MiddleEarthCrisis wrote:I know I'm a little late to the party but here's a site for the DIY angle:
https://taweber.powweb.com/store/kits.htmI think the 6M18 Head is based on the 18w Marshall. Definitely some good info and they have mod kits for just about everything.
I'd recommend sourcing your own components. As far as tubes go, for the price difference you might as we'll get the ones that come with the kit. They'll be fine for testing purposes/backups but once you get it up and running you'll probably want to replace them
Since those are Weber kits, I'm surprised there isn't an option to get an attenuator included with the kit.
this brings up a rant..
Really, I like old/vintage amps, but I think it's silly to try and replicate a vintage amp down to the exact output transformers, caps, rectifiers, etc. That's what the Germino amps do, and I'm not really interested in an amp that is part-for-part identical to a vintage amp.
I'd much rather take what works in the old designs and replace the rest with modern parts and modern design choices. Granted, some modern parts are cheap in mass production and therefore don't sound as good, but that's not always the case. Things like solid state rectifiers, 2 channels with switching, full EQ stack, effects loops, attenuators/voltage scaling of some sort, etc should all be in one amp (like my original request for an amp..) and sound good at a decent price point.
The only problem with wanting that is that either the amp is cheap and sounds fake (the Egnater I tested) or it is ridiculously expensive with those features (the Reinhardt version of the Marshall 18 head with voltage scaling is $1775) I realize that once you start demanding those features, it basically has to be handmade in small batches by an experienced amp tech, which drives the price up. Also, there's a lot less demand for these kinds of amps than there are for cheap-o solidstate crap, cheap cheap tube amps made in China, and there's probably even less demand for modern/updated do-it-all amps than there are for the vintage-a-like amps that Germino and other companies make.
I'll add on that the reason the overdriven/gain sound was found in tube amps was that the amps were too small for some venue and the guitar player had to turn it up. And he liked the sound. Guitar amps were originally designed to play to large crowds of people, and the progression up to a Marshall full stack was an attempt to keep scaling up the volume to be heard over a crowd, up until the point that PAs started to add to that. But my point is that most guitarists, myself included, are never going to play to a crowd that requires a Marshall full stack. I'd still like to get cranked Marshall full stack sound without using an emulator, that is, with actual tubes. So there has to be ways to scale down the wattage/volume of these amps and preserve some of that cranked sound.
That said, I tried a little Bugera V5 in the store yesterday and its distortion was laughable, especially since past noon on the gain knob it seemed to be trying to do the high-gain sound. But it just ended up sounding tiny and transistor-radio-y. I think that's because the speaker is too small to have any punch or dynamics at that size. Definitely glad I ended up with a mostly-clean amp with a 12" speaker. The Ampeg has punch even with the volume on 2 (read: 8 o'clock)
The master voltage in the 65amps, voltage scaling in the Reinhardt, and even amps that just come with a real attenuator (and not a couple series resistors like the Vox AC4 amps) are interesting because they at least let you control both the volume of the amp and the cranked sound that you're looking for. I know now that you're not going to get whisper-quiet volume with a cranked gain sound -- the tiny Bugera is testimony to that. But I don't think sticking an attenuator in an amp (or the more pleasant volume-scaling schemes) should be discounted as "killing tone" and left out of amps, if it means you can knock the volume down a 1/3 or whatever rather than try and attenuate the volume down to zero.
[/rant, just wanted to put that out there]
