Still being in search of the perfect tone has taken through many, very creaky doors and down more than one detour.
(no wonder people do these side-turns with their faith too)
Additional roads traveled have been:
- Digital guitar modeling (a now antique Digitech RP-50, cool reverb and delay effects).
- The organic Tube Screamer TS-9 (mine dates to the early 1980's) force-feeding the front-end of various small amps such as an Estey Magnatone 104 ($2 at a yard sale some years back) and the Prince-tone.
- Most recently blowing through a Pignose G40V tube amp (the ultimate Brown-Soun machine, but that's another post).
Some guy had boxed this puppy up into a homade cabinet with a very vintage Bogen ceramic magnet tiny-wattage 12" speaker. What I could reverse-deduce of the schematic indicated a two-stage preamp (plus driver) via 2-12AX7's force-feeding a 6V6GT which was (uniquely?) cathode biased through an axillary winding on the secondary of the output transformer.
Little guy sounded pretty good, tight and chimey with lots of gristle cranked up to pat. pend.. Since we are talking a single-ended 6V6 machine (at likely reduced voltages) I would be surprised if it was kicking 4 watts, so this was at almost "have a conversation" volumes.
I wanted to build my own thang though so I came up with a hybrid schematic with 3-preamp stages plus a driver, with the last preamp stage having a cathode-follower tone stack w/ 3-band EQ. As an FYI, this is a cash restricted R&D project, so I am even salvaging tube sockets from the old unit. I did treat it to new pots and switches though.
Here is the start of the project:
Tiny box doesn't leave a lot of room, so I've burnt a knuckle or two so far.
I'm getting ready to finish out the power supply currently, and then to the preamp section, so it will get quite a bit busier in here.
More to come.
