Ep. 147: "Kosher Sound"

Summary

Episode Summary: The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons – Ep. 147: "Kosher Sound"

Release Date: April 26, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 147, titled "Kosher Sound," of The Truth About Vintage Amps, host Jason Verlandi prepares to embark on a month-long trip to Peru as a chaperone for a group of 8th graders. Joined by guitar amp guru Skip Simmons, the episode delves deep into vintage tube amp restoration, modifications, and collecting, all while maintaining the show’s signature blend of humor and technical insight.

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Jason's Upcoming Trip to Peru

At the outset (00:33), Jason shares his exciting news about chaperoning 8th graders on a trip to Peru:

Jason: "I am chaperoning a bunch of 8th graders taking a trip to Peru... It's going to be something you remember forever, I'm sure."

Skip adds humorously about the challenges of managing young students in such a setting:

Skip: "Eighth graders, they're savages. And then Peru. Wow, that's a cocktail I never would have dreamed up in a million years."

The duo discusses the logistics and implications of Jason's absence, assuring listeners that the Fretboard Journal operations will continue seamlessly with a dedicated crew (03:00).

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Sponsor Shoutouts

Note: Per user instructions, detailed sponsor advertisements are omitted to focus on content. However, brief mentions include:

• Emerald City Guitars: Renowned for their extensive collection of vintage amps.
• Amplified Parts: Offering discounts on amp kits with code "Tava20."
• Grez Guitars: Highlighted for their customizable, high-quality guitars.

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Technical Discussion: Hemp Cone Speakers

A significant portion of the episode (12:46) centers around the topic of hemp cone speakers. Skip shares his experience with hemp speakers in his amps:

Skip: "I fired this one up... thought the amp was broken. But the 12-inch version sounded completely normal."

Jason and Skip explore the benefits and quirks of hemp speakers, contemplating their unique sound qualities and reliability. They discuss the importance of experimenting with different speakers to truly understand an amp's potential, emphasizing:

Skip: "An amp is a speaker and a cabinet. Just for fun, once in a while, try your amp with a different cabinet or a different speaker."

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Listener Questions & Answers

1. Owen from Santa Cruz Mountains (21:34)

Question: Owen inquires about modifying a Fender Twin Reverb into a stereo Deluxe Reverb, asking about legality and technical requirements.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "No, I just see that... big amps are cheap, but I don't have blackface twins laying around. And I would say a silver panel, something from the '70s... experiment away, I say."

2. Blair’s Amp Collection (25:08)

Question: Blair shares his vintage amp collection and asks about a signed tape on his 1948 Princeton amp.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "That's a very early, very rare amp. Anything you do to that thing is not going to help the value. It needs to be carefully approached."

3. Cyrus from Bloomington, Indiana (41:34)

Question: Cyrus asks about Skip's amp servicing methods—whether he conducts comprehensive checks or focuses on specific issues.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "It depends on the amp... Often resistors are just way off. Sometimes I don't check parts because I can't leave them in if they gotta go. But always check the grounds ... experiment away."

4. Jeff Shikatano from Pennsylvania (47:51)

Question: Jeff seeks advice on wiring a Webcore 4901 powered speaker chassis, specifically regarding polarized cords and preventing ground loops.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "Definitely put the neutral on or the hot on the switch... most amps are okay with three-prong cords but handle them correctly to prevent shocks."

5. Federico from Arctic Norway (93:28)

Question: Federico discusses using resistors as an alternative to Variacs for modding old amps and shares his experiences.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "Don't recommend using large resistors due to inefficiency and heat... better to use Variacs or proper voltage controllers."

6. Michael’s AO35 Reverb Unit (64:40)

Question: Michael seeks advice on adding volume and tone controls to a converted Hammond AO35 reverb unit.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "You might need to build a preamp or experiment with shielding and connections to reduce noise... careful part replacement is key."

7. Gary’s Footswitch Issues (69:09)

Question: Gary describes hum issues from his Fender amp's footswitch and seeks solutions.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "Shield the footswitch with aluminum tape or use quality shielded cables... consider replacing the footswitch if noisy."

8. Seven from New Jersey (77:10)

Question: Seven asks about restoring a 1950s Moss Row amplifier for guitar use, focusing on safety and component verification.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "Handle 'death caps' carefully... replace selenium rectifiers with diodes... ensure all components meet safety standards before use."

9. Greg’s Bogan Challenger CHB50 (84:50)

Question: Greg inquires about modifying a Bogan CHB50 amp by replacing 6L6 tubes with 6V6s to reduce power output.

Skip's Response:

Skip: "Don't replace power tubes to reduce power; it can damage the amp. Consider using smaller transformers or building a separate preamp for volume control instead."

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Typewriter Talk

Midway through the episode, Jason and Skip shift gears to discuss typewriters, reminiscing about their mechanical charm and restoration experiences:

Skip: "Working on typewriters is very relaxing. They are all mechanical, unlike electronics, and you can see how they work."

They highlight interactions with the typewriter community, mentioning Richard Polt and Charlene at Baco Ribbons, emphasizing the hobby's artisanal appeal and the satisfaction derived from repairing and using manual typewriters.

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Kosher Sound Discussion

Towards the end, the episode delves into inventive amplification methods inspired by fluidic amplification for Orthodox Jewish communities seeking non-electrical solutions for synagogue services. Listener Tad shares a visionary concept of a completely mechanical guitar amplifier utilizing fluidics, prompting Skip to explore its feasibility:

Skip: "That's some deep thoughts right there. I'm going to have to wrap my brain around that if possible."

The discussion acknowledges the challenges of amplifying audio frequencies without electronics but appreciates the creative exploration of alternative amplification technologies.

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Closing Remarks

As the episode wraps up, Jason reiterates his upcoming absence and teases future content, including a recap on the Peruvian vintage guitar store scene and announcements related to the Fretboard Journal Summit. Skip encourages listeners to continue exploring and experimenting with their amps, maintaining the show's commitment to fostering a passionate and knowledgeable vintage amp community.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

1. Jason on Peru Trip (02:28):

   "I am chaperoning a bunch of 8th graders taking a trip to Peru... It's going to be something you remember forever, I'm sure."

2. Skip on Hemp Speakers (12:46):

   "I fired this one up... thought the amp was broken. But the 12-inch version sounded completely normal."

3. Cyrus's Question (41:34):

   "Do you go through the amp from end to end and check every component... or just focus on specific areas?"

4. Skip’s Amp Repair Philosophy (43:31):

   "Have you hooked it up to another speaker? So many times the next call is, dude, you were right."

5. Typewriter Enthusiasm (93:28):

   "Typewriters are all mechanical... you push that and you can see the bar pushes that and it's hooked to that."

6. Kosher Sound Inspiration (96:07):

   "It's a technology developed by the Department of Defense... used as a way of providing amplification without electronics."

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Conclusion

Episode 147, "Kosher Sound," offers a rich blend of vintage amp expertise, listener engagement, and quirky diversions into typewriter lore and innovative amplification concepts. Jason and Skip continue to solidify their roles as beloved figures in the guitar amp community, providing valuable insights while keeping the conversation entertaining and inclusive for both seasoned enthusiasts and newcomers alike.

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Timestamps Reference

For ease of navigation, key sections are referenced with approximate timestamps based on the transcript provided:

• Introduction & Trip Announcement: [00:33]
• Hemp Cone Speakers Discussion: [12:46]
• Listener Questions Begin: [21:34]
• Typewriter Talk: [93:28]
• Kosher Sound & Fluidic Amplification: [96:07]
• Closing Remarks: [103:19]

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Note: For a complete understanding and additional nuances, listening to the full episode is recommended.

Transcript

[Jason]

We may be able to help you with your amp problems, but if you need online therapy, you can get quality care at a price that makes sense. And it can help you with anything from anxiety to everyday stress. You can switch therapists at any time. Visit betterhelp.com fret. Fret. To get 10% off of your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L p.com fret Good morning. Morning. How are you?

[Skip]

I'm groovy. Welcome to this edition of the Truth About Jason Verlandi.

[Jason]

You don't want to know the truth. It's not pretty.

[Skip]

Do you get allergies in the spring?

[Jason]

Not so much in Seattle. I think I would in California.

[Skip]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jason]

Do you.

[Skip]

You probably hear a little bit of a no, I'm not sick, but I've been out, you know, working in the yard so much that a little. Little sniffly. So, yeah, Truth about Jason for Lindy. See, sponsored by our sponsors would be coffee, Tylenol. Hopefully a few hours of sleep. I mean, for you, coffee, Tylenol and what a glass of white wine, hopefully.

[Jason]

At the end of the day to always welcomed.

[Skip]

Yeah, you. You haven't been able to put it to bed for a little while, that's for sure. Well, you could. You could sort of just say how come you're so busy or not.

[Jason]

Because I'm about to leave the country.

[Skip]

Are you really?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Oh, that's right. That's right.

[Jason]

Is that. You're not even talking about that.

[Skip]

Okay, well, I'm talking about. I know you just had all sorts of family stuff going on, but I.

[Jason]

Was in Sacramento yesterday.

[Skip]

I felt the vibrations. There's been a few times in the last couple weeks that I wanted to call you just to check on you and thank you. As everyone knows, we. We don't speak off set. We have separate green rooms, separate trailers. Right. Me and this guy, we. We never talk. Well, yeah, you could tell about why you're going out of the country, unless we did last time.

[Jason]

I am chaperoning a bunch of 8th graders taking a trip to Peru if we have any Peruvian listeners. I don't know that I'll be having any time to say hi to you, but I'm guessing we have a couple. I don't know. Aren't the odds in the favor? A listener in almost every country, thanks.

[Skip]

To you, but I just say unpack that sentence.

[Jason]

I know.

[Skip]

Eighth chaperone. All right, that's. It's already over. Eighth graders, they're savages. And then Peru. Wow, that's a cocktail I never would have dreamed up in a million years. But it's going to be. It's going to be. It'll be something you remember forever, I'm sure.

[Jason]

I am sure of that, for sure. Yeah.

[Skip]

Wow. And how long are you going to be gone?

[Jason]

A month.

[Skip]

A month?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Wow.

[Jason]

But I should add, because somebody will ask or wonder. I got a crew in place to keep the fretboard journal going. Our 56th issue is about to hit the world. It's going to be showing up in mailboxes this coming week, and the summit is full steam ahead, and so the show will go on. You don't need me to keep the fretboard journal going. I mean, maybe you do, but I can. I can check out for a month. How's that?

[Skip]

I. I think that's true.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

I just. I just see that. That one guy in the band on Spinal Tap who was always on his phone. Right. Of course. A great big giant phone back then. But I don't want to see Machu Picchu in the background and you with the. With the cell phone straightening out something back in. Back in the States. I know you got to have it, but hopefully you can turn it off.

[Jason]

Hopefully I can. Yeah. Yeah. It. It'll be a. One of. What do they say?

[Skip]

Be.

[Jason]

Be present. It'll be one of those lessons.

[Skip]

What's the highest altitude that you'll be at?

[Jason]

You know, I think it's like 12,000ft. 13.

[Skip]

You're going to go to some place that's 12,000ft.

[Jason]

Yeah, I think a village. Yeah.

[Skip]

Oh, my God.

[Jason]

I know. This whole trip is surreal.

[Skip]

That's. That's. You might seriously notice that you might cut down on the cools for that. I mean, not a problem for me getting up there. It just might make quite an impact on, let's just say a less than youthful gentlemen.

[Jason]

I know it's true, but that's amazing.

[Skip]

I mean, imagine what the air is going to look like. There's flamingos that nest in like a salt marsh at like 12 or 15,000ft somewhere down there. Can you imagine that?

[Jason]

That's more about Peru than anyone. You've talked about the alpacas that have the designated restroom.

[Skip]

It's all about Patrick O'Brien. It just.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

It's historical fiction, and you learn so much from it. They go to so many different places, and the author keeps it legit. You know, he doesn't talk about seeing something that doesn't actually exist. He talks about things that really did. So that's how I know about the giant saline marsh full of flamingos. But it's going to be awesome. Think of the air. Whoa.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

You know, you could record some of the air up there and then come back to a studio on the coast and record the air there and then mix the two together.

[Jason]

This is very Vander slice of you.

[Skip]

No, that's from an interview with some famous producer the night that he talked to the Grateful Dead and they wanted to do something like that. And this was like, you know, a famous rock producer is just going, what?

[Jason]

I don't know. Well, okay, I'll try to do that better.

[Skip]

Better talk about our real sponsors, not Tylenol and red wine. Yeah, those are your sponsors. I have other sponsors.

[Jason]

This is true. Emerald City Guitars is located here in Seattle, Washington, and hopefully by now all of you are following what they are up to on Instagram and on YouTube. Their YouTube channel is amazing. And I just want to thank Trevor & Co. For being such big parts of the Fretboard Journal community and for continuing to find incredible guitars and amps. And they're just a cool store that if anyone ever comes into Seattle, please go stop over there and just say hi and see all that they have. Because they have pretty much almost every vintage amp, you know, mainstream vintage amp that we ever talk about. Not necessarily all the obscure Canadian stuff or whatever, but you can pretty much spend a whole day just trying out 50 plus vintage amps. And they'll be happy. They'll be happy to see you. So they are our first sponsor, Amplified Parts. If you are listening to this podcast, the week that it gets released until the end of April 2025, you can get 20 bucks off of their new amp kits. Tava 20 is how you can get your discount off of the amp. And the cool thing about these amp kits, in addition to just having thorough instructions and all the things you need, is if you've got some cabinet already sitting around or a spare speaker, you don't need to pay for that thing that you're not going to use. There's like four different tiers and levels of amp kit. So if you just want the chassis and all the parts that go into it, you can buy that. If you want the full meal deal, you can buy that and all the variations in between. And then, last but not least, our friend Barry at Grez Guitars. I am staring at a Grez here at the Fretboard Journal, a grand tour that he made that if anybody again come to Seattle, go visit Emerald City Guitars, then come play this thing. It is beautiful. It's got a one piece African mahogany back and and neck. Barry's just crushing it. And these guitars just look so cool and so classic but they feel like a modern up to date, no issues at all. Guitar with mine has Lawlers. I think you can customize pretty much anything though. So. Graz Guitars.

[Skip]

Is it an arch top?

[Jason]

Yeah, it's his f holed arch top. Yeah.

[Skip]

Well I don't know by the.

[Jason]

Yeah. By the names. Yeah.

[Skip]

One of his junior things. It's a. It's a hollow body guitar. Does it have f holes?

[Jason]

It has F holes, yeah. It's super cool.

[Skip]

Is it thick or is it 335ish?

[Jason]

It's 335ish. It's really nice.

[Skip]

Right now. Buy it now on ebay. Thanks to the great Kevin from Ohio. There's a Rickenbacker M8 and that's like a little butt kicking champ.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

That is like. I think it's 450 or 500. What?

[Jason]

Okay. And.

[Skip]

And it would. It would it. That's. It's also one of the ones I'm. I'm almost certain that was be built by Massey. So you're going to have some cheesy construction here and there. Mainly the chassis being held in with wood screws. But you've got a really good circuit and a nice bigger box. Looks like it has a nice big Jensen in it. If people wouldn't and they. People need to free their minds. I'm back to big amps. You're not really going to take it to a gig anyway. Get a big amp for cheap and put it at your house and. And don't move it. And if you think you can't get a great sound out of a twin reverb or super reverb until you turn it up super loud. No. And that stuff is just so cheap. Like I got to get more for a silver face vibro champ than you'd have to pay to get, you know, amps of the gods. So not that it's not cool to have the real expensive tweed stuff and all that, but there still are a lot of cool things out there that have their own little limitations or compromises but that are really cool and still a grand or less. Like that Rickenbacker M8.

[Jason]

What? Surely someone or you over the years has taken an amp like that in a cheap cabinet and put it in a more stout cabinet. What does that do to the sound?

[Skip]

Start with. Well, start with always if you can with your dinky amp. Even a little 4 water, have a plug and a jack like our hero Leo did right away by like 1950. Lots and lots of other amp companies, you have to bust out a soldering iron to. To do what I'm talking about, which is just remember, even the tiniest little amp is a head in the cabinet. And if you take that head and you hook it up to a different cabinet, it's going to sound different. If you take the silver Face Champ I fixed up and you hook it up to a 112 with a nice efficient speaker in there in a way you won't want to go back to the other cabinet ever, because it just sounds much bigger and. And fuller. It's not just the size of the speaker, it's the size of the cabinet. If you had a dinky little 8 inch speaker in a much bigger box, it would sound more full. But that's the way those amps are. That's the size fits behind the seat. And your Volkswagen Bug, you can stand on it. It's ultra sturdy. But having another cabinet to play anything through is a good idea. And also, of course, in the troubleshooting vein, what do I always say real soon when somebody asks me what's wrong with their amp? Have you hooked it up to another speaker? And that's because so many times the next call is, dude, you were right. Yeah. Okay, well, gotta start at the end, right? Speaking of speakers.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

I thought this was supposed to be the truth about Jason Verlandi today. We didn't get. We can circle back to me, the Peru 8th graders. Oh, my God. You're gonna probably be on some road that you just look over there and just go, oh, don't look over there. Think how steep those mountains are. Not the. Not the swinging bridge over the gorge though, I hope. Made out of like ropes and stuff. I probably don't have to do that.

[Jason]

I don't want to deal with that. Yeah.

[Skip]

Did I talk about hemp cone speakers ever in our life? Probably not.

[Jason]

I think they've been brought up by listeners. I don't know that you've ever brought them up.

[Skip]

Well, I wrote it down and I was afraid I'd wrote it down for last time, but I didn't cross it out. I got. I had. I had. Shouldn't have ever said I had them. Had two. Got two champs and they had these hemp modern speakers by a big company. Right. Like a. One of my favorites. And I was going, wow, this is going to be great. Because kind of like we're talking about bigger speaker cabinet A little champ with a little 8. Those little stock ones are late night groove. They get distorted really good. But a better eight that you can get from lots of places is. Makes them sound overall better in general. So I was all excited and I fired this one up that I'd fixed up and I thought, oh my gosh, I've made some kind of mistake on the amp, which I do all the time. And I started messing with the amp. I thought I put the wrong values in for the tone circuit I was using. And on and on and on for half an hour until I finally went, wait a minute. And I plugged the amp back into my test speaker. We've talked about the importance of having a test cabinet if you work on a lot of amps. And all of a sudden it sounded awesome. That speaker sounded so dark that I thought the amp was broken. Like there was just no highs right to me. So then probably the next day, someone brought in a falcon 12 inch speaker and he had one of the exact same speakers, but it was a 12 inch version and it was in a box. I didn't really realize it. I did all this work on the amp and I get out his speaker and I just go. Because I. I didn't even want to tell them, but I put it in the amp and it sounded great. So it was the, the 8 inch version is the one that sounded so different that I thought my amp was broken. But the 12 inch version sounded completely normal. And I don't really, I don't really want to diss on the company. I'm just, I think I. I guess if somebody called me, I'd tell them. But. But my point is get stuff from someplace where you can send it back real quick if you don't like it, you know, I guess. Or just realize that an amp is a speaker and a cabinet. I mean, an amp and a speaker cabinet. And just for fun, once in a while, try your amp with a different cabinet or a different speaker. If you'd have bought this, an amp with this speaker in it, you wouldn't really know what the amp sounded like. And if it was your first amp, you wouldn't even know that. You just think, oh, that's the way these things sound. Right. So I don't know. What do you think?

[Jason]

Well, I was making a. I was smirking when you said that the hemp cone speaker had no highs because that was kind of a funny marijuana joke.

[Skip]

I think we've decided to test the jokes on the show and it's not you. I know I didn't even think of that. That's a good one though. I should have had a drum roll or something.

[Jason]

Yeah, we need sound effects.

[Skip]

Yeah, I got to work that up. I have that. I have all those cool 1920s drummer sound effects that they'd have to make like the, the whistle and the little bird sounds and stuff. I have to break that stuff out, start using it when. When the host starts cracking jokes.

[Jason]

Yeah, Radio theater. I feel like as the co host dumber half of one of the world's great vintage amp podcasts, I should know this, but hemp speakers, does every brand have these or is this like one or two brands have decided to go in this direction?

[Skip]

Courses. Courses started in California, I imagine.

[Jason]

Okay, sure.

[Skip]

You know, you got to be close to the source, right? No, I don't know. It's. I. Nobody ever had them, ever. They're not required for you to sound like whatever, you know, whoever that you want to. But on the other hand, I know people who really like them and most companies make some and I don't know, I don't. I say the speaker situation is a blessing and a curse. There's so many that you could go nuts like pedals, you know, trying them. And I don't know if the bigs. If the big companies will give you seven day trial period on speakers or all speaker sales final. I don't know. But it'd be nice if you could try it. And then a good speaker is all you need. The rest is up to you. That's why you have fingers and knobs to turn and you know, I don't know, chasing a certain tone in the speaker department seems to me to be like having too many pedals. You go in a big old giant circle and end up back where you were at the beginning.

[Jason]

Yeah, I think there's a, there's a. Doesn't Pete Anderson have a hemp speaker? Signature model. But it's like 150 watts. It's like a really big.

[Skip]

I think so.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Yeah, I think so.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

Yeah, he wanted an amp for free.

[Jason]

An Eminence 12 inch speaker. It's actually available at amplified parts. 150 watts. Watts, eight ohms.

[Skip]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's Eminence.

[Jason]

That's who, that's who you were trying to.

[Skip]

That's who made the one. And you know some. And you know something else that I'm going to give them to a local harp dog and harmonicas. They don't even have anything above a certain frequency at all. It doesn't even exist. I've probably mentioned making amp for our player and sweating out this tone control and then hearing them play thing and turning the tone control and didn't do anything because it wasn't really in the range, which is pretty limited on those things. So it might be that they would be an awesome addition for the right dude. But my main point was I was stupid. Should have gone right back to the test speaker. Wasted a whole bunch of time messing with the amp when it was really the speaker. And what was that? Too old. Ampegal, kind of like a. A rocket or an M12. Like a tweed Deluxe, but an Ampeg, another sleeper amp. I rebuild the thing, put new filter caps in it. It humps and I mess around with it for an indecent amount of time before I finally realized that I had replaced a 10k resistor with a 1k resistor. Because I reached in my 1. My 10k resistor drawer and I pulled this thing out. And I didn't take my own advice of always test the resistor before you put it in there, especially if you're colorblind. And I put it in there, and that was what was wrong with it all along. Oh, humbling. Kind of like you walking around at 12,000ft. That's going to be humbling, baby.

[Jason]

You know, I'm trying to think, what truth about vintage amps. I'm not going to bring a can of El Pado to South America. But what could I. I guess I could wear a Tava T shirt, take a picture of myself. I don't know, man.

[Skip]

That's. That's pretty obvious. How about holding up a copy of fj, you know, with the Machu Picchu in the background, if it's a lot. Or anything. Or anything with a llama. Yeah, yeah, that's true. A lot of weight. A T shirt you could at least wear. Wipe the sweat from your brow, you know? You know, shield yourself from the fierce glare of the sun. Don't get caught in a. In a snowstorm up there.

[Jason]

Yeah, I. I will try not to. You mentioned harmonica and Heartbamps. And. And that is actually one of the questions that was submitted this week. And let me just remind everybody, you can be a part of this show. Send us a question. You can record a voice memo on your phone, email us a question, include photos of the Ampson question, whatever. To podcast fretboardjournal.com we also have a Patreon where you can get to the front of the line. Do you want to answer some Amp questions or do you want to make it more about the truth about Jason Verlandi?

[Skip]

We'll circle back to that.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

As they say in meetings these days. Yeah, yeah, later. Let's have the. Let's have the heartband question.

[Jason]

Oh, the heart. I can't do these in order.

[Skip]

Oh, well, then any question.

[Jason]

Okay, cool. Let's do that. I know there is a heartbamp question buried in this folder. This first one is from someone not too far from you. I think they're in the. Oh, it says Owen in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Here goes.

[Owen]

Hey, Skip and Jason Owen from the Santa Cruz Mountains here. I know the twin reverb is the logging truck of fender amps, but I'm wondering about a potential mod or rebuild option. Splitting a single twin into a stereo Deluxe reverb or a reverb and a regular, possibly for wet dry usage. I know I'd need another output transformer and I think I'd need another preamp tube, but otherwise other than that, it's a full rebuild. This seems like it could be made to work pretty well with each channel having a separate output stage. And those stages would only use 2 of the output of the power tubes, given their lesser desirability. Would it be illegal to try this on a black panel twin of some sort? And do you have any of those sitting around in the barn that I could come by?

[Jason]

Wow.

[Skip]

That it. That's abruptly. Yeah, it's really smooth too. Had. Must. Had a good microphone.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Big amps are cheap, but I don't have blackface twins laying around all over the place. No. And I would say a silver panel, something from the 70s. If you're going to do something this major, which, which what he's talking about is having instead of being a push pull parallel mono amp driving two 12s, he wants it to be each 12 inch speaker has its own separate amp, which has been done in various ways over the years. There are Ampegs Super Echo twin that are basically 2amps sitting side by side in a big giant 212 cabinet. There's also cheapskate moves. Dan Electro did this all the time on the Silvertones. When they wanted a four power tube at amp, they just put two little tiny output transformers on it that kind of work together instead of a big expensive output transformer. But that's still a mono input signal. It's just each. Each speaker has its own power amp. This guy's talking about some sort of two complete amps inside of a twin reverb. You could take the normal channel and feed it to two 6L 6s and a speaker and then the reverb channel and hook it up to two six l six is in a speaker. But you'd need another output transformer and you'd need some other phase inverter for one of the channels. I don't like this idea too much. I mean, it's not that it couldn't be done. But my bet, I think the fun thing to do with twin reverbs is to make them about 30 watts. And we've talked about this before, two 6 volt rectifiers, six AX5s and then two 6L6s. And that's going to bring. And hardly anything else is going to bring that wattage down from 80 watts down to 30 watts, I would think. And a method of getting those things quieter or not quieter, lower volume, less power would be groovy. And I know that would work. Someone called me and I mentioned it once on the podcast and somebody did it. So you got four sockets, four 6L6s, you end up with two rectifier tubes and two 6L6s. And I think he made it cathode biased instead of fixed bias and didn't change anything else at all. It worked fine. So experiment away, I say. Okay, next.

[Jason]

Well, I found the harp amp question in the folder. Blair here. Well, I compile each episode's questions into a folder.

[Skip]

Keep it in your file cabinet.

[Jason]

It's a digital folder. Yeah, it's not a real folder.

[Skip]

All right.

[Jason]

I try to be semi organized here. This is a complicated show. There's a question coming from around the world.

[Skip]

I don't know how to put make a folder unless it is an actual folder, you know, from Staples.

[Jason]

Yeah. Okay, keep going. Blair says, I love the show. Patreon subscriber going on my second time through listening to all the podcasts of Boy Skip. Aspects of our lives sound very similar. My wife and I live in a town with 350 population in the mountains in Southern California. We have goats, miniature horses, chickens and pot belly pigs. Fire abatement is an annual concern. We have a tractor. I'm 65. Jason, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your letterpress experience. I worked as a printing pressman for many years. On several occasions I would run old letter presses for special applications. I really like Jason's subtle sense of humor. Thank you. Moving on. I've been gigging recording. I've been a gigging recording harp player for a long time. I have a big collection of 30s to 60s tube amps I've collected over the years. Masco combos and PA heads, Supro, Webster, National Dobro, etc. I became aware of Tava after buying a Masco MA17 advertised as having been modified by Skip Simmons for HARP. I was instantly hooked. My question, how would I be able to verify the Masco PA was modded by you? And then let's start there and then we'll go through his other questions.

[Skip]

I signed I. I've. I've been signing PA heads for a pretty long time. About. Okay, at least 20 years. So if you open it up, take the bottom plate off and look inside, it'll say skip 02. Or it'll say for Bob, Skip and a year. And that's how you can tell.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

Yeah.

[Jason]

Maybe the more meatier question. Is there a standard type of mod you do for harp? I. E. Always different value of tone, pot resistor, et cetera. Or is it significantly different from amp brand to brand? Top secret question mark.

[Skip]

Well, he owns one and I would suggest that somebody who has a bunch of old amps and has interest, you're just a. You're just an hour's thought and study away from being able to look in there and see exactly what I did to it. Right. Dig me. And that is something that I don't, that I've never given away. But on the other hand, there's no goop or anything like that. And I've made millions of them. Not millions, but quite a few. And it's, it's not the same on every amp at all. In fact, there's lots of cool PA heads that aren't as expensive as the Mascos have gotten that with a bunch of R and D could be made into good heartbamps. And of course, every page was made to have them make a microphone louder, which, you know, any PA would actually work. But the fine tuning part, getting the tone control to work right in the range of the harp, which hard because I can't play the harmonica. And in most cases getting the gain controlled a little bit because remember, they were made for you to talk into a crappy mic from six inches away. And harp players, when they get that thing right up there and cupping and they're really close to it with the harmonica right there putting out mega, mega signal compared to what the boys at Masco and Gals, I'm sure thought that you were going to do with it. So a lot of amps vendors are super sensitive for harp players. And if you're not an absolute God of controlling the feedback and having a volume control. It can make it really hard to play, you know. Well, it's another skill you have to learn, not just the riffs, but how to get a good tone off of. Off a harp amp in this room and that room and at the jam. It's not easy. That's. That's what separates the super pros. It may be even more so than guitar because it's harder. It's a microphone and the acoustics of the room and all kinds of things like that come into play. And, you know, you practice at home for a week and then you go down to the jam and you get up there and all of a sudden it doesn't sound anything like you thought it was going to. Right. And you gotta adapt on the fly, so. But that's cool. I'm glad that guy enjoys that thing. And he's got all that. That land he's got to take care of. Fire prevention. I've been. My new mower has a hour meter and I'm about to 40. And this is the first. This is the first spring I've actually used it. So I've got almost 40 hours on just the lawnmower, not counting the tractor.

[Jason]

It's a work week.

[Skip]

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I. I have that huge field and my old Ferguson tractor from the 50s, fired right up, needed one little teeny thing. But the mower I have, which is a really nice orchard flail type mower, not a big blade that just spins around and a bearing went out in it. And so I had to have like, call around. Luckily I found the right guy who knew the right guy, an AG mechanic, you know, a guy who works at a big equipment rental place. And that's what he does all the time. He pulled up with his trailer and we loaded this big monstrous mower that, you know, you couldn't lift. You'd have to have like a crane to lift it up. Practically loaded it onto his little trailer. And now I'm waiting for him to bring it back with new bearings in it. So a bunch of the field I did on the riding lawnmower. The part, it's real smooth, it's not super bumpy. And normally I would have done it on the tractor, which is about 6ft wide cut, whereas the mower is 54 inches, a little bit smaller, a little bit slower. But that's how I racked up all those hours on that thing. Daydreaming. Mowing. Yeah.

[Jason]

Do you listen to music or anything? Or you just you're focused.

[Skip]

I daydream.

[Jason]

You daydream.

[Skip]

Not on the tractor. If you're driving the tractor, you gotta, you gotta be on top of it because that thing would just kill you in a second, you know? But a mower, you could fall off of that thing dead drunk and it would just stop, you know, it's not gonna hurt you, right? But no, I, I haven't really. I have dreams of listening to a Giants game and in fact, Dave Barrett, bluesharmonica.com super nice guy. First guy to ever offer me money to answer questions at his website. He sent me some cool headphones that have a radio in it. But I can't quite get the Giants on AM around here. Just a little too fuzzy and distorted and, I don't know, power equipment, I don't like to get disconnected, you know, from it. Right. You, you don't want to run over, you know, a rake that you forgot to. Something like that. So I mostly just think about, you know, stuff, amps. I, I dream up amp circuits. I think about the. Remember, are you old enough for Mr. Rogers? Interviews the bass player on National Lampoon.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Yeah. And Mr. Rogers asked the bass player what he thinks about. He says, I mostly I think about the notes I'm putting out into the space and how much money I'm gonna get. So, no, I, I, I, I cook up some ideas when I'm out doing that. The good part is that it's work. It's not goofing off. And I still, I bet you're not, you're the same way. Not working, but actually, seriously goofing off. I don't know. Unless I'm watching TV with my wife, about 10 minutes of that, and I'm like, oh, I better get back to work. Right?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

But mowing is sort of a combination. You get, it has to be done. It looks great. When you are done, you should, should send a picture. Like, it's huge. It looks like a park. And it's not that hard, you know, really.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

So I don't really mind as long as the equipment holds up, which, of course, it often doesn't.

[Jason]

But I know I, I have a push mower, a push gas mower, and yeah, they're finicky.

[Skip]

What? Truth about yard equipment 27 rechargeable, cordless, electric stuff.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

No, no, no, no, no, it doesn't. It's under a hundred dollars. It doesn't matter. It lasts at least a few years. It always starts, you know, Makita dewalt, Ryobi, my Old hood has quite a few of those things. There's a little chainsaw. I've been running chainsaws all my life. And there's a little battery powered chainsaw that I just went, what are you going to do with this? You could. It's amazing. And it always starts and it's real light. So if you're thinking about, I wouldn't, I wouldn't get a gas and I got a lot of weed eating to do, but I wouldn't get a gas weed eater anymore. You also want the head not just with the string, but with the little flappy blades. If you really tackle in the tall stuff though, that's way faster than the string. The only problem is if you hit something like concrete, they break. But you can get a big sack of them for cheap and I use both. If you're close to things that you don't want to damage, then you just got to go with the string. So those things are great. And you can have like a couple different tools that all use the same battery. And that's technology where it got better and better and better to the point that now people will buy. It doesn't need to be subsidized or anything. You know, that stuff works really well. Boy, there's solar power, solar generators that power those batteries that are pretty darned amazing. Now you could really live backwards these days if you wanted to. Far cry from the 70s, you know, where a solar panel 1 inch square cost like $20 and it would make a little light bulb light up maybe so. All right, we. I think that's the worst in veering. We've completely left the road.

[Jason]

We switched genres with the potbelly pigs and the tractor. He did have one last comment. Switching gears. He has a fifth, a 1948 Princeton. On opening it up, I saw that it has masking tape with Lily signed. I've only seen examples of Lily. Oh, Lily. Two L's. He's only seen examples with Lily with one L. I seem to remember an episode where Skip said he saw a piece of tape with two signatures, one being a lily, two Ls possibly indicating some sort of sign off for training. Or did I dream this? More dreaming. Hope Skip can comment. There you go. That's the whole thing from Blair.

[Skip]

That's a good one. Don't know definitively. Were there two lilies or did Lily just spell her name with more Ls? Sometimes. Well, that would be three. So there's either two or three, right? I don't know, but either way, 48 that's very early, you know, that's very early for the piece of tape. You get far, you get much back further than that. You don't usually see the piece of tape. But even so, that's just an interesting. When I see those, I don't know, I feel a connection. You know, you can, you can just imagine that some person did that and stuck it in there. And now I'm looking at it. I'm. I'm lucky enough to. To have seen so many that they're like, I don't know. My pals, you know?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

I like my pals, so love it. Yeah. That's fun. And 48, Princeton. Anything you do to that thing is not going to help the value of that thing. That's a real rare early amp. It needs to be carefully approached if, you know, wouldn't. It wouldn't be a great idea to just change every capacitor and resistor in that thing.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

So very significant. Cool. Early amp.

[Jason]

Yeah. Blair included a photo of the tape that I just described as well as his PA collection. So I'll be sharing those on our Instagram if I have Internet connectivity. Thank you, Blair. Oh, you asked about letterpress. I apprenticed. I probably have talked about this for a high end letterpress printer in the Berkeley, California area who made really expensive books and wine labels and wedding invites and stuff like that. And so that's my letter press experience. And I.

[Skip]

No, it isn't. What about having one and going.

[Jason]

I had one in my. I did acquire a printing press and put it in my garage in Northern California and did stuff for Skip and various other friends and. And some band stuff, but that was how I got into it.

[Skip]

And do you still have that press or do you know where it is?

[Jason]

I know where it is. I sold it. I moved it all the way up to Seattle and then I sold it to a woman who is doing letterpress printing in West Seattle. And so.

[Skip]

That's beautiful. Yeah. How did you get that thing lifted up? I mean, doesn't weigh a ton, like literally £2,000 or something. Yeah.

[Jason]

But there's. I mean, it's actually a lot easier to have a company move like factory equipment, like heavy, you know, what do they call drayage companies? It's easier to have. It's easier to hire a company to do that than sometimes to hire an arborist to take down the tree in your backyard. So.

[Skip]

Right. They just went. And there's a way to lift it up and get like a forklift or something.

[Jason]

Some straps. Yeah.

[Skip]

It's it wasn't. Yeah. I imagine it was probably made so that when it's sitting on the floor, you could get something under it. In other words, forklift blades or something like that to move it.

[Jason]

Yeah, Well, I think it predated forklifts, but it. You can put it on skids. You can put anything on skids. And.

[Skip]

And how old was it?

[Jason]

My printing press was a Chandler and Price new style. I think it was from the teens or twenties, hopefully.

[Skip]

I need to call him Tin Can Valley. Yeah, letterpress stuff. Hopefully he'll write in and tell us what his machine is. Yeah, I think he actually. I know he sent me a picture of a bunch of. Of a bunch of typeset in his machine when in his little goodie bag, I gave away some of his coasters. People were knocked out and I'm going to use typewriter.

[Jason]

Oh, did I lose you? Come back, Skip. Come back. Can you hear me? Oh, there you are.

[Skip]

There you are. Am I back?

[Jason]

Yeah, you're back.

[Skip]

I didn't do anything.

[Jason]

Oh, Internet.

[Skip]

I swear.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

All right. Thank God. I was starting to get nervous. I would have to call you on the phone.

[Jason]

No, that would be bad.

[Skip]

Okay.

[Jason]

Okay. Our community. What can I say? This is crazy. This is a long email. I don't usually like reading long emails, but this one's kind of cute. So here we go. And then there's a tie in. This is Cirrus from Bloomington, Indiana. I'm a proud Patreon member, and after binging the entirety of the podcast, I'm currently making my way back from through. From the beginning. Just like the other guy. Yes, I'm that kind of weirdo. I must also say that after initial skepticism and eye rolling, my wife now enjoys the podcast. Wow. She even gifted me a Fretboard journal subscription. My son has loved it from day one and especially loves you, Skip. I guarantee he knows a thousand percent more about tube amps than his any of his fellow third graders. Wow, Cyrus, you're killing us here. One question I had for Skip. I know he doesn't like to go into detail about his methods for servicing amps. I feel like you do.

[Skip]

What?

[Jason]

But as someone who fantasizes about one day having the time and knowing how to do it, I have one main question to ask you about the process. When Skip takes one in after the initial cleaning and checking, does he go through the amp from end to end and check every component to make sure it is all within spec? Or does he only focus on the areas that seem suspect or are Directly related to the customer complaint. As long as voltages and ground seem good and the amp sounds as it should, does he call it finished or does he make sure all the components are up to snuff before he gives it a stamp of approval as working like it did when it was new? That's the first part of this whole thing.

[Skip]

Hmm. Well, it would depend on the amp amplifiers made by Dan Electro for Silvertone and a million other companies. You got to check all the resistors. Why? Because I've been doing it a long time and I find that often they're just way off. Right. If it's a Fender, if it's, if it's a Princeton Reverb from the 70s, there's a few. A few you'd check. But in general, you're not going to ever have, you know, a bad resistor. Right. So also in keeping with people are still. Even after I've raised my prices a little bit, people are still just shocked at how cheap I do stuff. And, and part of that is that, that Princeton reverb, I don't know, 45 minutes. And I usually have a pretty good grip on it. Right. Whereas something like a PA from the 40s, you know, you're going to have a million parts you have to change. But you know, a lot of times I don't check parts because I, I, I can't leave them in there if they gotta go. So I'm not gonna measure a bunch of old ancient wax capacitors that I know are gonna have to be replaced for the amp to be reliable. How's that?

[Jason]

That was great. The, this just keeps going. Food tip. Have you tried Herdes Salsa Ranchera? I recently picked up a can and it's great. A pretty hot chipotle pepper based salsa. It says medium on the can, but I'd call it closer to hot. Recommended.

[Skip]

It can't. I, I love the El pato thing and it's my, my, my cupboard has some. But I said from the beginning that, that herdes in the can. That's one of the other pillars of condiments. And it has to be in the can. There's all sorts of herd as they sell in jars. Yeah, but that tastes like paste. It has, it's too sweet. It's like galopy. Whereas the stuff in the little cans is like you chopped all the junk up at your table there and put it all in the right stuff, you know, more, more homemade salsa casera. And sometimes it says hot, sometimes it says medium. It is kind of hot, but oh man. And there's some other herd as similar. There's a green one that's a tomatillo based sauce and that is really good too. Really tangy, like almost a citrusy bite from the tomatillo.

[Jason]

Yeah. Okay. Keeps going. Cyrus. Thanks music guitarist pick Randy Holden. Randy was a monster west coast bass guitarist who played in a legendary guitar psych bands like the Sons of Adam and the Other Half. Then subsequently played with Blue Cheer for a year or so after that. He released a fantastic LP called Population 2. He scored a sponsorship deal with Sun Amps and supposedly used 8 of their 200 watt heads with JBL D150 15 inch speaker loaded cabs as his rig on this record. He was definitely a volume enthusiast from the beginning and said the sun gear was great. It delivered the tone and power I wanted without the distortion. Anyway, every Tava listener should at least check out guitar song from Population 2. I know they'll at least relate to the lyrics.

[Skip]

Good one. That's inside. I wonder that record was made if. I mean, must have been when sun was still around. So sometime before 1980 or so. Suns are pretty great. The Model T has gone just completely through the roof price wise, but the other ones are still pretty darned affordable and very high quality.

[Jason]

This record was released in 1970.

[Skip]

There you go. Yeah, yeah. Only the Model T, which is the base head with four 6550s, I think that thing's like five grand.

[Jason]

Wow.

[Skip]

But the other ones, a lot of the other ones are still, you know, a grand or less. And they're neat, they're really, really well made. Lots of room, you know, sonically, who knows if it's your bag, but definitely in the high value bracket. Is there more?

[Jason]

There's more. The last part, Cyrus concludes by saying, weird Tava connection. And then this gets weirder because we have actually a submission from this person he's referring to. My wife's jaw dropped when she first heard Jeff Chicatano. His name. Her dad's family were Chicago Tano's and they famously can be seen in one of the well known pictures of immigrants coming into Ellis Island. And then he includes a picture of Anna Chicitano. It's possible she and Jeff may be distant relatives. Huh. And then we'll get to Jeff's question in a minute. He says, thank you guys so much for doing what you do. I've learned a ton just from listening to Skip and love the podcast dearly. I just picked up a set of the Van Valkenberg basic electronics Books, and they're fantastic. Clearly written, well as illustrated and easy to understand. I'm contemplated coming to the fretboard summit this summer. I hope I can make it happen. Thank you, Cyrus.

[Skip]

Cool. The Von Valkenberg books have the Tube Man. That's where I got the. The Tube man logo I've used for a really long time. And of course Shikatano is one of the guys that made sure I knew about the Jersey Fresh. Don Pepino canned pizza sauce. I think you got some, didn't you? It's.

[Jason]

It's good stuff.

[Tad]

It's.

[Skip]

It's bright. Yeah, it's bright, it's cheerful. It's hard to beat for a can.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

All right. Good one from Cyrus.

[Jason]

Well, I think it's time now to talk to Mr. Shikitano himself. So here we go.

[Skip]

Oh, no. Okay, I'm ready.

[Jeff]

Skip. Jason. Jeff Schick, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Needle help here with a death cap situation on a Webcore 4901 powered speaker chassis. So here we go. We've got this knotted cord coming into a terminal strip, also with a primary from the power transformer to a disc style brown little pancake death cap. I think that's it, right? It says high q 0.0114k.

[Skip]

Huh.

[Jeff]

Okay. And then from there we have that black wire going over to the switch. So I've heard that we need to continue on with a polarized version of a two prong cord. Fat end, skinny end. Yeah. And not necessarily ground this thing to the chassis because it could create some level of ground loop. And maybe that's the hi fi world. But I need to know the correct way to wire this thing so I can continue my grasshopper adventures. Right. With sensei, you telling me what to do. So if you can give me instruction on that. And if that's not enough, well, you can make all the fun of me that you want and I'll learn from it. Okay. Musical recommendation. Who'd ever thought as I rode the elevator in the late 80s, maybe 89, 90ish. Well, that's not the late 80s, right. At the Syracuse, New York Sheridan University Hotel, Syracuse University. I looked at this guy and I said, you know what? I know who you are. And he smiled back at me. It turned out to be Glenn Campbell. We never really exchanged any words other than some looks. But you know, I really only knew that guy as the rhinestone cowboy from that Dolly Parton movie. Yeah, but whoever thought that, that that guy can play guitar. The best of the best. One of the best. Actually, right along with a guy by the name of Jerry Reed, good old Cletus's best man in the old tractor trailer Eastbound and Down. What a great movie, by the way, Sheriff Beaufort T. Justice. Yeah, well, either way, I would recommend listening to any of these two gentlemen and maybe of them together, because you get a lesson in guitar. And I would think some of the guitar gods out there would also say that those guys know what the f they're doing. Thank you, Tava. Thank you, Skip. Thank you, Jason. Take care, boys. Have a good night.

[Skip]

We. We have got to get him a really late night FM radio gig. I know he needs a creaky chair to sit in like the old KAZAP studios in Sacramento.

[Jason]

He could narrate a Giants game for you to listen to on your director.

[Skip]

He's so relaxed, but he's a goer. He's. He's a whirlwind in person and he's. And he's also bought a whole bunch of stuff for me and paid, you know, he's not just like a guy that just wants to yak all the time. So he's, he's been, he's been fun to get to know. Okay, so the only kind of amp you got to worry about, a grounded cord or an ungrounded cord really are those amps we've talked about that don't really have a power transformer. And they'll have tubes like 35W, 4, 50C, 5, 50L6 instead of the common 6 volt, you know, 6V6, 12AX7 type of stuff. Those you just can't put a grounded cord on because the, the chassis is part of the circuit in a weird way. But anything else, I looked at this picture of this thing, this thing, I think it has two eighty fours and a five Y three. And just put a grounded cord on that thing. Dog. And the death cap is one of the reasons why I, why I wrote the truth about vintage amps. There are no dead guys, right? You don't have to have it. If you put a grounded cord on it, you can cut it out of there. That's the way, you know, most people build stuff these days. But the, the issue is that electronic wizards figured out that if that capacitor shorts, then you could basically have wall voltage going to the chassis of the amp, which, which would be shocking, but it doesn't short, especially not those disc caps. The high Q, that's a real fancy brand that was made just for that. So you could just leave it all alone. Two prong Chord. But why not put a grounded cord on it? Because with a two prong you have to pay attention to the polarity and what other things you're touching. Or yes, you can get a big old shock. It's not like you can't get shocks off of two prong stuff. Any musicians who were around back in the 70s at least are going to know like, holy crap, I touched my lip to the microphone. And so a grounded cord is a no brainer on something like that. You'd want to put the neutral through the. Generally I put the neutral through the fuse to the power transformer and then the hot, which would be like the black one in a. In a grounded three prong cord. Put that to the switch. Sometimes when you do it the other way, you plug the thing in even when it's turned off and you're. A GFI receptacle will trip because it's. It doesn't. It's getting faked out into thinking that there's some sort of short because it's reading through the transformer. So definitely put the neutral on or the hot on the switch and that'll help that Euro style, they just. Every on off switch for years has had to be, has to be two poles so that when you turn the amp on, you're actually connecting the hot and the neutral at the same time separately through like a double pole switch. But American junk usually has the neutrals just going right to the transformer through the fuse and the hot is on the switch. All right, and what was that last thing from Schick? My mind just melted after that.

[Jason]

The last thing from Jeff Shikatano was.

[Skip]

Wasn't there more than just the death cap? Well, Jeff, you can call me anytime in the day, okay? And ask me. He just lulled me with that FM DJ late night I was expecting. Put some Cal Jader on after that. Oh, he had some music recommendation. That's right. Glenn Campbell.

[Jason]

Yeah, he had a Glen Campbell story.

[Skip]

Yeah, Glenn Campbell, Billy Strange, Travis Wamak, all these guys that are just holy moly, jaw dropping. And Glenn Campbell, definitely he played on all sorts of, you know, studio stuff with Tommy Tedesco before he was in a great movie. The original True Grit, right? Yeah, the original John Wayne True Grit. That's right. He was, he's. He was great in that one. That's a good movie. Okay, keeping it moving.

[Jason]

Your Halblaine comments from last time around were very controversial, by the way. The way. So.

[Skip]

Controversial how, people? What's the controversy?

[Jason]

The Halblaine legacy and did not believe that he was having down and out in Sacramento.

[Skip]

But. Oh, I don't know. I, there is nothing. He could have been imprisoned for murder and it would never have affected my respect for Hal Blaine and what he did.

[Jason]

He did not murder anyone.

[Skip]

But that was. Who was that? That was a super famous western swing guy who was arrested killing us. Thank you. They let him out to do a concert and he died on stage. Good way to do it. A. I shouldn't have ever mentioned that because there was, there's really no good in it. I think I was just sort of. We were saying well, not fun. I think my point was just we can't all be superlative musicians. But it's, there's, there's a reward to getting up every day and going to work and just being a boring guy. Getting the magazine out, taking care of the kids, mowing and I, I and, and it, I think I'm also commenting on people that run really hot. You know some of the most creative and fabulous people could be difficult to live with or you know, hard on themselves or all sorts of things. But that's okay. Gotta have people like that too. And nothing could, nothing could ever affect the respect I have for any of those, you know, 18. Well anybody like that but guy like him, you know who was. We've heard, we've all heard all our lives and just. I don't know what am I. I shouldn't have brought it up at all.

[Jason]

Okay, down to the Tava universe.

[Skip]

But, but yeah, but keep, keep moderate and you know, just think of what some of the somebody like Hendrix, you know, could have done if, if he was around now. So anyway, that was depressing.

[Jason]

Yeah. Jeff Shikatana was worried about getting shocked. Our friend Federico, the Italian living in the arctic Norway of Lofoten. Lofoden, I don't know how you pronounce that town did get shocked. So here's his question. Subject line Resistors. After a nice 275 volt zap of yesterday, an idea came to mind. Even if I think it's just something that people do. So you guys have always talked about the Variac for older transformers that do not support higher voltages. But taking a Variac around, if you play here and there, there is often a pain in the butt. In my honest opinion. You could use a big resistor when you have an old amp and you have 10 to 20 volts higher input on the primary. If you are sure that the rectified voltage doesn't exceed the ratings on the power tubes. You're just fine. But the filament are not. So placing a 0, 30.4, 0.205 to 10 watt resistor to drop enough of the voltage on the 6.3 and 5 volt rail, they're going to run hot. So keep that in mind. Yes, you have to check the bias on the power tube later, but then if you've done the good job, you have a working amp in every condition. I've done this for a friend who really liked my old 1963 FBT G60, a 5 watt lamp, but wasn't liking all the chunky Variac coming with him. Next time I will include a pizza dough recipe, I promise. Have a nice day. Keep going, Federico. Danny. Yeah, Federico.

[Skip]

DIY EXPLOSION OF TUBE AMP POPULARITY Our good, our good friend. Rest in peace. Steve from Angela Instruments knew about it way back in the 90s. It started in hi Fi and people started building their own tube hi Fi's and all of a sudden there's kits and I mean tube sockets. And now we can just basically go crazy doing stuff like that. You know, you can build all sorts of stuff and there's more and more and more places to get stuff like that, like amplified parts and others. Variacs are now 75 on Amazon. I mean you used to have to either score one or, or go buy one that's still made in America that they still make for laboratories and stuff that cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Now you can just get a nice affordable offshore thing for cheap. And I think it really must be because there's so many. Why else would anybody be buying Variac? So they are kind of clunky to take to a gig. A guy who was really smart that I love to hate is the guy that figured out to sell people that brown box which is a gigable like four step voltage controller thing. A thingamajig that's pretty expensive, but apparently it's very well made. And a lot of people I know who do take their old stuff have one of those. And this guy is talking about doing the same kind of thing in a very wartime way, you know, like a cheap way, you know, basically putting some voltage through a gigantic resistor that's going to get really hot and dissipate a certain amount of electricity, I guess, I suppose. I'm not sure I'd really recommend that as the next big thing to try. One really cool thing about our groovy fenders, they don't have any big resistors in there because the, the circuit, the power supply output stage where all the current is going on has been so carefully designed that you don't have great big giant resistors that run smoking hot. You get yourself like an old PA head from the 40s, especially RCA. They have these 50 watt resistors in there that are six inches long, like a big sausage shaped thing and they get so hot you can't even touch them. And that was part of that, was the way they controlled, you know, things through gigantic resistors. And you could do it that way, but I don't know. Also, at any tube, amp will work pretty darn good even at 100 volts if it's made for, you know, US voltage. And yes, the 5 volt filament current is lower, the 6.3 volt filament current is lower, the B plus is lower. But it's one of the groovy things about tubes is they, they, you know, an amp gets quieter and quieter and puts out less and less and less power, but they start making noise at like 50 or 60 volts and I don't really think you're going to hurt anything by running them at a lower voltage. Next.

[Jason]

Yeah, have you ever seen those fbts before?

[Skip]

Don't know what that is.

[Jason]

It's an Italian made.

[Skip]

Yeah, I have seen that before. I have seen that before.

[Jason]

That's pretty cool.

[Skip]

It looks pretty cool. Although Euro stuff. Not the greatest construction, you know, in reality still, but still very cool.

[Jason]

There's one on reverb, it has the three prong cores, but the three prongs are not helpful at all in America.

[Skip]

Oh, it's got the weird three prong Euro plug. Yeah, well, you'd have to know what you're doing there. You could change a transformer or you could add a outboard transformer and pretty much run any amp in any country. Just have to have a little understanding of how it works.

[Jason]

Yeah, thanks, Federico. We have more questions. Maybe I should split this into two episodes since I'm going to be gone for a month. In which case I'll thank our sponsors once again, Grez Guitars, Amplified parts and Emerald City Guitars. String Joy Strings is also sometimes sponsoring the show. Thanks, String Joy. This next question comes from Mikey or Michael, I guess. Hey there, Skip and Jason. Long time listener, first time caller. I'm converting a Hammond AO35 reverb unit. I did not gut a Hammond, nor do I endorse their being gutted. He adds with the help of a revised schematic as posted on YouTube by the venerable Uncle Doug. Part of the conversion involves adding volume and tone controls and planning to use the tava lauded 5F 2A volume and tone setup. But I realized I could make a few different styles and alligator clip them together to see what sounds best. So are there any other amps with a single knob tone tone control that Skip really digs deeply? Appreciate the podcast. I will include a recipe next time. That's from Michael.

[Skip]

So he's talking about a little amp chassis that originally were used to to power the reverb speaker in organ setups. Speaker driven reverb which we've talked about. So it's a 2L84 usually or two ECL86s. Wow. Still can remember stuff, huh?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

And. And it and they're really like a little power amp with some of them even have a little solid state preamp kind of thing. But they're made to amplify the signal that's going to the reverb speaker. Someone really well known in the boutique world used as talked about using those when he first got started and still uses a certain part of that design in some of his more well known amps with two EL84s. So the challenge is to build a guitar preamp for it. And that's what this guy's up against. And I don't know about the 5F2A1 in there. I don't know. I've never actually done that. I've taken those amps and made them straight power amps to use in a hi fi context. And they sound fantastic. You know stereo amps for your. For your stereo. But you're just gonna have to experiment. One thing you said about alligator clipping when you get into a preamp tube, stuff like that, if you connect two parts together with a foot long wire it's going to go because it's an antenna. A lot of times you basically have to install a part then disconnect one end of it and then use your Sharpie or something to make and break that connection while you're playing it to hear what the change in sound would be. But you usually can't have a bunch of stuff like you couldn't have the tone control hanging outside the amp with a bunch of of long wires while you experiment with the tone control because it would probably add a lot of noise. Right.

[Jason]

So hobby we have.

[Skip]

Hey, if you A lot of times people want me to have an app that I the right kind of guy who really enjoys it. We haven't mentioned the great Larry Chunk. Yeah, the right kind of guy who's not paying someone to do it. You know, some people like making puzzles and doing crosswords and carefully restoring some old amp is kind of like that. Don't expect to instantly gain the. The knowledge it takes to really know how it works. But careful part replacement and steady hand, you know, make it. It's. It's an art form. And if you enjoy it, then do it.

[Jason]

Right.

[Skip]

That's what I say. Totally. But. But you might not. There might. There's some amps that I just go new, new, new, because it could just be days and days and days of work and I'm the kind of guy who'd want to say, here's your amp. It's $2,000, you know, so I tend to avoid some of that stuff. But if you feel like doing it, then let the good times roll.

[Jason]

Yeah, for sure.

[Skip]

Yeah, give. Give it a whirl.

[Jason]

We have a whole bunch of listeners in Canada and I think most of them are on the east coast of Canada. There's even a Toronto area meetup for people who are part of our rustic kegger in the woods Facebook group. Gary Economy is on the other coast. He's on the west coast. He's in Vancouver. He makes amps. Economy amps, he says. Guys, I have a couple of tips for you. I recently worked on an old deluxe reverb amp with intermittent problems. The first issue was with the new preamp tubes and old tube sockets. Some modern tube brands have pins with smaller diameter and can cause poor connection if your sockets are not clean and tight. Compare a new 12AX7 with an old one and you may see the difference. Second problem I noticed on my own deluxe reverb is that it has the old style pyramid shaped two button foot switch for the reverb and vibrato. On some stages there was a hum. There's being generated from the switch itself. There's no shielding on the bottom and wiring under the floor was letting hum into the signal. I removed the plastic cover and put some aluminum foil tape on the inside of it. You have to add a bit of tape or something similar to make sure the foot switches don't contact the base. Hope this helps some of you love the podcast. Included a photo. Thank you, Gary. That's the, that's the whole thing.

[Skip]

Shielded foot switch for a fender amp.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

What do you think? Shielding the bottom because there's like a plastic cover that fits on the bottom. Yeah, nobody ever did that, ever. But I guess I could maybe see that the, the shielding is in the wire. The reverb part of the foot switch has to has to be shielded. And if it's a factory one, it should be really high quality braided shield all the way down there inside the foot switch. And the unshielded lead should be pretty short, you know, maybe not even an inch, half an inch. So that's the place that you'd get noise. I've guess I'm not surprised that you could pick up noise through that. If you were playing the reverb and the reverb foot switch was on and you took something like a soldering iron and held it up to that solder joint, like in other words, created an electro field around it, I wouldn't be surprised if it made noise. But I hate fender foot switches. If you don't have to turn the reverb and or tremolo off and on in the middle of a song, then can that thing. They just make noise, you know, they're just a pain, right? So make a shorting plug, stick it in the tremolo foot switch jack and you can just turn the tremolo up whenever you want. And the one on the reverb, like I said, it's a common, very common source of noise when you're using the reverb. I always say unplug the float switch. It has that, that RCA has to be always clean and maintained and they, they crack and break and I don't know. Little Charlie always had to have his foot switch anson. Funderberg always had to have his foot switch. And if you really do need it, then just fine. But for most people, oh, and don't buy the new ones because they're just junk. You may be way better off just buying your own little box and the good switches and making it yourself. So, all right. Did we cover? I said no. There was the foot switch. Oh, and yes, he hadn't been listening. I noticed years ago I put a 12ax7 in my venerable tube tester and it just falls right out. Why? Because a lot of new tubes have smaller pins and they just do. What are we going to do about it? I suggest the. Every pin be tilted a little towards the center the same amount. And that seems to be a good angle to put them so that they all make a contact. And of course, in any amp that's on, you should be able to wiggle the tubes around in their sockets. If there's any change, any cutting in and out or noise or anything, then you start over, right? They should be quiet. You should be able to pull a tube a little bit out and push it back in. And unless you actually disconnect it, it shouldn't cut in and out or make a racket or do anything. Great. Dig me.

[Jason]

Yeah, thanks, Gary. Gary.

[Skip]

I did have one person. I was hoping for more, at least an email. I had one person who responded to my list of great English cop shows.

[Jason]

Oh. And.

[Skip]

And so I. I have it. Whenever you're ready.

[Jason]

Let's hear it.

[Skip]

Let's lay that one. Let's lay it on the people for that one. All this stuff is fantastic. You could waste, like a summer or if you broke your leg, weeks watching all of this stuff. And there's not that much American TV that can really compete with it, if you ask me. So the pioneers are Inspector Morse and his younger sidekick had his own series later called Inspector Lewis. Inspector Morse is just. You can't understand who killed the person, you know, because it's way too complicated. He is always at the pub and he's a genius. And the writing is beautiful. The novels or the actual books that Inspector Morse was created from are also a great read. So you gotta have Morse, you gotta have Lewis. You got to have Vera. She's been. She's been the cranky investigator cop lady with the Land Rover Defender for, I don't know, at least maybe 15 seasons. And she's just really dry and really excellent. And you got to have Prime Suspect. No kids for that. By the way, that's Helen Mirren, and it was a big, long PBS series that's just gritty and just intense. Intense as hell. Right. Then we have Happy Valley, which is England, more modern, you know, 90s, 2000s. And just a bunch of great characters and a bunch of just fantastic Happy Valley. And a great theme. The happy. The music for Happy Valley is really great, too. Then we have Shetland, which is on the Shetland Islands. And it's just everywhere. There's the stone house with nothing around it, overlooking the bay, like on the moors. It's just so bleak and cool, Right. Shetland and unforgotten. And that's kind of hard to describe, but it's, again, really engrossing, really good, you know, cop drama tutorial kind of thing. And all set in fantastic locales, especially to a Yank. You know, canals with the canal boats and the Shetland Islands and places like that are just. You just. Whenever I watch it. How come they didn't build a Walmart there by, you know, where are the power lines? Right. It's just Europe. Lewis, of course, and Morse, that's Oxford. And so there's fab shots of the university and all the Beautiful buildings and all those shows. And if you like anything like that, if you like Law and Order or something like that, you'll dig all of that stuff. So there you go, proven winners. Start the popcorn and let the binge watching begin.

[Jason]

Who was the big expert on this? Who. Who wrote you?

[Skip]

No, there was no expert. Just one person said, I listened to the podcast and I was hoping you'd say, I like this show. And that show. He named a couple.

[Jason]

These are all your.

[Skip]

These are all mine?

[Jason]

Yeah. Wow.

[Skip]

No, these are all Jill and me. Mainly Jill, because she finds them. You know me, I'd never even bother, but she finds them and says, check this out. And these. These are all ones that we found to be really, really engrossing and excellent.

[Jason]

Amazing.

[Skip]

There you go. No one cared, but everybody cares. Oh, there's. Oh, second page. I forgot. There's one called Broad Church. And the setting is this little English town that's right next to this huge cliff next to the ocean, like the cliffs of Dover. And again, the setting is just really dramatic. And of course, it starts with some, you know, dead body down there on the rocky beach. And everybody's just really different. You know, there's some of these. They speak Gaelic in some of them. And it's just a different world and a slow pace like I like, you know, not so much in the car chases and stuff like that, but just more intellectual. All right, I guess we're pretty much done, huh?

[Jason]

We're not done. What are you talking about?

[Skip]

We got more. What time is this? Seems like I've been here forever.

[Jason]

We're gonna. We're gonna. We're gonna do two episodes here. We won't get on for an hour and 20 minutes.

[Skip]

All right, well, you're God Peru. Mr. Peru, you're gonna need to split it up.

[Jason]

We have at least two listeners named Seven. They're spelled differently, but their names are Seven. This is the Seven. The East Coast Seven. Seven in New Jersey. Has Skip ever restored or converted any amps for bell towers? I've got a 1950s mass row 50A that I'd like to bring back to life. The tubes are good 2.5v4 rectifiers, a 6v6 serving as dropping resistor, a 6Sn7 phase inverter, and a pair of GE6550 finals. Other than some tack soldered cap replacements, the unit is original and clean. The chassis weighs nearly 40 pounds, mostly due to the big iron. It has separate filament and high voltage transformers. It also uses a selenium rectifier, which is my primary concern. Opinions vary on whether these are safe and how they should be replaced with diodes and resistors. What would Skip do? I'd like to use the amp for guitar, but it lacks a preamp stage and tone stack. Once again, what would Skip do? Lastly, what's up with the 6V6 in this circuit? Is it indeed just behaving like a very expensive resistor? Schematic and photos attached. Thanks for the podcast. Seven in New Jersey. Before you answer this, are there a lot of bell towers amps floating around?

[Skip]

No, I'm pondering. So in the day, yes. Like, you know, like the 10th century, there was a bell up there and you pulled a rope. Right. But starting in, I would say the 40s and 50s, it became popular, I'm not exactly sure why. For churches to instead have big gigantic speakers up there and a big gigantic amp and a way to go or whatever, right? A way to make this. And they're called carillions. And there was a couple of big companies that made them. And every once in a while you run into one. They tend to be, if you see the whole thing, it tends to be like a file cabinet, like a giant thing with. With these really exotic timers, you know, so you could set the time to do whatever. But somewhere in all that is a gigantic ass amp. This one Moss row. Check out some nukem amps from Hollywood, California, and you will instantly see that the moss row amps were made by Newcomb. Right? And it's a gigantic power amp. 265 50s, you know, that's 50 watts plus. Oh, and I know you're a ham radio guy because no one else would say finals. Power tubes in a ham radio rig, the ones that actually send the sound across the room, Those were always called your finals. I got two 807s in my finals.

[Jason]

So I'm a ham radio guy.

[Skip]

So he was a ham radio guy, I bet.

[Jason]

Yes. Not me.

[Skip]

I just meant that he said 6,550 finals. That's a very groovy old school ham radio way to describe it. It's the output tubes, right? So a who really needs a 50 watt plus guitar amp? That's just a straight power amp. It's got two rectifier tubes. He said, oh, and the 6V6, which we all know of as a little power tube for a champ. And that thing, it's used as a regulator tube, which is designed to keep that amp even more high fidelity by controlling, I believe, the screen Voltage on the finals. So it's not just an expensive dropping resistor. Sometimes you'll see a power tube like that used as an actual tube in the preamp to drive a phase inverter transformer. But I'm pretty sure I looked at the schematic that he sent, and in this case it's being used as a regulating device to maintain screen voltage. If you ask an amp to do a bunch of work, those voltages can drop. And this is a way to maintain that voltage all the time. Found this piece of gear, that's military radio tube. And the little unit just had a couple of tubes. But the power supply for it had three chokes, a rectifier tube and a regulator tube. Just for these couple of little preamp tubes to maintain absolute. I bet you you could change your wall voltage quite a bit and it would stay the same all the time. Because for whatever reason in the military they were using it. That tube couldn't just sag or change the way it worked. It had to be perfect all the time. So they had this really elaborate power supply built for it. And this big old moss row thing has a pretty elaborate power supply as well with two rectifiers and a regulator. And so restore it. And then you'd have to make a preamp for it. Some sort of simple. Very simple. I would start with circuit. You could build it in a separate box, but I bet that thing has room enough that you could build it right inside there. And then you'd have those big, gigantic, loud, clean guitar amp if you wanted. Carillion amps. Yeah, they're pretty hard to deal with. I 45. I found a couple in my career and they. They pretty much. They're just so neat. And you could tell how expensive they were. But they're just pretty hard to do anything with like antique radios, right? I mean, wow. I can't. Atwater Kents and stuff. I have a Thompson neutridyne, pre depression. I've been telling people about it for years. Beautiful antique wood case and everything. Nobody wants that stuff. So anyway, I think the guy should build the Karelian. Probably be a great sound and bass amp. And we could probably hear it from here. He's in Canada, right?

[Jason]

No, he's in Jersey.

[Skip]

I could probably hear it from here.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Jeff]

Yeah.

[Jason]

So there's probably some bell tower enthusiasts who just hate the idea of these being converted to guitar amps. Like, you know, but I bet they.

[Skip]

Yeah, but I bet now they're just replacing that stuff with solid state stuff. But next Time you go and buy a church and you hear the bells. Look up there. Are there bells up there or they're just great big gigantic speakers.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Interesting.

[Jason]

When he said a pair of 6,550 finals, which you said was a ham radio term, I initially paused and thought, you talk about finials. Isn't that the top of a church? But I'm glad I just kept.

[Skip]

Finial is an architectural device of some kind, but we're both too stupid to know what it is. I think it's like a cupola, right? A man's. Yeah, it's something. We just don't know what. Thanks.

[Jason]

Other seven?

[Skip]

Yes.

[Jason]

All right, we've got two more and then we'll. Greg, I don't know where you live. Greg, what changes would you make to a Bogan challenger CHB50 to make it more suitable for a guitar amplifier? Can I replace the 2L6, two 6L6 tubes with 6V6 tubes to make it more like a 20 watt amp? That's from Greg.

[Skip]

That's a Bogan PA head, one of the ones that they made in the 70s and up into the 80s. And I believe with 6L6s, the high voltage in that amp is about 420, 440. If you just take those 6L6s out and put some dinky little 6V6s in there, it might work for a while. But it. That's not how you reduce the power of an amp. Right, by putting tubes that are just going to blow up in that thing. So, no, you don't do that. CHP 50s sound great. They sound very much like a. Almost like a tweed basement, kind of a 35, 40 watt thing. And they've got a lot of headroom, but they'll play gnarly if you just turn them up a little bit. So make sure it's working perfect. And then you might think about. Well, I can always give. Give away putting a little bright cap on one of the volume controls. You got two channels on that thing. So take one of the channels and put a little bright capacitor on it, like a twin reverb. Of course, it doesn't have a switch. You'd have to solder it in place. But you could try experimenting with a few values and that'll make the amp a lot brighter at low volume. And maybe something like that could work. But don't. You can't lower the power of an amp. Just. That's the Cadillac V8 that they made in the 70s when you got on the freeway. It would like basically stop working on all eight cylinders. It would only fire on four. But all eight cylinders are still banging around in there, right? Like the worst thing they ever did. Don't make a. Almost every way to make a too loud amp quieter. I don't, I hate. This is. You just, just get a smaller amp. It just, it kills the, it kills. I don't know, I'm sure there's some. I'm sure I'm wrong in some ways. But in general it's pretty tough to have a switch that goes 40 watts, 20 watts, 5 watts, unless you're big time like our friends at T Rock where you can get like a custom made transformer that's actually changing stuff in the amp. Oh, that reminds me. Local guy I would have refused is some new head that looked like a PA thing. It was made in China. Hayden H A Y D E N I think couldn't have cost more than a few hundred bucks. Well, it sounds kind of. I'm not working on this thing. But he was somebody close and he brought another old amp. So I decided I'd look, look at it on the bottom of the, of this thing. It's all metal like a PA head. There's a little slide switch just like the on off switch on a Champ or just like the bright switch on a fender or like on a twin reverb. And I say what's that? He goes, that's the half power switch. It's on the bottom. Like if you set the amp down and the feet weren't resting on a flat surface, you just bash that thing in, right? And I got it going and I mess started messing with that switch and it didn't do anything to the way the amp actually worked. If you're going to go from two EL84s like 16, 18 watts down to like seven, you got to lower some voltages. You got to like disconnect the tube. There's really some that do that so that there's like a single ended mode and then there's a push pull mode. But this thing didn't do anything. It just made the amp sound terrible. Like you turned it down and put a bunch of mud on it. So I told the guy to tape that thing over, don't break it. And it had a bunch of knobs. This gain knob plus volume and a master volume. If you had the gain knob up very far at all, all of a sudden you, as you turned it up just started really getting fuzzy, like a fuzz tone. But if you didn't know you'd think that the amp was kind of busted. So I didn't charge him. And I showed them how to set it up so you could get a decent tone out of it and you get what you pay for. I mean, there's no repair in the thing. I thought about taking the bottom plate off so I could look inside. Even though I knew it was all printed circuit board. They put the screws in with machines and if they put a screw in too tight, it's stripped right there at the full tightened position. So basically when you put a screwdriver on it and you'd go to unscrew it, it just sits there and spins and they're sort of countersunk and there's just like. It would have been so hard to get that thing apart. It's just so if you find something brand new from a faraway land for 99.95 and you're having fun with it, great. But don't, don't expect it to be anything like the stuff we're talking about in general here on the Truth about Vintage Amps. That stuff's unrepairable. And he thought it was going to be like. He thought I was going to like modify it and tune it up for him and all this stuff. I was going to get this thing. In fact, I did it this very next day because I wanted it out. Be bringing bad karma down there next to my Standell 50L15 or the guy that makes beautiful Bigsby steels up in Oregon Smith. Yeah, yeah, maybe he listens. Todd, I think you need to come down to like reading because I don't want to ship that thing. And we're trying to get him a JBL 15 inch speaker for it too. I just have the amp chassis and it is heavy. Yeah, it might be time for a road trip.

[Jason]

Yeah, go on these road trips before the fire season.

[Skip]

Yes.

[Jason]

Doug freeman down in LA typewriter fanatic said that he just listened to episode 146 and was delighted to learn that you're still enjoying the typewriter revolution. He's the dude who sent it to you back way back when. Also, glad to learn that you've connected with Richard Polt and Charlene at Baco ribbon in St. Louis. Yes, highly recommend. Another fascinating typewriter personality. There are so many who publishes this occasional blog and it's mildtypewriter.com per her about Me description. She's a middle aged mother of two whose 12 year old dragged home a broken typewriter. We fixed it was fun. Now we have 10 or 12. We love our manual typewriters. Doug. Abs. This must have been some years ago because Mary is now a grandmother living in, I believe, Virginia, who manages the most miraculous loving hands at home, repairs on machines that most of us would have given up for dad. She would definitely rank among the tava maker community. Check her out. I'll include a link in the show notes.

[Skip]

Yeah, you should, if you have an interest in typewriters or you just starting to get an interest. We're gonna have Richard Polt on one of these days.

[Jason]

Good. Let's do that in June when I'm back.

[Skip]

He's the guy that wrote the book Baco Ribbons. She was fantastic. She does everything over the phone and her dad started the company in her basement. She still does it. And if you want one, you better start junk piling quick because it's going to be like, you know, anything else, you know, you're not going to see him anymore. And you can go buy one for $1,000. It's all restored at some, you know, big, you know, there's places that do that and there's some vintage ones from the 1800s that are many, many, many thousands of dollars and they're just hyper rare. But the portables from the 50s and 60s that you can carry around, better get one of those while you can. Your mom. Smith Corona in the little case. That's the stuff right there. So. And Doug, I wrote him personally because, you know, getting the book was like, well, I hope the podcast is like that. For some people. You're interested in something and then something just opens up a bunch of possibilities that, you know, and you learn and you learn a lot faster than you would have if it was just you by yourself. So every typewriter I got, I got, I had a book. I got to open it up and read about it a little bit and shoot. That book taught me how to fix a couple of things that were wrong because the guy has a lot of experience. Well, on Olympias, if the carriage is scraping, you know, it could just be that these grommets. Sure enough, that's what it was. I put a couple grommets in there. And the Olympia works. Right. That one has cursive, by the way. It's really beautiful looking when you type on it. There's something about them, like the letterpress deal where when you take the paper out, it's a thing. It isn't the same as on a screen.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

It's punching into paper.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Yes. There's a sculptural quality to It. That's just interesting. So thanks, Doug. And we'll keep that cooking. And his. His link to the little old lady who works on typewriters almost made me break my rule of no more than one or two minutes, you know, on the Internet. And because just had all sorts of, you know, pictures of different ones and a little story. We found this one, blah, blah, blah, and it needed this. Blah, blah, blah. They cleaned it up and there's a little picture of it in her backyard. And it's a. It's fun. Working on them is very relaxing. They're very, you know, they're all mechanical, unlike, as our friend Louis Garcia says, amplifiers, electronics, can't see it, don't understand it. No, you know, no electrons. Right. But this thing is just. You push that and you can see the bar pushes that and it's hooked to that and it pushes that and it's different. You can actually see how they work if you. If you enjoy like a little puzzle. So totally typewriters. You should have one.

[Jason]

I have one.

[Skip]

Do you. Is it out where you might beat on it once in a while?

[Jason]

There's one here at the Fretboard Journal and one at my house. Don't ask me what kind they are. They work.

[Skip]

No, that doesn't matter. Just sometimes that's. Sometimes that's. That's what you want.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

And I can't type, but I do. But I have been making a lot of fun looking little labels for PA amps and stuff like that, and I've given some away. I'm not just hoarding them. We need somebody who always shouts to come and get the one that's all capitals from a telegraph office. Right. Arrive Tuesday, stop, that sort of stuff. Right. And when you do the shift, it's capitals both ways. So be a good one for Trump. Right.

[Jason]

You would think that a telegraph typewriter that stop. Would just be one key with all four letters like them all at once. Because they, at least in movies, they say that a lot. I don't know if they actually say stop a lot. Okay, we've got one more from longtime listener, longtime contributor Tad. Remember, we have a Patreon. Remember to go thank Emerald City Guitars, String Joy Strings, amplified parts, and Grez guitars for their support of the show. Go tell them Tava sent you. And here's Tad warning us that this is on an obscure subject which is par for the course with this particular episode. Here we go.

[Tad]

Jason and Skip. This is Tad, one of the wilds of Colorado and New Hampshire. It's been a Couple of years since I've been in touch with you, and I don't want to take up too much of your time because, as usual, what I have to say doesn't really have anything to do with amplifier repair. But I do think you'll find it interesting. You cast your mind Back to episode 116. This was in June of 2023, and it was the episode where the item of the horsepowered IBM Selectric typewriter came up. Amish farmer that wanted to be able to use his. His Selectric typewriter but couldn't use electricity. That got me thinking about. The larger question, which I probably must have come to everybody, is the question of whether it's possible to build an entirely mechanical guitar amplifier. Something beyond the resonator style of guitar amplification. Some kind of a device that would allow the amplification of the guitar signal to some. Some arbitrary level without using any electricity or electronics. And that was sort of a fun thing to think about for a while. Your options are kind of limited because of the fact that audio frequencies are pretty high. And so whatever system you use for amplification, it's got to have very low inertia. And that eliminates a lot of possibilities. And so, anyway, I thought about this idly for quite a long time until a friend of mine suggested to me that I take a look at what's called fluidic amplification. This is a technology that was worked on and developed by the Department of Defense during the Cold War. And it was essentially used as a way of providing amplification and communications for flammable or explosive environments. And what it consists of is a chamber in which a jet of fluid, it could be air, it could be water, could be something else, is injected into one end of this chamber and another jet, a smaller jet of fluid, is introduced into the side of the chamber so that it impinges on the first jet at right angles. And by manipulating the small jet of water, you change the direction of flow of the large jet and direct it out of one or another orifice, depending upon what the small jet was doing. So just like a vacuum tube or a valve, you're using a small flow of energy, water or current, to change the direction or modulate a large flow of energy. Okay, well, that's good as far as it goes. Now, how do you connect that to a guitar? And there are some details to be worked out, but you can imagine starting with a resonator using the vibrations of the resonator to actuate a small valve that controls the small jet, which then controls the large jet. And maybe you need a little preamplifier stage because the signal coming off of the diaphragm is pretty small. But anyway, you could sort of see where that's going. All right. So anyway, there's the idea in principle. Now, putting it into practice. I did not get a resonator guitar and start trying to build one of these things myself, but I discovered not too long after this, a really interesting solution. And this came about from Orthodox Jewish restrictions on the use of electricity and other kinds of gadgetry on Sabbath. Apparently this is really a problem during Rosh Hashanah when many people attend services and apparently the cantors get totally worn out trying to sing loud enough for everybody to hear them. Well, one of the fellows in the Department of Defense that worked on this years ago built a fluidic amplifier for a synagogue on Long island and it worked very successfully. Sound amplified sound was transmitted by hoses to the back of the sanctuary and even into overflow rooms. So it was a very successful installation for them. And I think that the handiest among our listeners can probably take it from there as far as building a non electrical guitar amplifier goes. And I've posted a bunch of relevant materials on the KEGR site. Okay, well, that's about it. I encourage you to take a look at the documents that I put on the KEGR site because there's some really fascinating details, including the maneuvering that they had to go through to get this okayed by rabbinical authorities. And in fact, there is such a thing now as kosher sound. It took 15 years to get this thing okayed. But that is a whole other interesting story. So, okay, thanks for your time and we'll talk to you next time.

[Jason]

Oh, what happened to our podcast?

[Skip]

Kosher Sound is pretty cool name, though. I'm still waiting for somebody to pay me for Wave Magnet Surfware. But kosher sound is not bad. And that is, as is often the case with the smart people, say, you understand? Now there's, I'm going, I don't understand. But there are some details to be worked out. That's kind of one of our hallmarks, isn't it? So, wow. I'd be interested in checking out the way they did it at the church, but boy, that next step of a non electronic amplified guitar. Yeah, what about that? What about that speaker that vibrated its.

[Jason]

Own sympathetic speaker cabinet. Yeah, but that required electricity. Oh man, that's not kosher. I'll include links to whatever Tad shared on our Facebook group in the show notes for this episode. And thank you, Tad.

[Skip]

Yeah, that's some deep. That's some deep thoughts right there. I'm gonna have to wrap my brain around that if I. If possible. Couldn't you just have maybe like a. I don't know, a water wheel and a generator so you can use your amp. Maybe we could get a water wheel or a windmill involved somehow, but. Nah, he's talking about a completely different way of. Of doing things that I'm gonna have a little bit of a hard time visualizing.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Yeah. Hopefully you're the same. I'm not completely idiotic, but I'm glad. I'm glad to. I'm. It's good to hear stuff like that from people. It just shows you that creative people are always going to come up with stuff and no reason to be bored in life. You already built yourself a couple of tweed deluxe kits. Well, you're ready to tackle this guy's concept, right? Wow.

[Jason]

Yeah. How big was this? I don't know, where the rabbi needed to, like, do this complicated amplification math that he couldn't just speak louder or. Or maybe do multiple services or something.

[Skip]

I got to hear an orchestra play at Harvard.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

You know, and that building is, I don't even know, 16 something.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Way back there. There weren't any amps, man, when the. When the four or five double bases leaned into it, Right?

[Jason]

Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah.

[Skip]

But in other words, the building was designed the building's instrument for unamplified sound politics. Yeah. That's. Wow. Far out. Well, we'll look into that. And no reason to be bored with life. No, it's always some crazy ass thing that you could get interested in. And it was good to hear from him.

[Jason]

Yeah. Thank you, Tad. You kept that bottled up in you for a couple of years, it sounds like, and we're glad you finally shared it with us.

[Skip]

Yeah. Wow.

[Jason]

Well, we did it. That was an episode and a half of the Truth About Vintage Amps.

[Skip]

Well, you're going to be saying we did it in a month or so when the wheels touched down back in. In the US of A. Right.

[Jason]

My big recap on the Peruvian vintage guitar store scene will be coming around the 1st of June to this very podcast, and I can't thank you guys enough for contributing all the questions. Summit is we're gonna have some big announcements in just a couple weeks here, so please come if you can to our big Chicago guitar hang and skip. Thank you as always for fielding all these questions. My mind is still numb from tads.

[Skip]

My mind is still numb from 8th graders chaperone.

[Jason]

I know Peru.

[Skip]

And your son thinks you're an idiot. You know that, right? And it's just.

[Jason]

I've known that for 14 years now.

[Skip]

Yeah, it's not you. It's just. It seems to be a thing. Right. But the rest of the crowd will be lucky to have you. Airy died.

[Jason]

We're gonna be on one of those treacherous switchback roads in some bus that looks like the wheels are gonna fall off. And I'm gonna stand up and say kids, look, let me tell you about fluidics.

[Skip]

Exactly. You just keep it. You're going to keep it calm like. Like when the big pop up tent flew in the air and landed on your car. Yeah. I mean you'd be ready for anything. But there will be some unbelievable views. Take lots of pictures. Make sure that there's a lot of people in them. And I don't know. Don't drink the water.

[Jason]

Yeah, don't drink the water. Don't even have a salad. I've been told.

[Skip]

Don't. Don't take your weed on the plane.

[Jason]

Or even the Paul McCartney thing.

[Skip]

Yeah. No Hemcom speakers on your headphones, right? No, just. When in Rome. Do you like the Romans? I'd be. I mean I'd be. Care. Gonna be some awesome food, you know. Right. You might not know what it is, but you know there's going to be some awesome food and just. Man, talk about the heirs. It's going to be so different from where you live.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Just. And it's going to be. It's going to be something. And. And are you really going to go to Machu Picchu?

[Jason]

Yeah. I'll send you pictures.

[Skip]

When's that for? When's that. Isn't that ad. No, that's B.C. isn't it? Like it's way back there. Do you gonna get to wear a pith helmet?

[Jason]

Can only.

[Skip]

I always wanted to have a pith helmet.

[Jason]

I'll bring you back one.

[Skip]

Okay. No, no, don't bring back anything. And if your laundry gets too dirty, you it there and donate it. Hopefully you can get a Swiss army knife into the. Into the. Into the country. I'd hate to be without mine if I was chaperoning a bunch of 8th graders. But have a great time and it's going to be life altering, I'm sure. Yeah, you'll have some good stories for us. And thanks everyone for the questions and thanks for patience during the mowing season.

[Jason]

Oh yeah, getting.

[Skip]

We'll be. We'll be down to one day a week here pretty quick. But not quite.

[Jason]

Oh, yeah, Everything's growing.

[Skip]

Oh, man. Yes, absolutely. But I got it. I got it pretty much under control. And we'll talk again soon, okay?

[Jason]

Sounds good, Skip.

[Skip]

All right. See you guys. Bye.