The Amp Garage

I'm sure others have seen the piece in Vintage Guitar.

But, if you haven't, a nice piece on Ken in the April 2007 Vintage Guitar magazine.

Hi, Paul Ruby put together two amp kits for me. The first one was an Express, and the second one was a Rocket. He was a great help with answering my questions during the building and tweaking process. Both are great amps, although my favourite is still the Express, since I have an ear for the roughe...

The split load is well documented on this site, while Kevin O'Connor's, The Ultimate Tone I, explains how to add a simple circuit, and switch, to a solid state rectified amp to emulate the softer response of a tube rectified amplifier. His books are excellent, especially for advanced amp builders. H...

I've tried Valve Art KT66's, and they sound nice...they really sparkle at lower volumes and are quite edgy when you turn the volume up. I have tried all kinds of tubes recently, mullard el34s to JJ KT88s. The best sounding tubes to my ears so far are the NOS RCA grey plate 6v6s from the late 1950s. ...

I have to second John's comments regarding Paul Ruby. He is exceptionally smart with electronics as well as being a super nice guy to deal with. After I decided that I wanted to try to build a guitar amp last year, I decided a trainwreck clone was what I wanted to build after hearing all of the grea...

Allyn,

I'm assuming the tubes in Francesca were Mullards?

Sobersuds

I tried IC's, Mallories, and Sozo's in that order. I currently have the Sozo's in my Express inspired amp, as they were the last set I was tinkering with. Honestly, I couldn't really tell much of a difference (tonally) between them. They all sound pretty good. I did install some blackgate electrolyt...

I added the split plate load resistor switch on my Express clone so I could skew the tone a little more to back-end distortion for playing blues. Even with around 28ohms resistance in the low sensitivity position before the PI, the amp is still pretty aggressive. I find it a bit more Plexi like. Wid...

I have tried the blackgates in the cathode bypass for V1 & V2. I purchased a few values to see the difference in tone. I currently have a 47uf 6.3v installed in V1 and a 4.7uf 50V in V2 (both the high-end nonpolar type). I tried the standard 22uf in V2, and found the sound a bit too bassy, so the 4....