Ep. 151: "It Starts Out Cool"

Summary

Episode Overview

In Episode 151: "It Starts Out Cool" of The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons, hosted by The Fretboard Journal, Skip and Jason delve into a mix of vintage amp restoration projects, personal anecdotes, upcoming events, and detailed technical discussions. Released on July 25, 2025, this episode offers guitar enthusiasts a blend of humor, insightful advice, and community engagement.

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Current Projects and Collaborations

Skip opens the conversation by sharing his latest endeavors in vintage amp restoration. He mentions an upcoming meeting with Bill Kernard to photograph a collection of Standell amps, highlighting the intricate details and unique features of these rare amplifiers.

[01:11] Skip: "Tomorrow, I'm going to see Bill Kernard and we're going to have a whole pile of those Standell amps and take a bunch of pictures of them."

Skip elaborates on his collaboration with Dave Britton from Nashville, describing Britton as a knowledgeable and enthusiastic expert on Standells. Their joint efforts aim to document and understand these amps better, potentially leading to a future article in The Fretboard Journal.

[02:22] Skip: "He's one of those guys that just goes whole hog on it... We're trying to get together as much information on them as we can. Maybe a future FJ article."

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Anecdotes and Personal Stories

Skip shares a humorous memory about receiving an old photo from Steve SOS, depicting himself with vintage gear in 1991, which leaves him puzzled about the context.

[07:00] Skip: "He sent this picture of me... I looked at the picture and I just went, what the heck? Where is that?"

Jason recounts his recent encounter with legendary guitarist Leo Kottke, highlighting the personal impact and memorable interactions that arose from their meeting.

[19:31] Jason: "Getting to meet Leo Kottke last week was a career highlight... He was a super charming guy."

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Fretboard Summit Announcement

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to promoting the upcoming Fretboard Summit in Chicago, scheduled for August 21st to 23rd. Jason outlines the event's highlights, including performances by Charlie Hunter, Ella Feingold, Dave Hill, and special appearances by the team from Two Rock.

[16:33] Jason: "We're gonna have Charlie Hunter, Ella Feingold, Dave Hill, and a very special guest on Saturday..."

Skip endorses the event enthusiastically, comparing it to summer camp and emphasizing its organized nature, thanks to the support from the Old Town School of Folk Music.

[17:53] Skip: "If nobody trusts that I personally could throw an event like this, the good news is there's an entire team helping me out."

---

Listener Questions and Technical Insights

The episode features an engaging segment where Skip addresses listener-submitted questions, providing in-depth technical advice on vintage amp repair and customization.

1. Question from Lux about a 1980 Vibro Champ:

   • Issue: Overwhelming hum after modifications.
   • Skip's Advice: Replace all coupling capacitors, check the hot resistor's value, and ensure proper installation of the isolation transformer.
   • Notable Quote:

     [28:33] Skip: "There are some people that just can't stand a knob that doesn't do anything."

2. Hum Issues in a Late 70s Deluxe Reverb Tremolo:

   • Issue: Shallow tremolo effect and delayed engagement.
   • Skip's Advice: Start by replacing the tube, check electrolytic capacitors, and consider replacing the optocoupler.
   • Notable Quote:

     [34:19] Skip: "There's a lot you can do... Sometimes, sometimes they nailed and looks."

3. Question from Eric in Norway about Bass Amplification:

   • Topic: The influence of bass guitar amplification on amp design.
   • Skip's Insight: Discusses the historical development of bass amps, the importance of clean sound, and the evolution from tube to solid-state amplifiers.
   • Notable Quote:

     [37:07] Skip: "If you want to think of that amp as a pedal platform type of deal, they're perfectly fine."

4. Question from Phil in the UK about Fender Reverb Channel:

   • Issue: Tremolo depth and phase issues.
   • Skip's Advice: Replace tubes, check capacitors, and avoid grounding the chassis in non-traditional amps.
   • Notable Quote:

     [36:00] Skip: "Just get a different amp. But doing that."

5. Question from Bob in Boulder County, Colorado:

   • Topics: Phase cancellation in Fender amps and Yellowjacket tube converters.
   • Skip's Advice: Explains channel jumping and advises careful experimentation with amp modifications.
   • Notable Quote:

     [62:44] Skip: "If you listen to it and it sounds good to you, fine. And if it doesn't, don't do it."

6. Question from John in Riverside about Trainer YGM3 Combo:

   • Topic: Comparing the YGM3 to Fender amps like Deluxe or Princeton Reverbs.
   • Skip's Advice: Highlights the quality and versatility of older tube trainers, noting their bright sound and robust construction.
   • Notable Quote:

     [73:02] Skip: "They sound fantastic... but they're just ridiculously bright."

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Book Recommendations

Both hosts recommend insightful literature related to amp history and guitar culture.

• Listener Recommendation:
  • Book: The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass by Brian Wright.
  • Skip's Addition: Recommends the only book about the Ampeg company, detailing its origins and impact on bass amplification.

[38:58] Skip: "The only book that was written about the Ampeg company... Read about his very beginnings."

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Community and Networking

Listeners are encouraged to engage with the community through events like the Fretboard Summit and local meetups. Bob from Boulder suggests organizing a Denver-area gathering, emphasizing the value of local connections among amp enthusiasts.

[61:35] Skip: "You think about it, there probably are like-minded types in a big city, a couple at least, right?"

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Final Thoughts

Throughout the episode, Skip and Jason emphasize the importance of hands-on experience, continuous learning, and community support in the realm of vintage amp restoration and guitar playing. Their blend of technical expertise and personable anecdotes makes The Truth About Vintage Amps a must-listen for guitar aficionados seeking both knowledge and camaraderie.

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Notable Quotes

• Skip on Standell Amps:

  [02:22] "They're all different and they're all made crappy. And I'd throw them all in the slew except that they sound really cool."

• Jason on Leo Kottke:

  [19:24] "I got to hear him play the Fisherman just for me, and that was pretty special."

• Skip on Testing Equipment:

  [56:17] "Always check stuff that you know with your new piece of test equipment."

• Jason on Fretboard Summit Programming:

  [23:04] "I'm gonna do a little tell-all on 20 years of the Fretboard Journal."

---

Conclusion

Episode 151: "It Starts Out Cool" is a treasure trove of knowledge, stories, and community spirit for those passionate about vintage guitar amplifiers. Whether you're a seasoned amp technician or a guitarist looking to deepen your understanding, Skip and Jason provide valuable insights wrapped in engaging dialogue.

Transcript

[Skip]

Foreign.

[Jason]

Hey, welcome. How are you?

[Skip]

Good morning. I'm fine.

[Jason]

That's fire season.

[Skip]

Fire season's cruising along. Endured a pretty much 100 degree week but got some more like 80s for a week which will be nice. I like it when it starts out cool. Is it 60 degrees in the morning at your house or is it 70 degrees in the morning at 6am Right. That's the thing. So I'm fine. Seems like we just did one of these. It's pretty timely for us.

[Jason]

Well, you know, we gotta space them out a little bit and life gotta grab.

[Skip]

Yeah, grab time when you can.

[Jason]

Grab time when you can.

[Skip]

Yeah.

[Jason]

We have lots of questions. Thanks to everybody who either joined our Patreon or submitted a question to podcast fretboardjournal.com as always. Well, I guess we should talk about sponsors but before we get to that, what's. What are you working on.

[Skip]

Tomorrow? I'm going to see Bill Kernard and we're going to have a whole pile of those Standell amps and take a bunch of pictures of them. And yes, Dave Britton, B R I T T O N in Nashville is somebody I talked to on the phone who seemed super legit and of course I never carried on with it. But he's waiting and makes the crazy. Knows a lot about Standells, has some schematics available, makes the crazy little plastic drawers full of crazy parts that were the early, early modules pre Howard Dumble. Didn't want anyone to steal his schematics and he would be fun to get on sometime and talk about what led him down that path. Plus he lives in Nashville which is, you know, a lot of guitar players, a lot of good guitar players in Nashville and probably a lot of people that, you know, service their stuff. Probably a pretty tough market to make a dent in. I would think so. So that's kind of fun.

[Jason]

So wait, you and Cunard are doing what from two Rock, by the way?

[Skip]

It's just a little. It's just weird. We have a place, we have a common reason to be an hour and a half, we live pretty far apart, but we have a central location where we have an excuse to be. And so we get to hang out for a while and look at Standells because in his usual pit bull fashion, you know, he. In a week he saw more and fixed more than most people have ever seen. I of course take months, but it just happens. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, there's about like eight of them that some of them are the ones that have the Solid state, front end and the tube power amps. But some of them are all tube, which are the old ones, and they're all different and they're all made crappy. And I'd throw them all in the slew except that they sound really cool. They sound really good. And information is really sketchy on them. So we're trying to get together as much information on them as we can. Maybe a future FJ article.

[Jason]

Is this like a tailgate party?

[Skip]

Yeah.

[Jason]

That's pretty cool.

[Skip]

Yeah, pretty much. Down by. Down in Vacaville, home of Pacific Hardware. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this place, but if you. If you live in Northern California, you just go in the front of this thing. It. Look, it says it's an ace. But no, you go in and there's like all these tradespeople, you know, people in their 50s and 60s who know what the hell they're doing. And you just hold out the part or you ask the question. Done. And, you know, they. They lead you through this labyrinth to where they have all the corks and springs and stuff like that. Hardware. I mean, I. In the olden days, I bought lots of hardware and stuff there. Sheet metal, screws, and it's just a cool place.

[Jason]

That's great.

[Skip]

Yeah. So there you go.

[Jason]

Bill works, obviously, for two Rock. Hopefully he'll come to the Fretboard Summit this Chicago this year. I don't know. You know, two Rock will be there. But does he just do amp repair on the side, or is this stuff he's picked up or.

[Skip]

He doesn't really do. He really just works for T Rock. Yeah, but he can't stand it. You know, that's. You know, the most amazing thing about him to me is that he's still like a little kid. He's still, like, super interested.

[Jason]

You mean he can't stand working there or he can't stand sitting.

[Skip]

Can't stand not. Not doing stuff. And he acquired some standouts, right? He. You can't get him to go fix your fender. Forget it. Right? He won't do it. But he just always has his own. Kind of like Keith Carey. You think he's got 20 hours in his day, but then you show him this one thing and he goes, yeah, I'll do that. Someone gave me a koa wood old ukulele that's all busted up, and I showed it to Keith, and he's going to fix it up for you. Or Kernard comes up to my house for the first time, and he just goes, what because there's all this junk in the. In my barn. And he hadn't really seen a bunch of that type of 40s type stuff, but he just. He's one of those guys that just goes whole hog on it. So he'd call me the next day, and he'd already fixed the amp, whereas I would have just spent the first week just thinking about it and looking at it. Right. He's just one of those guys that dives in, and when those Standells came along, he just tore into it and that happened. I happen to have some at my house, some of which had been here forever because I don't really know how they work, but we're trying to just, you know, it's like a bunch of weird stuff coming together that so rare that having even a few of them at once will be educational.

[Jason]

I love it. That sounds super fun. I wish I could be there and film it. Yeah.

[Skip]

He'S got. He's got. He takes good pictures.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

I wouldn't have to put on a clean shirt. No, I'm not going to be in the pictures. Did you see that picture I sent you?

[Jason]

Yeah. You just sent me a picture from when? When was that?

[Skip]

So I haven't talked to Steve SOS for a while, but of course, a groovy cat and an early influencer. And I never. I'm almost certain that I never actually met him or talked to him. I just knew who he was and knew that he knew what the hell he was talking about. Like Steve Lock, the Sethian from Angela. I never talked to him until we had him on the podcast. He was just a mentor, as was Sost. But out of the blue, a few days ago, he sent this picture of me. I still have some genes like that, but I still had red hair. I mean, we must. Must be back maybe 1990 or something, standing with a pile of stuff, reverb units and a brown something or other. And he goes, hey, I guess we go way back. And I looked at the picture and I just went, what the heck? Where is that? What are those? I had no idea. You know, the backdrop wasn't my house or someplace. I remembered, like, I went somewhere and someone took a picture of me standing in front of all this stuff and somehow so standed up with it. I emailed him back and said, I have no idea where that was or when. Do you. And he said, no, he found the picture in a box of pictures, so that could be the baffle. Does anybody know what that. Where the heck that was? Did I Fix some amps for one of our customers or friends a billion years ago. And that's your front porch. I don't know, but you can put it on the kegger.

[Jason]

Yeah, it says 91.

[Skip]

91, yeah. There you go.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

Yeah. I have no idea. Just look so young in that thing. Made me feel old.

[Jason]

Nah, doing great.

[Skip]

So anyway, that's, that's, that's a, that's something for tomorrow.

[Jason]

That's exciting.

[Skip]

I'm gonna see the great Tom Gunterman today. Plays electric violin through Mascos and makes his own speaker driven reverb units and stuff like that. Super cool guy, Jackie Brown. Connection, right? Married to his mom, Jackie Brown, who's a pretty famous guy from the Sacramento area that Tom gets to play with a lot. And oh, stop the presses. We need the ohga horn, like when the submarine is gone. I've managed to annoy the great Kevin from Ohio. Apparently I implied that you shouldn't mess around with your own guitars or amps or like good musicians don't or something like that. You guys know, I don't, I can't remember exactly, but he called me and he's like, what, what are you talking about? What about this guy and that guy? What about Brian May and his dad building their own guitar in the garage? And I said, what are you talking about? Apparently I didn't say it quite right, but I implied that really good musicians. Maybe it was when I said a great musician could get a good sound out of anything. You don't have to necessarily get into this train of modifying and messing with stuff, but that's not putting down people who are technical. So I calmed him down and said, hey, Joe Walsh figured out he could take the bright cap from the normal channel of his twin reverb and parallel it with the bright cap on the reverb channel of his twin reverb and then get even more of a treble boost on the bright switch because he basically doubled the value of the bright cap. Joe Walsh. So sorry, Kevin. I think he just misunderstood me. Or quite possibly I was really vague. Hey, people that mess with their own stuff and constantly tinkering, geez, where would we be without Les Paul or Leo Or Leo? So I don't know, maybe he was just in a mood, wanted to yell at me about something.

[Jason]

Yeah, people take what we say seriously.

[Skip]

Remember I. We don't practice, we don't talk about it ahead of time. So kind of like in a regular conversation sometimes you might listen back and say, well, that wasn't exactly what I meant. Or that sounded stupid, so. But I know you don't edit much.

[Jason]

I don't. I really don't.

[Skip]

Who's got time for it, right? Somebody's going to have to give us a lot more money if we're going to have spend a bunch more time.

[Jason]

This is a tough show to edit. Sometimes topics are brought up minutes after they were first brought up, and you'd.

[Skip]

Have to listen to the whole thing.

[Jason]

Well, I'm okay doing that.

[Skip]

I still have never listened to a single one.

[Jason]

That's.

[Skip]

Yeah, I think I listened to the first couple minutes of the very, very, very first one we did. And I went, wow, I'm talking. He's talking. But. But that was pretty much it. So. All right, shall we segue, or should we just ramble on?

[Jason]

Yeah. So our friend Barry over at Grez Guitars just posted. He's. He's doing the. I don't know what it's called, the Japanese technique where you take the butane torch and you burn the wood, and that's the finish. He's doing that now on. On at least one guitar that he's bringing to the fretboard summit in Chicago. You can sign [e-mail] for that, but come see Barry. Follow him on Instagram. I think the cool thing about the. The main models of guitars that Barry's doing is that they're all. Can be very simple, or he can just go over the top, and they're just kind of like the perfect customization vehicle. So everybody, go follow Gres Amplified Parts has those amp kits. Hopefully some of you got in on that sale they had around the 4th of July. But if anybody wants to get into the exciting world of building an amp or a pedal for the first time, they have pretty much everything you need, including these kits that kind of walk you through the entire process. Go there, Tell them Tava sent you. And then, as always, our friends at Emerald City Guitars continue to get a incredible array of vintage amps in their showroom. They've got the bright. Is it orange or red Marshall Capri? I don't know. It's kind of between orange and red. The little cute little thing that only came out for a year or whatever. They've got a 59 Gibson Skylark in stock right now. They've got a 61 Fender Twin that was owned by Rich Robinson of the Black Crows and so much more. So tell them Tava sent you, except not that Capri. Oh, you don't like those?

[Skip]

Well, if they sounded great, they'd be $10,000.

[Jason]

I know. They're so cute.

[Skip]

They're so cool looking, but they're like. Kind of wish there was a, you know, a little bit different circuit in there. As I recall, they're missing a gain stage or they have a trans part, transistor preamp or something. I think I've only ever seen one like that. But not every amp was great, even by, you know, the great companies. So sometimes, sometimes they nailed and looks. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah. I bet there's people that are making replica amps that look just like that, but have a more enjoy more fun amp inside. So there. Yeah. Yes. And thank you, sponsors. Really appreciate it. Barry was the first person to step up and I of course said, what? Who's that? But of course family. Yeah, we know now for sure. So, okay, either you tell something that's happening in your world or start the questions.

[Jason]

Okay. It's Shu Sugi Bond. That's the name of the wood burning technique I say.

[Skip]

In seventh grade at Cal Junior High Wood Shop, Barry, one thing, one. One of the finishes you could do on your little wooden box you had to make to pass wooden wood shop was to do a flame thing where it raises the grain. And of course, the dopes would catch their. Their thing on fire. But there was a period in the late 60s, early 70s when you saw a lot stuff you built at wood shop. And that flaming technique was. Well, everybody thought it was so cool. You got to have fire. Yeah, man. When I think back to a wood shop, whoa, Wilbur, that just seems like a million years ago. Like we were making, you know, buggy whips or something. Great big room, all sorts of power tools all over the place. Sanding and planing and cutting and making cutting boards out of mahogany and maple glued together and then like routing it and giving it to your mom for, you know, Christmas presents, stuff like that. Wow. It just seems like another. Another time. Another time. So. So you just tell Barry I was doing that in seventh grade in wood shop, so he's not so such a badass after all.

[Jason]

All right.

[Skip]

I bet he's perfected it. Just the effect of the heat on the wood. Right. And. And you could bet that a half an inch closer with the flame. And if you went too far. Right. I bet it's like quite the skill. Takes a little bit of practice.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

I'm just teasing.

[Jason]

No, I mean, it looks beautiful. The other big news on my end is obviously we've got this fretboard summit coming up. And Brian McAllister from Vintagetubeamplifiers.com is going to be filling the Tava vintage amp room with a bunch of PAs and some old tube amps. So anyone coming to the show to try out either new guitars or who just wants to, like, hang out with other truth about vintage amps listeners, now we have a little hot spot for you.

[Skip]

Oh, yeah, it's gonna be. When is that?

[Jason]

That is coming up fast. It's August 21st to 23rd.

[Skip]

Right?

[Jason]

Charlie Hunter's gonna be there. Ella Feingold's gonna be there. Comedian and guitarist Dave Hill is gonna be there. A very special guest on Saturday I'm not allowed to talk about will be there. We will have our friends from two Rock there. I know you'll be able to see Chris Benson there. And we've got a pedal room. Not only a room with pedal vendors, but we have a room you can walk into. This is working effects pedal. So you can. You can be a part of the thing. And. And we have a Pinewood derby for the luthiers if they want to make a race car. And. Yeah, I mean, it's. It's summer camp, basically. We should be burning wood.

[Skip]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's going to take up a bunch of your time, but not as much as the trip to Peru. And you're not going to drive this time.

[Jason]

Not driving.

[Skip]

Yeah. All right, good. And it's fairly well organized. You don't have any disasters?

[Jason]

Well, no, this is the beautiful thing. If nobody trusts that I personally could throw an event like this. The good news is there's an entire team at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and they've been around for half a century and they're helping me out. So this thing actually does fire on all cylinders. It's not some ramshackle.

[Skip]

They do it all the time. Yeah, yeah. What's the Christopher Guest movie where they. It's the reunion of the folk groups.

[Jason]

A Mighty, Mighty Wind.

[Skip]

Yeah, There you go. The guy's worried that the plants are going to poke people in the eye and. Yeah, yeah. There's our video recommendation. If you haven't seen that is Mighty Wind.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Yes, absolutely. Christopher Guest. You see him in a. In a role and you can't even believe he was the. That guy in that other movie because he can just. He, like a chameleon. Change so much.

[Jason]

He's the best. Okay, well, he'd be a good guest on this show.

[Skip]

He would. Yeah, absolutely.

[Jason]

Somebody must.

[Skip]

I'd be in. I'd be in awe.

[Jason]

He used to subscribe to the fretboard journal.

[Skip]

Really?

[Jason]

Yeah. And I never had the nerve to, like, you know, send a note.

[Skip]

You just saw that. You just saw the label on the mag, right?

[Jason]

Yeah, totally.

[Skip]

Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. I bet. I bet there's a few of those, but we won't make you reveal them.

[Jason]

No, it's. It's private. Totally private. All right, we've got questions. You could feel. Do. You wanted me to talk. What did you want me to talk about? You said share.

[Skip]

Yeah, he said. So you already. You already talked a little story. Yeah, give me that one.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

Because he's playing with Julian in the foothills by my house at a very small venue, and I don't know if the tickets may already be gone. I think that's center for the Arts.

[Jason]

You should go to that.

[Skip]

Two of those.

[Jason]

Two totally polar opposites, too. I don't know how that goes down.

[Skip]

Well, it'll be fantastic because they're fantastic.

[Jason]

Yeah. All right. I know this is an amp podcast, and no one's going to care about famous acoustic instrumentalists. Well, he's saying, too. Leo Kottke was one of my early guitar heroes. Now we're going back now 30 plus decades. In particular, I love that album with the Armadillo on the COVID And in particular, I love the track the Fisherman on that. On that album. So, as you can imagine, getting to meet Leo Kottke last week was a career highlight. I got to hang out with him in the green room before he played at Jazz Alley here in Seattle. And he was a super charming guy. And the big takeaways are I got to hear him play the Fisherman just for me, and that was pretty special. And then he told me he's about to turn 80 and that his 70s were his best year. So everybody out there, take note. Maybe the 70s will be your best year.

[Skip]

There you go.

[Jason]

And he's hilarious. He was, you know, apparently in the before, after he was in the military, he thought he might be a journalist. So he was, like, pestering me for questions about how fretboard journals run, as though he was gonna, like, potentially start a magazine or write for it. And it was the cutest thing ever to be interviewed by the guy that you really wanted to interview. And so that was fun.

[Skip]

Wow.

[Jason]

And he's hilarious. So I don't know how these Julian Lodge, Leo Kotki shows go down, but, you know, Julian Lodge is from another planet and one of the greatest. I mean, both Leo and he are two of the greatest players ever. Julian is very intense, and Amazing. Leo Kotki cracks a lot of jokes between every song that he plays and, you know, is sort of got that sort of zen of like a Big Lebowski type. So I don't know how that all works, but I bet it's a magical show and you should go skip.

[Skip]

Ah, that's fantastic. And how about you had to have mentioned the recent FJ article about the artist who drew the Armadillo.

[Jason]

Well, that was what he mainly was asking me. He was like, how the hell are you able to put out a magazine that does this. This kind of journalism? It's really amazing. And he was really grateful. Annie Elliot, who is not doing so hot health wise, is in Oregon. She is the person who illustrated that armadillo for the 6 and 12 string guitar record, as well as many other things in the Midwest in the 60s and 70s. And our buddy Jamie Thurington down in Australia tracked her down and interviewed her and interviewed Leo about her. And it's this beautiful article that ran in the last issue of the magazine. And so Leo mostly wanted to talk about that and was just super grateful.

[Skip]

Beautiful.

[Jason]

Yeah. That was my little moment. So. Yeah, so that's a perk.

[Skip]

That's another perk of all the work that you did putting that thing together is you get to hang out with one of your heroes and have them play your favorite song for you.

[Jason]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, speaking of which, at the Fretboard summit, for anyone who goes, I'm just. Since I'm the boss, I get to decide what programming we have. I'm gonna do a little tell all on 20 years of the Fretboard Journal. It'll be like an ask me anything, and I've got lots of stories no one's ever heard. I'm gonna. I'm just gonna throw it all out there. So come see.

[Skip]

Fantastic. Yeah, that's. That's what we want to know. Yeah, we want to tell all book.

[Jason]

That's basically the tell all hour. So it'll be fun because I sometimes share stories, you know, at the Elks Lodge or something, over a beer with a friend, and I should be sharing them with everybody. They're funny stories. Okay.

[Skip]

All right, go ahead. No, I'm silenced. I'm stupefied. You're silent.

[Jason]

Okay. That I'm a member of the Elks Lodge or did I just.

[Skip]

Just the whole thing. The whole. Just the whole thing.

[Jason]

Yeah. Okay. All right. We take questions from you all and. And we need those, so please keep them coming. [e-mail]. include a photo you can get on your smartphone and make a voice memo and hit the send button and send it to podcastreportjournal.com or email us however you want to do it. This first one, I don't know why, but it took me a while to read it is from our buddy Lux on Pat Patreon. People, get to the front of the line. Here we go. I recently completed a 1980 vibro champ with the Tweed Princeton tone circuit mod here in Santa Cruz. Much appreciated. Thanks to Skip for the over the phone assistance and encouragement. Once you disconnect the tone circuit entirely and just have the volume control hooked up, it's pretty wild how much the amp opens up. With the Tweed Princeton tone circuit installed, the new versatility of the amp for recording purposes is huge. So naturally I'm looking at the unused base control and what that extra 250k variable resistor could be controlling. Does Skip have any favorite uses for it that he'd be willing to share? That's from Lux.

[Skip]

There are some people that just can't stand a knob that doesn't do anything. Yeah, it just. It grinds on the Silver Face Champ conversion to Tweed Princeton style by just changing the tone control. There's a lot. There's a lot you can do. There's a lot of messing around you can do. The problem is that a lot of times the gain gets too high, unless if the guy. If you're a basher or play high output guitars, they get distorted awfully quick. I think the one up at Fretboard Journal probably is like that. And so there's all sorts of stuff you could do and using a 2 and just because you had an extra 250k pot there, unless you're on a desert island, don't let that limit you because it could be a different value. Or my favorite, a rotary switch. Because stuff I like to do usually involves switching something in and out. I would start with cathode bypass capacitors. Both on the first triode and the second triode, the amps change radically whether that part is in there or not. There were some Tweed Champs that didn't have a cathode bypass cap on the first triode. And some people really like those because they don't instantly break up. There's less gain if you don't have that. So look around for some quality rotary switches. I like the kind where you could put the pop back on. It says like one click two, maybe click three and the amp still looks really stock. So that's something you could mess with and just realize you don't want to do anything to add more gain. Some people are want to start messing around with the inverse feedback, but all that really does is make the amp even louder and even wilder, which they are already. And it just shows you that that tone control, which is great in a Princeton reverb, it's subtractive. When the treble's on 10 and the base is on 10, that's normal, or as close to normal as you're getting. If you take that circuit out and just, you know, have a volume control feed in the next stage, all of a sudden the amp is just way louder. Now in the bigger amps, I would never change it because it works great. Like even in a Princeton reverb, say for instance, because they've compensated for it and there's an extra gain stage in there. So I just finally figured out that that's what keeps a stock silver face champ from sounding better. That and the really high B plus, remember the blackface ones that sound a lot better, they just have lower B, even though they have the same schematic, some cooler capacitors in certain parts. But the main thing is Fender started using the Princeton reverb power transformer and the high voltage went up to 410, 420. And that's the way the silver face amps are. And that's part of why they sound a little dry. Now. If you want to think of that amp as a pedal platform type of deal, they're perfectly fine. I wouldn't want people to think that they have to change their silver face champions. You do have to listen to it through a bigger speaker someday though, because that's pretty mind boggling. That little 8 inch speaker limits the sound of those things quite a bit. But they can still sound really fine stock, especially if you're looking for a cleaner sound. But that tone control gets way brighter and way bassier than the two knob tone control. How's that? I probably said most of that before, but you know, that was the question.

[Jason]

What's the goofiest thing you've seen someone do or ask for with that?

[Skip]

The, the goofiest thing I've seen in the last couple days is a beautiful. It's a beautiful twin reverb 64. And this they disconnected. They took the two wires that went to the standby switch and twisted them together so the amp would be on all the time. You know, it couldn't go into standby mode via the standby switch. But then they made Their own standby switch function, which was taking the cathodes of all the power tubes, which are all grounded in a fixed bias amp like that, and disconnecting them from ground. So when the amp was in standby, the power tubes wouldn't have drawn any current. And what does that mean, you in the back? The high voltage, the B plus, would have gone through the roof when that thing was on standby. The filter caps probably had 6 or 700 volts on them. In other words, don't do that. Don't disconnect the cathodes of all the tubes in the twin reverb to make, because you think that's some better, quote unquote, standby switch than the one Fender put in there. I couldn't believe it. I don't know how anybody would even get the idea that that would be or could be better, but don't do that. It shows that without a little foundation, you got nothing. I had a good customer, super cool guy, but he was freaking out because this Masco I made for him had a new choke inside of it. And that's a pretty insignificant part tonally. He was afraid it was the output transformer, which, of course, is a huge part tonally on something vintage. I mean, the first thing you want is the original output transformer. So I had to say, hey, doofus, look at all those wires that go to the speaker jacks. They don't. They go to that other transformer. They don't go to this choke. That's just a choke. And just the lack of foundation can make you think something terrible. And that's the situation here. That's the dumbest standby switch I've ever seen. All right, now, something dumb in a silver face Champ. Nah. I've had a few in where people had modified the tone circuit a little bit, done various things, but you know me, I never played it until I tore all that junk out of there and made it the way I wanted. So I've seen a lot of GZ34s in champs, which, again, just. Yeah, maybe it makes the amp a little bit louder, but it just puts the high voltage through the roof where you're going to be blowing up 6v6s like crazy. Nah.

[Jason]

Nothing.

[Skip]

No, I don't. I don't really. I can't think of anything really idiotic I've seen on a Champ.

[Jason]

That's great, but I'll try.

[Skip]

I'll try to think.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

Maybe this podcast later on, it'll come to me.

[Jason]

Okay. This is from phil in the UK Question for skip late 70s Deluxe reverb tremolo seems very shallow. It needs to be on 10 to get anything usable. It sounds good but it's mild. Can anything be done to improve this? Additional info the Trem takes a while to engage when the amp is first turned on. It ticks for a while and then goes away. Neither a problem but might be useful for you to know. It's a late 70s model with the push pull boost. This was removed and replaced with a bright cap switch before I owned it. Thanks. From the UK Philippines.

[Skip]

Okay. Deluxe reverb he said yeah. Okay. So that's the smallest amp that uses the optocoupler Tremolo. The Princeton Reverb. The next smaller down has the bias modulating tremolo different but so this one has the light bulb that flashes on a light dependent resistor. A little gizmo that changes its value depending on how much light is flashing on it. Strange. But if your tremolo and a fender like that is not strong start with the tube because it's the easiest. Yesterday I had a bender. That same twin reverb that was ticking really bad when the Tremolo was on especially high speed it would go which if you were playing it real loud you might not hear it. But it's certainly annoying and not right. And I messed around with it a little bit and it's the tube. It was a modern 12AX7 and I just found some old American made tube and stuck it in there and all the noise went away. Also guy in England it's part of the circuit. You got to fix it. It might have something wrong with it. So tube. Then the next thing would be there's a little electrolytic in that circuit bypass cap in the Tremolo you could change that or parallel in another one like Jack Dar would do and see if that helps. Then the last thing is if the Tremolo is weak. A lot of times it's that light dependent resistor and they are sold lots of places including our sponsor amplified parts and you get kind of an assembly. It's a little black piece of heat shrink tubing with two wires coming out of one end and two wires coming out of the other end. Two of the wires are the light dependent resistor and two of the wires are a neon bulb. And if you replace that assembly the Tremolo will get stronger as long as the tube is good and as long as that bypass cap is good. So keep after it.

[Jason]

You can do keep it supposed to.

[Skip]

It's probably the Optocoupler, but why not try another tube? Also, I should add to the tremolo discussion is there's a factory Fender tweak for this noise that they suggested by the late 60s. And they started putting in the amps in the 70s, which is a small. A capacitor. Believe it's 0.05 that you put across that. And it's hard to describe exactly where it is, but you can add a capacitor to that circuit, and that can get rid of that noise too. But it's usually only an issue on the silver face amps, where the wiring is way messier. The old ones, they don't. They're not usually noisy because the tremolo circuit and the tone controls and all the wiring are very, very carefully grouped and laid out just where they want. And tremolo is a weird thing. On the twin, when it was ticking, I could put my finger on one of the capacitors. Not the wire part people, but, you know, the body of the thing, one of the capacitors that's doing the oscillating, and the noise would stop because my. The capacitance of my body touching that thing was enough to eliminate the noise. You can have tremolo that's ticking, and you can just move some wires around, and it'll go away. So I hate tremolo. I've been stumped by tremolo. When you've replaced all the parts and it still doesn't work, that's when you're going, dang it. They can be tricky. But in the case of this one. Oh, go ahead.

[Jason]

No, I was gonna say that's when you say you don't really need Tremolo, do you?

[Skip]

Yeah, exactly. Just get a different amp. But doing that. So they can be chat. They can be challenging. They can be. They can be tricky. The. The combination of voltages and feedback that get this oscillation starting, which they then apply in different amps to various parts of the circuit to make the sound go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So. But I think we covered it on that one. Tremolo. Tremolo and you.

[Jason]

Yeah. All right. This is a voice memo from our friend Eric in Norway.

[C]

Hi, Skip and Jason. Eric from Norway calling in again. This time I have a book recommendation. I have a great joy of reading a book called the Bastard Instrument. It's a cultural history of the bass guitar or actually the electric or amplified bass. And it's got quite a bit of interesting stuff also for app geeks.

[Skip]

And.

[C]

Well, what's sort of interesting me, which my skip might ponder about is the way the amplification of bass made challenges for the amplifier, the guitar amplifier and point being the bass man, which actually was developed to handle the bass and also have been sort of the most one of the best or most most iconic guitar amplifiers. So if you can ponder something about the relevance of the bass amplified bass guitar and for the development for guitar amplifier tone would be interesting. Also I learned that the name Ampeg actually came from Amplified Pig which was. Which was patent. The the founder of Ampeg made microphone on a peg inside the base mounted on the endpin and the amp company was actually born because he needed a better amp to amplify or to reproduce the sound from this contraption. So once again the bass amplification made some, let's say some iconic and some very, very, very important amps in amp history. So please ponder on that and just keep on going. Thanks again from Erik in Norway, but.

[Skip]

Ah, Norway. Without you Jason, I wouldn't know anyone in Norway.

[Jason]

Ah, now you would go there and be welcomed with open arms.

[Skip]

Yes, indeed. Back at you with that, with my book recommendation which would be the only book that that was written about the Ampeg company. And you could see pictures of the amplified peg and you can read about his very beginnings where he was a kind of a vaudeville jazz bass player. There's a picture of him with a motorized bass that would go across the stage that had like lights flashing on it and some sort of wheels he could push or something like that. That sounds cool, but yeah, he figured out based. I mean if you look at the pictures it looks basically it's in a static JT 30 or some kind of inexpensive mic that he figured out a way to install inside the base on an extension of the inpin. And of course he figured out an electrical connection for that so that you could then have a cord that would run to an amp right away. An Ampeg quote unquote base amp, which are the very earliest amps that were designed for bass. And they don't really kick like something more modern, but they sound really cool at their volume and they're really undervalued. Kevin from Ohio has one or two of those that they're just like a combo and they're from 523 somewhere in there and they have a 15 usually at like a standel. They have kind of like a hi fi oriented amp in there where they're basically just trying to get the loudest clean sound that they can. And our friend in Norway of course Hit it. Guitar just doesn't go down there in those frequencies. And if you want to see what an amp looks like that's designed to handle low end, go look at some tube amps that were made for hi fi. Going way back into the 40s. You know you're going to see gigantic transformers that are on 20 watt amps. And that's because you need the big iron and the clean power to amplify the low notes. Those are the hardest ones to do. If you only wanted to play on the high E string, you could have a little tiny app and it would get real loud, right? So the development of, you know, the idea of electric bass absolutely pushed designers to make stuff that sounded as loud and clean as they could get, right? And ampegs were, I mean, the SVT was the king. I think that started in the late 60s. But even before that, the flip top ampegs designed by Jess Oliver. It was a tube amp, but it was also a sealed tuned cabinet. We've discussed this before. Fender amps until later on when they made the piggyback stuff, they were just a. A box with speakers in it. No back place to put the cord and your whiskey and that's it. You know, if you wanted to design some really nice Fender style cabinets pre piggyback, you wouldn't need any dimensions or drawings or anything. It's just some wood stuck together. But a flip top, now that is a tuned, ported, sealed enclosure. And that's what makes them thump out so much better for bass. So how about nowadays if you're making amps for bass as opposed to guitar, where everybody wants that distortion for guitar, you know, distortion is a huge part of the vocabulary of guitar. All that sustain and compression and fuzz and all that weird stuff that all started just by turning the dang thing up until it started sounding like that. But in the world of bass, most people want it just loud and clean. I mean, there's exceptions, people that played like fuzz bass and stuff. But it just required a big push for more power. And it didn't take long before Solid State pretty well took over in the bass world because of course it's so much lighter for the amount of of watts you can get. You know, you could have a 2, 3, 400 watt base amp that didn't weigh very much. Of course, don't get me to try to work on that. So.

[Jason]

You would, wouldn't you?

[Skip]

Solid state 400 watt base amp. Maybe if the guy lived next door, I don't know. So anyway, that was a Good. That was a good question.

[Jason]

Yeah. I'll include a link to the book. It's called the Bastard Instrument. A Cultural History of the Electric Bass by Brian Wright in the show.

[Skip]

Notes that that guy up in the Pacific Northwest may have made the first ones, right?

[Jason]

Tut Mark.

[Skip]

Yeah, but of course, yeah, it comes around to Leo. I mean, the first precision bass was pretty much why bass became a thing. And I don't think there's. I mean, there's. Of course there's going to be oddball exceptions of people who made stuff or electrifying the upright and all of that, but. But the P bass pretty much. Fender said it was because he wanted the bass player to be able to do the dance moves, you know, that were popular at the time, which you couldn't do if you had a big old upright. Totally something to keep. Something to think about.

[Jason]

I know. Okay, this next one is from Joel in Newburgh, Oregon. Have you been to Newburgh, Oregon? Yeah, yeah, sure. This is on the coasters in the middle.

[Skip]

Newburgh isn't. Oh, no, that's Roseburg. That's on the five. I don't know where Newburgh is.

[Jason]

Okay. This is another adorable lamp. Much like the Marshall Capri we were just talking about earlier at Emerald City Guitars. A Taisco Melody amp. Thanks as always for the entertaining podcast, Skip. I've been putting a few hours into a Tysco Melody amp that a friend picked up at Goodwill for 20 bucks. I'm stumped getting it into working order. This thing is really neat. Cosmetically. It's super lightweight. It has a little 6 inch speaker. I patched up some speakers in the cone and the red covering is in great shape. It's not very complex. It has a preamp tube and a power tube. I was feeling pretty impressed with myself that I recognized that it didn't have a power transformer and might be dangerous. So I added an isolation transformer. The circuit board had a number of loose wires which I soldered back into place and put in a 12 au 6 tube which was missing on power up. The guitar tone was sweet, but there was an overwhelming hum. My first thought was to replace a couple of capacitors, two electrolytic electrolytic filtering caps and one in the preamp, which did nothing for the hum, but somehow got rid of the guitar signal. I replaced the 5oC5 power tube, thinking that the original might be bad. No luck. Even though there aren't that many components, I want to avoid randomly replacing everything. There's a big green resistor that's vertically placed on the circuit board that gets really hot. I think it's to drop the voltage from the wall to a manageable voltage in the circuit. My guess is that it's supposed to get really hot as it's doing its job. Is that likely the culprit for the hum? Why don't I stop there? And then he has some questions about the isolation transformer.

[Skip]

There's a lot to unpack there, but we can start. We could rephrase this thing which is I found this old junk amp. I don't really know what I'm doing but I tried to fix it up and now it doesn't work. Yeah, I mean that's basically it. And Tycos are Japanese early. They go back into the late 50s. One thing we know is that their coupling capacitors are something that I generally wouldn't even test. And they just used a type that are bad. We've talked about the ones in Gibson amps and even in Macintosh stuff. Even here. There were in America, I mean there were companies that convinced all the bigs to use this.05 at 400 volt. And now after 40 or years or so we know that they're almost all bad. And those ones in the Japanese made amps say oil filled or oil on them and they're just bad. So I would suggest if you had an older Japanese amp like that, the first thing to do would be to replace all of those. Now the super hot resistor, if it's a great big resistor, it's big because it has to dissipate a lot of heat. And it's not surprising that a great big resistor should get hot like a cathode resistor on a power tube that's a cathode biased amp. That Cathode resistor is 5 watts or 10 watts. They get hot. Whether that's the problem of the amp. Why don't you measure that resistor and see if it's the right ohms? Still that's about. That's something you can do with any resistor. Then why does it hum? I think he said he replaced the filter caps. Maybe you did it wrong. A classic is the arrow points to the negative end of a lot of modern filter capacitors. And you'd be surprised how many people put them in backwards because they figure oh, the arrow goes to the plus. But no it doesn't. And I don't know what else to say. That is a no power transformer amp and 50C5 is the power tube. Usually 35W4 for the rectifier. They can be fixed. They never sound fantastic. They can sound okay. And if you keep after it, you can get it to work. And a lot of people would buy that amp for 20 bucks, and they just take all that junk out of it and make a little champ, you know, and use the cool red Tolex little box to build something better in. Yeah, you guys know I built that. Built that tweed Vibrlux for James Patrick Regan. And I built it in an old acoustic combo from the 70s. And so it looks really old and cool instead of just like something that you bought brand new. And it is possible to do stuff like that with this. Kaisco. I would say to the listener, don't do that right off the bat. Keep working on it. Let your knowledge base expand a little bit. Read the section on those type of amps and jackdaw, start measuring some voltages. It's not a value thing. I. If you're having problems, there'd be nothing wrong with replacing all the capacitors right now. If it's a Tweed Deluxe, you should be lined up and shot. But on that thing, there's only, like, there's not that many parts in it. And you could replace all the capacitors as just a troubleshooting technique in this case. So some of them can sound really good. The slightly bigger ones. Like, there's some with a 6v6 or an EL84 that aren't the no power transformer ones. And they can sound pretty darn good if they're fixed up. So this thing would definitely work, and it shouldn't have a big, loud hum. And don't be discouraged that you can't figure it out because you don't know what you're doing yet there. And don't send me the chassis. Well, you could send me the chassis, but. Tim Foster, listener. Tim Foster, Sacramento. Great musician. Been in, like, garage bands forever. The Losing Streaks. That's a cool name for that. He got one called a T, a K Tact, and somehow I managed to fix it. I remember it really stumped me some aspects of how it worked. But he loves that thing, and he's been playing music all his life. He has all sorts of Fenders and everything. So sometimes you find an older amp like that that you don't just want to gut right off the bat.

[Jason]

That's cool.

[Skip]

And hi to Tim Foster.

[Jason]

Yeah, he's a jerk.

[Skip]

He was a journalist kind of guy. Remember, he put out a downtown Sacramento newspaper for many years. He and his wife were like the. The brains behind it.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

You already know him.

[Jason]

Yeah, yeah. Joel wants to continue, though you did address most of his issues. But he says also the. For the isolation transformer, I'm wondering about how to ground the circuit. The amp has a two pronged cord before, but the isolation transformer has wiring for a ground connection. On the primary side of the new isolation transformer, there's a green ground wire that I ran to the ground on the new three prong cord. On the secondary side, there are two red wires for the isolated signal. There's also a white wire for on the secondary that I connected to the chassis. I guess what I'm wondering is what is that white wire on the secondary? And do I need to be concerned with grounding the chassis when adding an isolation transformer to this kind of amplifier? I've made several working amps, but I'm dealing with some problems I don't get.

[Skip]

Well, this is a good one. First, those amps and billions like it. Dan Electro made gajillions of them. That's basically the amp that's in a Dan Electro Silvertone amp in case where there's a guitar case with a little tiny amp in it.

[Jason]

Okay.

[Skip]

It's basically that amp. Did anyone have an isolation transformer back then? No. No one did. No one, right? No one. And yet they sold tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of those amps. So A, you don't need an isolation transformer. B, because I never do it, I don't really know what you're supposed to do with that wire. C, I can tell you you can't hook anything to the chassis of an AC DC type power, no power transformer amp, nothing should touch the chassis. That's the whole thing is part of the chassis has voltage on it. So you can't just ground the chassis. So I wonder if that has something to do with the gigantic hum. The thought don't ground the chassis on those amps. And then this is such a popular Internet deal that there's tons of guys who've been bought and gals who've been buying these amps because they're still cheap. Even from a music store. An amp like this might still be a hundred dollars or $150 or something. So they're buying these up because they're cheap. And then they realize that they can eliminate the inherent shock hazard of this type of amp by adding an isolation transformer between the amp and the wall. So I would imagine that there's several super boring YouTube tutorials where guys gals show you how to do that. Go watch that. Or just remember that no one had an isolation transformer ever. And so why do you need one? That reminds me of the guy. I fixed his Tweed Deluxe, shipped it to him, and he said it wasn't dark, it wasn't bright enough. Tweed Deluxe's get pretty bright. And there was a few calls back and forth and he was kind of like getting all worked up about it. And finally I figured out that he had read online that you always have to have the volume control of the channel you're not using turned up. So Tweed Deluxe has instrument volume, microphone volume, and a tone control. And if you turn the microphone volume up when you're not using, rolls off the highs, it changes the sound. But Neil Young did it once and so everybody thinks you're supposed. I finally figured, finally. I remember I was on the phone with the guy, I go, you did what? Your volume. What? I said, no, no, no, no. Turn the mic volume off. Turn the tone control up all the way. Now plug into this input, turn to my. Turn the volume up. And of course it was, you know, breaking glass, bright. Sometimes these misconceptions, you know. Got to explore this stuff a little bit before you just follow along. No one had a isolation transformer, and none of those kids who bought those guitars from Sears catalog are dead because of it. So how about that?

[Jason]

They're dead for other reasons.

[Skip]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Jason]

Joel ends with. For a tip, I've heard you mention how valuable ESR checkers are. I found online that multifunction testers are pretty cheap, about $20 and include ES, our measurements. I'm pretty sure they run by magic because you essentially plug any component into them and it tells you the type of component and its value. It's been especially helpful for my big bag of random capacitors with writing too small to read. Have you seen these? Thanks for everything, Joel.

[Skip]

Yes, some stuff has gotten super inexpensive. Yeah, I have my 20202005 price guide when Silver Face champs were 125 to 175 in the price guide. But other stuff is like dirt cheap. When I started getting ESR checkers from the great Earl Yarrow, they were close to $200. And the one I used most lately is the Capacitor Wizard. And I'm pretty sure they're at least 150. But the there are little dinky things that you can get for dirt cheap that are made in faraway countries that do all sorts of amazing stuff. My beef would be that I'd step on it and break it. And remember, with the ESR check, if it won't. If a capacitor won't pass the ESR check, you might as well just wing it. Now if the capacitor does pass the ESR check, in the case of say an electrolytic, you variac that thing up or reform it and it may well work. It doesn't guarantee that the cap is good, but it will help you weed out caps that are bad. And as always on test equipment, don't use your new piece of test equipment to fix an amp. When you get a new piece of test equipment, you get a bunch of known parts and you start measuring them. If you put your new ESR checker on a brand new F and T electrolytic and it says it's bad, you gotta throw it away. No, you're not using the tool right, Dig. So always check stuff that you know with your new piece of test equipment. I mean, you're going to get your first voltmeter or multimeter. First thing you should do is start measuring stuff that you know. Right? I always tell people for DC voltage if you've never measured it before, or how about a 9 volt battery? You know, if you can't get your meter to show 9.6 VDC, then you're not doing it right. You got to got it in the wrong button or you're not pushing the thing right. So you get your resistance out or you get your, your, your meter out to measure resistance. Why don't you measure a brand new pickup or a potentiometer that you bought that says 500k right on it and make sure that you're getting meaningful readings. Because test equipment can lie to you. Mine, mine does all the time, but I know when it's lying to me, so. So it's just a little test equipment, sort of sidelight, you know? Yeah. I feel I pity the guy who buys an oscilloscope and then wants to use that to figure out what's wrong with his amp. Because you got some learning curve in there to, to even understand what you're doing with something as sophisticated as an oscilloscope. So start with something simple like voltage resistance, ac, dc and when you want to see how to measure AC voltage, try to put your meter on AC voltage and stick those prongs into the wall socket. It better say 120 or 125 or you're doing something wrong. So, all right, there we go. I got in a test equipment rant there.

[Jason]

You really did you can send questions for Skip that'll get him ranting about something by being a part of the show. Podcast fretboardjournal.com all right, we'll do two more and this first one is from frequent contributor Bob.

[D]

Hi, Skip and Jason. It's Bob in Boulder County, Colorado. Just listen to the last episode with a question about channel jumping and I wanted to comment. I know Skip knows this, he just forgot to mention it. But I'm pretty sure on a black panel Fender, the reverb channel will not be in phase with the normal channel. So you might get some cancellation of bass frequencies and kind of a weak sound if you do jump the channels in a black panel Fender. Also, I wanted to share my experience with yellowjacket tube converters which are available from the great amplified parts, which will turn a fixed biased amp into a cathode biased amp, allowing the use of EL84 power tubes in a slot where A6L6 might go. I did try this on a pro reverb and I found that it wasn't really inspiring, although it did allow me to get a little more crunch at the same volume. But I did try it in my silver panel master volume twin reverb. And they tell you in the instructions to put the yellow jacket tube converters in the inner two sockets of the amp and quote unquote from their instruction manual. This will give you a combination of class A tryout and class ab pentode operation. A very cool responsive sound. And I actually did find that with.

[Skip]

The.

[D]

Main volume control dimed and using the master volume as a volume, I did find that the distortion was, I would say, more pleasing and usable. Finally, I'd like to see if I can reignite some interest to have a Denver area kegger get together. I know you've got the fretboard summit coming up, so I'm sure it's kind of low on the priority list for this time period, but maybe we can get something going in the fall. I think that would be great. As always, appreciate so much what you guys do. It is a great service to the community. Thanks for everything.

[Skip]

Guys. Got the cool DJ voice he does. Denver. Yeah. I don't know, maybe there'll be some way you need to drive around in your town with a little sign that says T A V A. Just. I mean, you think about it, there probably are like minded types in a big city couple at least, right?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

So there was some stuff there. I think I was going to start ranting again. Oh yeah. So the whole thing is that you can't use a cable to go from one channel to the. We know about taking a cable and sticking it in a two channel amp so that when you play the guitar, your signal is basically going into both of the channels at once and you can turn them up. And some people find some sonic thing going on there that they like. I think an A B box is way, way better. But anyway. And Internet types will point out that because there's fewer stages in one of the preamps channels than in the other, if you combine them, they'll be out of phase with each other, which means that you lose base. But I don't think you should just assume that and not try it. For one thing, we know that the reason why there's two channels and four inputs on an old Fender amp is because Fender thought people were going to all plug into that thing at one time. So most of the time, I don't think you'd find any phase issues to just be a make it or break it thing. But try it. If it sounds good to you, fine. And if it doesn't, don't do it. So I wouldn't. I wouldn't worry about it. If you're just taking your guitar signal and putting it into both channels, I don't really think you get that much extra tonal variation. What gives you extra tonal variation is having your guitar go into a splitter of some kind where you can have it go through pedals and into one channel and then not through pedals and into another channel and give you some different tones and switching capabilities that you wouldn't have otherwise. Does that make sense? So you don't have to jumper the channels of any amp to get a good sound. You don't have to turn up the volume of a Tweed Deluxe on the channel you're not using. Just pretend you've never had the thing, never read the Internet, and just hook it up and see what you think. Was that. So that was the first thing. What was the second thing? Winter three.

[Jason]

Well, you could buy this stuff from amplified parts.

[Skip]

What? What stuff?

[Jason]

You could buy the jumper thing.

[Skip]

No, he was. We're worthless. Good thing. Good thing we're winding this up. No, for that listener, I say listen to this and then re. Ask us the part I didn't talk about because both of us are too dippy. We need. We need more coffee.

[Jason]

Sorry. All right, we'll do one more. Oh, speaking. This is about a trainer. Speaking about Canada listener, Dane up here in Seattle, Washington, did get that sound master on ebay. That we talked about on the last.

[Skip]

Episode, the 600, the one that appeared to be for running off of the car battery.

[Jason]

The one that was on ebay. It was like 280 bucks. It was really rusted, pitted. Was that a car battery one? How's that one?

[Skip]

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Kevin spotted that real early.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

But if you see if you got a tube amp with two big gigantic wires with alligator clips coming out the back.

[Jason]

Oh yeah.

[Skip]

You know those are the ones that are made to having your ice cream truck. Right. So getting those to. I've never seen one of those. Style master style. Most of the American made PAs that have the ability to run on a car battery also have the ability to run wall voltage. But I don't know about that Sound master. You'd have to know what you're doing and check out the power transformer and the circuitry. It may be that you'd have to run it off of your car battery or some sort of separate power supply. Yeah, that stuff's pretty rare.

[Jason]

Be fun having to run your car while you play a gig.

[Skip]

An old fashioned car battery I don't think would run a tube amp for very long. Now we've got these newfangled battery setups that would. As we know they make them now that'll run your silver face champ for several hours off of a little ammo can sized battery. So they are kind of limited, but it is Soundmaster. You could always change the power transformer to something that was made to run on wall voltage if you wanted. Yeah, I Bet It's a single 807 too, right?

[Jason]

I'm not looking at it. I don't know it.

[Skip]

Well, that was another reason why nobody we knew was willing to bite on it because the pictures were terrible and you could. I don't think there were any pictures under the lid.

[Jason]

Yeah, no, the tubes are there.

[Skip]

You couldn't really see too much. Oh, the tubes are there.

[Jason]

Yeah, yeah.

[Skip]

Another sign of that is a 6 volt rectifier 6x5 is popular instead of a 5 by 3 because they wanted as many tubes as possible to be able to heat it. Be heated directly off the battery power. Makes sense.

[Jason]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Skip]

There was a magazine back in the 70s and it was a guitar player magazine. In fact it was called guitar player and sign of the times. That thing used to have not Fretboard Journal. Never had the photography, but it would have a far more diversified group of interests represented than you would ever see in anything except Fretford Journal. These days. And they put out a book which I'm sure I've recommended back in the old days. It's called the Guitar Player Book. But really all it is is. Is reprinted articles from Guitar Player. But back then there'd be three or four pages with Tommy Tedesco, Freddie King, Leo Kotke, Brian May, Monk Montgomery, Wes Montgomery, Curly Chalker as a steel player. Right. Chet Atkins, George Benson. And if you can find an old copy of that book, you can. You can hear the older guys when they were still really sharp. Keith Richards talking about how Nick Jagger could really play the guitar. But what he didn't know yet was how to get a good sound off the amp at the gig. And if he. If he'd start to play and if it didn't sound right to him, he couldn't. He didn't have the knowledge to get over there and mess with it to get it to work. Right. And that's something that a lot of people I know have that problem. They stay at home, they learn the song, they go to the jam, and they just go poof. Because everything's different, you know? And those articles are worthwhile and you don't have to have a million years of back issues. That book, Andy Summers, Tommy Tedesco, three or four pages of him talking about. Well, he was a character for sure. So if you can find a copy of that book, they all tend to fall apart. The ship, the. The binding on him was often really poor, but it's a whole different thing. Roy Buchanan. Right. Where are you going? To ever read anything about Elvin Bishop and then Norman Blake? I'm reading from the contents of the book here, which is sitting out in front of me. And that's what we love about Fretboard Journal. Is that a. One thing is that it's not such a small. Merle Travis and T. Bone Walker. Right? Come on now. But most of the modern stuff is just such a narrow bag that. That just makes it not. Not so fun. Yeah. So there's a little book. Little book recommendation.

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

Carol K. Carol Kay. Are you going to read about her? Right. A lot of our heroes. So. All right. Did we do it?

[Jason]

No, we got one more.

[Skip]

I'm ready.

[Jason]

All right. This the trainer. The trainer that got me to talk about Canada and the sound master. Okay, trainer. YGM3. Please, everybody, send us questions, send us comments, send us family recipes. If you need relationship advice. Whatever you need. Skip and I have you covered. Podcast fretboardjournal.com we'll review your resume. What Whatever you need.

[Skip]

We'll.

[Jason]

We'll be great here. Okay, here is our last question on the trainer.

[E]

Hey, Skip and Jason, it's John from Riverside. Really loved the discussion with Jim on the last episode. And it's inspired me to get a smaller amp because I've been besotted with these beautiful, large, heavy, silver face Fenders all my life. Pro reverbs and. And the like. And I've been interested in getting a trainer ygm3 combo, 112 combo. I think it's like 20 watts or something like that. And I was wondering if it would be kind of similar in terms of sound, analogous to a deluxe reverb or a Princeton reverb. I know they have EL34s, so it probably has a British sound, but I want to hear your opinion on that also. I wouldn't be a good Allman Brothers fan if I didn't also mention.

[Skip]

Some.

[E]

Tidbits, facts, history about the Fillmore east album. You guys mentioned the Fender PS400 gargantuan bass amp, and that was the amp that Barry Oakley uses on that album. So, yeah, thanks, guys.

[Skip]

That's some good Allman Brothers knowledge. Yeah, I bet that thing sounded good until it blew up, right?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Skip]

In the Ampeg book, there's the story of them taking all these Ampegs to the Rolling Stones, who decided that they were going to tour the US With Ampeg stuff, and they immediately started blowing them up. And that must be. That must have been rough to be the representative, you know, engineer guy from. From Ampeg, and standing there in front of the Stones rehearsing and seeing smoke pouring out of all these early SVTs and stuff like, oh, that's a bad day. Well, there's some stuff in there. There was a couple of. What was the first. There was a couple Whoppers in there. What was the first part?

[Jason]

Well, he's thinking, because he listened to Jim Campolongo about buying a trainer ygm 3. I've owned this amp. I wouldn't say it's a small amp.

[Skip]

Yeah. Okay. So I think, okay, first, Trainers. Extreme high quality and very undervalued for starters. Now, I only go up into the 70s because trainers from the 80s and 90s and 2000s, you know, went the way of everything else. Printed circuit boards. But older tube trainers are exceedingly well made. They give Leo a run for serviceability and quality parts. The 20 watt ones use two EL84s and they generally are called. I don't know the number, but it's like the guitar mate. The Studio mate, guitar mate reverb. I think the YGM3 thing is a 2El34amp, which is more like a 40 watt amp. Loud. Right. So we got to distinguish there also. Or EL34s don't make any amp sound more British. Okay. That's just one little part of the stew, not the whole stew. Right. You can put EL34s in your twin reverb. It's not going to make it sound like a Marshall, so forget that part. So figure I. I think what this guy wants is a smaller one with two eel 84s. Those are the ones that are 1820 watts.

[Jason]

Isn't that the YGM3?

[Skip]

I don't know.

[Jason]

I think it is.

[Skip]

Okay, well make sure it's the two EL84s. If you're trying to get a small ramp. They're also really loud. And one reason why they haven't really gone, they don't really hold, they're not as expensive, is because they're large. You know, if they had made a little head or something like more compact, they sound fantastic. Because of the big cabinet, most of them have a sealed cabinet, not open back, where the amp sits in a little compartment at the top. But the speaker is completely sealed and that adds a lot of bass. Also, for some reason they made those amps just ridiculously bright. And almost everyone I've ever seen, I've done a thing or two to help with that. Some of them have a bright switch that's on all the time. That's a very big value. So it makes it like kind of like certain marshalls from the 70s and 80s. It makes that channel just as soon as you crack it on, it's just insanely bright. Also, a lot of them have a presence control that's on 10 all the time. So you circuit fans know that that's in the inverse feedback. And they basically took a capacitor and placed it in the circuit to make the amp even more bright. So when you turn the treble up on one of those things, I can't even imagine what it would do with a Fender. So it's just crazy bright. But they are really, really high quality and they are really great value. I think the guitar mates the small ones barely a thousand bucks, like a Vibro Champ or something like that. And of course it's a lot more amp than some little 5 watt thing. If you play in a band, you know, those things are definitely loud enough to play in the band. So yes, on trainers, no on shipping from Canada, but they're they're fantastic values. Second mention of Tom Gunterman. He has a bunch of trainers that he got heads reverb unit combos. And they're all really affordable and really well made. So if you don't mind the size or if you're the kind of guy that wants to make your own little trainer head out of a combo, then forge ahead. They're. They're super undervalued. If they made more small amps, they probably be a lot more known. They never really made like a Princeton reverb. Oh. Sonically, they're not really like a Fender. They use a Baxendal tone control. They. They sound similar in a clean way, but they don't really distort the same. But they sound great. They sound great. There's one with four, eight. It's one of the. I think that's the studio mate. And that's a really interesting sound. A lot of low end, that's for sure. So definitely qualifies as one of my favorite amps that isn't overvalued, which is. But actually undervalued, especially when you look at the quality of the components of that thing.

[Jason]

Yeah, perfect.

[Skip]

There we go.

[Jason]

Okay, Skip, we did it.

[Skip]

Good thing. I got a question where I could sound smart at the end, and I'm kind of flailing there. Dave Britton in Nashville. Mr. Standel, I'll be reaching out to you again. Thinking about sending out a transitional Standel amp to him and have him fix it. So share the love. Yeah. And I'll say hi to Bill tomorrow.

[Jason]

Yeah. Take pictures of that. Or have him take pictures of that since I know you don't like taking pictures, but that'd be fun. Have them all the Standells lined up on the side of the road.

[Skip]

Well, it's good. We're. We're geeks, so it's just going to be chassis in general, which are pretty, pretty dry. But at some point, you know, the idea is not to just hoard that information but to, you know, to add to the canon, so to speak. We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna do it. And I could have never done it without him or Louis Garcia, guitar Pig, because he's pushing us to take pictures and take notes and draw schematics and stuff like that. So hopefully we'll end up knowing a little bit more about these amps than we did before.

[Jason]

I love it.

[Skip]

And thanks to all our sponsors and all the people who've come by and picked up their stuff. We need more people to come by and get a project. My barn is filled with projects. Bring a hundred bucks or two. Come on by sometime if you need mixers.

[Jason]

Yeah, yeah. Good field trip.

[Skip]

Yes. I'm not, like, I don't entertain, but I'm home in the day, and if somebody, you know, you wouldn't be putting me out by saying, I want a PA head. I would say, well, here, this one's 200 bucks. And like that. Right. Or whatever.

[Jason]

Fun day. And then you could go have pizza from the place. That won't sell you dough.

[Skip]

No, I'd be going, but I'd, you know, go back to work at the end of it.

[Jason]

No, they would be whoever's buying it. Yes, they would kick them out, but. Yeah.

[Skip]

Yes, absolutely. Yes. They could have some shiner, Bach on tap and a big salad at, like, one in the afternoon. That's beautiful. So. So. So I'll be here. Thanks to everyone and thanks to you, Jason.

[Jason]

No, thank you.

[Skip]

All right, we'll talk again soon.