Playing guitar helps me deal with the pain very well and I just feel that this amp helps my pain management more than any other I own. I do this for many reasons: I own my house and the neighbors never complain about my playing, I have no roomies, and it sounds amazing!! The thing is that I play this amp when I am confined to my bed by my back pain.
But this beauty sits next to my bed all the time. The amp puts out around 30-35 watts and the cabinet is as large as a Fender Super Reverb. These Electar 10 amps sold for around $100-$130 new.Īs you might guess from my previous posts I have a plethora of small tube amps that would fall in the bedroom category but my bedroom amp is an Ampeg Gemini II with 7591 output tubes and a 15″ Jensen Concertone alnico speaker. Very cool little amp but it can get loud. After swapping preamp tubes to put a 5751 in the first position and putting in a salvaged 8″ alnico spkr it is very sweet sounding (I added some acoustic material to the cab to improve the sound a bit). I spent some time swapping leads till it sounded the best and it is a great sounding replacement. It has 20 or so leads coming out which allow you to match a variety of input and output impedances by selecting combos of the wires. This universal transformer was capable of replacing either a push-pull or a single ended xfrmr (it was really a single ended xfrmr with a center tap). I bought the Thordarsen xfrnr from an electronic supply house that was closing down many years ago(wish they had more than one it was made in 1958 according to the date code). The output transformer in mine went bad many years ago (it was way crappier than a Champ xfrmr)I replaced it with a Thordarsen universal replacement transformer. I like mine with a KT-66 output tube in it. And so this idea of being able to build little amp sections, and put together different combinations, and compare them, without having to build the whole thing each time… well it’s pretty darn appealing. I did it compulsively from age 9 to about 30. Unlike Joe, and many of you, I’ve discovered that I actually HATE building electronics. I was alive before 1994, and yet today I still cannot recall how we found out about ANYTHING REMOTELY INTERESTING before the internet! You had to talk to people or something! It was awful!īut lo and behold – Google spits out a MODULAR TUBE AMP DESIGN: This led to my next thought, which was “why do I have to build an entire amp just to try out a different power amp/tone stack/preamp arrangement?”… hasn’t anyone come up with a (gasp) MODULAR TUBE AMP DESIGN? And then I wondered: “maybe that’s the single-ended amp’s natural sound, to put a lot of even (including second) harmonic into the output”. Just because it’s a low powered amp, doesn’t mean:ġ) I don’t want a 2 or 3-band tone controlĪs I was messing around with the awesome one of a kind Joe Gore designed and built “Pure” boost/buffer and the Webcor, I thought “dangit, this thing has that tubby midrange I so dislike in these small amps”. My comment is more philosophical than experience-based, as I only recently ripped the guts out of my first tube amp project: the “not-originally-a-guitar-amp-but-since-it-has-no-tone-stack-what’s-the-diff” Webcor 4905-1A. Hats off to Tube Depot’s Rob Hull for doing it right!ĭetails and build report to follow.
(Most clone vendors simply link you to a schematic.) Having created a few step-by-step instruction manuals myself, I can testify how much painstaking work these entail.
But I can tell right off the bat that this Tube Depot kit has at least one major advantage over its Malaysian cousins: This one comes with a fabulous 40-page instruction manual. They were fun to build and sounded great. I’ve already completed a few amp clones from Ceriatone. Not dedicated practice amps, necessarily, but great-sounding stuff that happens to be ultra-low-wattage? Name your petite-amp poison!Īnyway, I’m stoked about this kit. But as I get psyched up to build this review model of Tube Depot’s Tweed Champ kit in the coming days, I figured I’d ask what folks are using these days to get cool amp tones in their bedrooms and basements. Okay, end of harangue - I’ll have time for that when I’m chasing kids off my lawn (after I move to the suburbs and GET a lawn). I ask sincerely: Why?īig amps make total sense - but only if a) it’s 1969, b) you’re playing venues with Jurassic sound reinforcement, and c) you’re a guitarist in danger of being drowned out by Keith Moon or John Bonham. It’s not just a cranky question from a guitarist who’s drawing depressingly close to the “Get off my lawn!” years. I’ve got a Tweed Champ kit, and I’m not afraid to use it.