom 50 (my first one) to in the 80's a lead 100 (my last one). I always preferred them to Marshalls at the time. When I built my 100 watt D-style amp I did it in the blues master style but made the clean 70s style and the OD channel more li...

What do you guys think about using a Dumble model as a base for such an amp? Jackson Browne's Dumbleland 150 that Stevie Ray used on Texas Flood was Jackson's studio's bass amp, and Tommy Shannon played a Winterland 300 for many years if I remember correctly. I've played bass a bit through my 100 w...

Just some ideas and opinions to throw out there. Look for a Peavey T.B. Raxx pre for cheaper than you can build something and go through it, get an inexpensive SS or class D stereo power amp in what ever power class you need and build two cabinets, one for lows and one for highs. That would be somet...