The Amp Garage

You are going to get "fizzy" tone as you draw the power down but the signal that has not been reduced will now appear bigger to the reduced stages. If it is all of them, the guitar input needs to be reduced. Dana has mentioned that he reduces the signal with the guitar. Stanz, I'm scaling the whole...

You are going to get "fizzy" tone as you draw the power down but the signal that has not been reduced will now appear bigger to the reduced stages. If it is all of them, the guitar input needs to be reduced. Dana has mentioned that he reduces the signal with the guitar. I have done this now for thre...

To be fair, not much to trouble shoot, at least for getting an amp back to working condition. Once you understand the basic workings of most amps, whatever symptoms are displayed should get you pointed to the trouble area pretty quick. As for fine tuning amps, that is a whole other level of understa...

When KOC talks about these types of set ups, he says that any ground/noise issues that already exist before installing the "reducer", will only be made worse after it is installed. Not a bad idea to twist all AC wires and keep their path separate from signal or even other power supplies (heaters). T...

I put in a similar system to the VVR, except I am only bringing the power tube's plates and screens down. With cathode biased power tubes, pretty easy to do. Unlike Dana's approach, I put in a bootstrapped master to reduce the gain into the power section, as opposed to reducing the voltage supplies ...

Thanks for the compliments. I must be getting better at the amp building thing, as the Rocket came together fairly quickly. Picking up Ron's chassis, xformers, and boards helped a lot. It is definitely a keeper and will getting its fair share of use.

Being a DIY community, there is no "right" way. Safe to say, you can hold your head high when showing your rig to others, "Bet you don't have one of THESE!!"

Some more clips...

Pieced together some clips that I thought showed the amp's range. I also am trying out some recently built studio gear, a tube pre-amp and a tube mic.

I believe I have found the elusive factor, it was the tubes. The power tubes. I just received my set of Saratov EL84s from Sgt Overdrive. That was the trick. I had a new set of JJ El84s in there originally. I can crank the volume up to 1:00 with the master volume at max and it sounds great. WOO HOO!...

I did notice all the key buzz words in the marketing copy, Class A, "pump searing Mojo" :D , somehow Beavis and Butthead come to mind, "hee, hee, he said pump" and the best line... Tubes! Just the smell of those glass bottles blazing with fire gets amp aficionados to perk up and lose their cool. I t...

I rewired the Rocket so that the cathode follower is alone on V2. No difference really, or at least the "too much distortion/muddy" sound is still there. Intuitively, this layout makes sense though. I have no electronics engineering background, but having the two tubes that are operating with differ...

RJ, OK, I will have to check that out. The amp sounds great, but it has pretty high gain/decent drive sound before 9:00, and by 11:00 it is too muddy to really be playable. I was contemplating putting in 1K screen resistors. I have 100R in there right now. I have it on the bench ready to make that c...

I did the same thing with an early 70's Quad head. I used Funk's boards. I was not able to mount the two boards (bias and relay supply?) that normal go up against the side of the chassis on the side. Since I had to mount them on the floor of the chassis, that left no room for the PS board. With all ...

That I know. Which raises a question, it seems the PI is being over driven as lowering the Master volume decreases gain and cleans up the signal. That seems backwards to me. With the voltages seemingly in line with what everyone else is getting, I was not expecting it to distort so easily. The boots...