Tonefiend Forum

Have you ever convinced yourself that your life would be better and your tone would sing in perfect harmony with the music of the spheres if you had a certain specific amplifier, just to get said product home (or worse yet) onstage and find out that it's a vastly overpriced boat anchor? Has your amp ever blown up in spectacular fashion at the worst possible time and place? Have you ever dropped your prized vintage amp down two flights or stairs right before a gig? Then we want to hear about it in juicy detail, so we can giggle at your expense, knowing all the while that we did some pretty stupid shi things in our time, too.

It must have been around 1980. I was 17 years old and a proud owner of a late 60s Vox AC30. On the way to one of our first gigs, the Vox dropped right out of the back door of my mother's Renault R4 on a heavily frequented intersection. Although I was shocked and embarassed, I quickly loaded the amp back into the car and drove to the venue, still shaking. When I hastily checked the Vox, it worked like a charm and continued to do so until I sold it a couple of years later (big regrets). The Renault broke down soon after that incident. So, what I learned is: British amps last much longer than French cars.

There's a picture floating around lately of a Marshall half stack with the head mic'ed. Not so uncommon. When I saw the Bandmaster Reverb head I got at 16 in the shop the guy manning the place didn't know it was a head and not a combo so was puzzled that it wasn't working. I had already noticed so was surprised that he hadn't hooked it to a cab. Damn, I wish I had kept that thing.

JCM900's can sound a lot better if you replace the output xfrmr with one from a JCM800 or plexi. Also almost every JCM900 I've ever had on my bench was biased in correctly and if they used anything but 5881's the feedback was on the wrong xfrmr tap which makes a huge difference. That being said the preamp was very different from other Marshalls it even had LEDs as clippers in the distortion channel, but I have heard some folks make JCM900s sound great.

As for your silverface Twin they are loud and clean but really need a blackface mod to open them up. There were also some Twins with ultralinear output transformers which sounded different but with a set of NOS 7581's (industrial 6L6's)and a rebias gave a very nice albeit clean tone ideal for FX pedal users. But in order to achieve any output distortion you would be deafened in a week. Some later SF Twins also had a very nasty distortion circuit that used reverb drive signal for distortion (the CBS engineers must have been a bunch of glue sniffers when they invented that idea).

As for your Deluxe they were a great design by Fender but you need good tubes for the 6V6's I prefer NOS but EH's and Tesla's are pretty good. Properly setting the output tube bias is critical to getting the best sound possible.

The Blues Jr can sound very good with some mods like putting in a Deluxe Reverb output xfrmr or better, put in Tesla EL84's, NOS first preamp tube and replace the spkr even a different Emminence like a BR-8 ohm or better can make it a real winner. Some customers also like having the negative feedback loop removed from the output amp. Those mods do more for the amp than any of the common preamp mods on the web IMHO.

The budgeting question is whether what you're keeping of the donor amp is worth more than a scratch parts build would have cost. The Mark Moyer mods for the Fender Vibrolux Custom are one of the most poorly kept secrets on the interwebs and bring an amp that comes up pretty cheap used up into contention with vintage models -- some caps and resistors, wires, reverb cables, a bias pot, and a 12AX7 aren't all that expensive to get there. But upgrading a poorly made Asian factory amp with new hand-wired turret boards (with all new components) and Mercury Magnetics transformers seems silly -- you're buying a thin chassis and an MDF box.