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I played a Victoria 35310 yesterday that kinda blew my mind. For whatever reason, I'd never messed with tweeds much before but now I'm super curious. Really nice cleans that aren't as glassy as a blackface, more punch, then capable of adding light grit all the way to fuller saturation. Awesome volume knob cleanup.

Anybody on here into em? Interested in other models I should check out...

1x15 Tweed Pro?

I haven't heard a tweed circuit i didn't like. I really want a cheap low watt 1x10 or maybe 1x12.

Yeah the small ones are pretty amazing—that low headroom gets some ridiculous cranked tones. It's funny because I actually have a vintage Gibson GA-6 that's like... a 58 or 59 I think. I forget that it's almost exactly the same as I believe a Tweed Deluxe, as Gibson and Fender were in such close competition back then circuit-wise. The cool thing about the Gibsons is that, despite being so similar electronically, they don't have nearly the legend attached to them, so you can get a GA-6 for like 500 bucks, when a Deluxe will be more like over $3K.

Mine's loud as fuck, but it's also crazy saturated... the volume is pretty much as loud as it's gonna get once you get to like 9 o' clock, and from then up it just adds gain. I've wondered if it'd clean up a little if I got it recapped, but I've been hesitant to do that because it's still got RCA blackplates in it and I don't wanna disturb any of the magic. It's great for recording...

The thing that attracted me to the 35 watt (I guess it's a Bandmaster?) is that it had a gorgeous clean tone before I got to the more broken up sounds. It was fucking LOUD too. Fun.

popvulture wrote:I forget that it's almost exactly the same as I believe a Tweed Deluxe, as Gibson and Fender were in such close competition back then circuit-wise.

A lot of those early amp circuits were just copied from the sample circuits provided by tube manufacturers.

Pretty sure that Victoria is a Bandmaster clone. J Mascis and "Who's Next" era Townsend. Very similar to the tweed Super and Pro, like entirely the same or close, except for speaker configuration. (Maybe output impedence, too?) Different animal from the Bandmaster heads. Nice stuff.

popvulture wrote: Mine's loud as fuck, but it's also crazy saturated... the volume is pretty much as loud as it's gonna get once you get to like 9 o' clock, and from then up it just adds gain. I've wondered if it'd clean up a little if I got it recapped, but I've been hesitant to do that because it's still got RCA blackplates in it and I don't wanna disturb any of the magic. It's great for recording...

Won't clean up much if at all.

None of that era's amps have headroom to speak of.

The lack of headroom is part of the appeal of these circuits for me, so I can get some grit without turning up too loud.

Yeah that was the really nice thing about the 35310—it did have a really excellent clean sound before the knob got into dirty territory. The one thing was that even at those lower clean settings, it was still loud as fuck. Really not too much of a bad thing, but definitely not a Saturday-afternoon-at-home kind of amp, unless you wanna drive everyone in the house away

So now I'm looking into building a tweed champ, because why not. I just pulled a power tranny outage of an old tube console radio my wife is turning into a wine cabinet. I think this thing is probably too big...working on mapping out the leads. I've got all figured out but one lead that doesn't seem to show continuity with anything...so I dunno if it's even any good.

Regardless of all that, I'll probably end up ordering parts to build one.

Part of the tweeds is underrated output transformers as much as anything else - you're pushing 'em hard.

If you're going to go through building a first one, just start with a stock one, then mod away like a maniac (and keep that pulled transformer for that or other project).

Here's another kind of tweed I like:

PERSONALLY:
1. EF86 Voxy amps
2. 20w+ tweed amps
3. Everything else

I love tweed style Amps so fucking much man, especially when they are a touch bigger so you can get a nice grindy "clean" going on.

*Edit: Grindy, not Grundy as quoted below

Ev_O))) wrote:PERSONALLY:
1. EF86 Voxy amps
2. 20w+ tweed amps
3. Everything else

I love tweed style Amps so fucking much man, especially when they are a touch bigger so you can get a nice Grundy "clean" going on.

Yeah man that clean I heard... ugh it was just so fucking goooood. It's haunting me right now. Ghost boner.

And Chank – nice... purple, of course. Do you own a Budda?

No, but I probably should, right?