Rivera interview

[Smokebreak]

http://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/ ... ene-627464

[deeder]

Thanks mate for sharing this interesting ITV

[ampmike]

Yea,good read,Thanks Buddy

[jaysg]

I was pretty good friends with him back then. I would drop in sometimes. His wife Cella told me that the Van Halen guys and Steve Lukathur kind of scared her and she didn't like it when they were at the house. He was working out of his garage for several years.

[sliberty]

I never really got the whole Rivera thing. His Fender models are nothing exciting, and in fact some downright suck. And the amps he sold under the Rivera name, while having nice cleans, had absolutely horrible overdrive (IMHO). Seems like a nice enough dude from the interview, but I suspect we have better builders on this forum. What am I missing????

[ampmike]

I never really got the whole Rivera thing. His Fender models are nothing exciting, and in fact some downright suck. And the amps he sold under the Rivera name, while having nice cleans, had absolutely horrible overdrive (IMHO). Seems like a nice enough dude from the interview, but I suspect we have better builders on this forum. What am I missing????

Totally true,well said,The article was interesting,Mikey

[vibratoking]

I'm not a Rivera fan. I had a Concert II that had good cleans. The OD was bad on its own, but it was much better when the effects loop was jumpered and the extra gain stage was used. In that configuration I could use it without being bummed out. The inside was a fucking mess.

Probably not his fault, but the factory speaker was a total POS.

[jaysg]

I never really got the whole Rivera thing. His Fender models are nothing exciting, and in fact some downright suck. And the amps he sold under the Rivera name, while having nice cleans, had absolutely horrible overdrive (IMHO). Seems like a nice enough dude from the interview, but I suspect we have better builders on this forum. What am I missing????

Hi Steve. I have a Rake, which is a head version of the Jake. I don't have reverb on it...focus control instead. When I was pondering buying a Rivera, I tried a Knucklehead. I think the cab had V30s. Really awful tone. What I found was, probably more than other notions, he tweaks all his amps for specific speakers and if you don't have those, all bets are off. I advise people who've bought a used one to call him and ask what speakers he recommends and stick with whatever he says. In general, he tweaks for the EV 12L, but they're too heavy for a lot of people. The Concert II was definitely tweaked that way. The stock OD with or without the mid boost was actually good sounding into an EV.

[sliberty]

Interesting. So I suppose that if you have things set up just the way he intended (speaker wise), it might sound OK. But that is a bad assumption given what tweakers guitar players can be. Although to be fair, there is probably some of that going on with other boutique makers as well. If it were me, though, I would tweak to something neutral so that i could please more people more of the time.

[jaysg]

Similar to another thread on another board, Paul's speaker of choice was the Altec 417-8H until they stopped making them. I think the EV is pretty neutral, as is the Ampeg V series. While not the most 'signature tone' amps in the world, if it was 1975 and you played a Fender Rhodes, I'd definitely recommend a V-4 and a couple Altec 12's over anything else available at the time...ignoring 4x KT88 and 6x 6550 amps and cartage.

[Steveo]

I know this is an old post but i thought id post anyway. I was really unhappy with my knucklehead tre’s overdrive channel but loved the clean channel. I asked all around if someone could mod it, everybody pretty much didnt want to touch it. So after a while i just got fed up and decided to do something myself. I couldnt sell it for what i paid so i wasnt going to do that. I ended up learning quite a bit about amps while modding it and i love the amp now. Rivera nicely sent me the schematic, it would have been impossible without it for me. From what i took out of the amp is it seems to be setup with more fenderish Bassy values in the preamp section. The cleans are great because of this but not so much for high gain tones imo. Some different cathode bypass caps and marshall tonestack values on the od channel really helped. I know why no one wanted to work on it though, its a real pain when lifting the board. I got really good at it after about 20 times.