Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

Tube amps. Last week on Craiglist I had an opportunity to make a trade for this tube amp that was retubed and rebuilt.

The amp came with a vintage Fender 12" speaker and a built cab. Once I got this home I plugged in my Gibson DC with p-90's. Man did the guitar sing like a charm. It was very simple with a drive circuit to run an additional pre amp through the circuit. I would guess this amp runs some where around 8-10 watts full power. A little more powerful than my 5 watt amp, but not close to the 18 watt I had. I took a few days to play around before making my recordings.

Basically this amp is very similar to the Hammond Organ Tube Amps, although not an organ amp, but very similar in structure. This amp was originally built in 56 (54 years old at the time of writing)

Follow up:

First I turned the gain to about 5 for a clean recording. There will be no super cleans with this amp, but the cleans handled very well. All these clips were recorded with Sennehiser E609, Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster, No effects.

http://burlapandblues.com/bluesblog/reviews/amp-cleanvol5.mp3

This would work well for cleans, but the volume was very low, more bedroom practice amp level. If you were to gig with this for cleans, plan on getting good mics.

Next, I turned the amp up just a little, to 8, This gave a little more boost to the volume, but added some tasty overdrive to the tone of the guitar. Still pretty much at bedroom level.

http://burlapandblues.com/bluesblog/reviews/amp-cleanvol8.mp3

Still pretty cool tone, but you would have to do some miccing to play live with this bad boy. O really dug that tone for some nifty rhythm work.

Before I flipped the gain switch, I turned the amp up to 10. Having the ability to turn an amp up to 10 an not be to loud was really neat. A few other amps I have, turning up to 10 starts to make things sound really sloppy, but this amp seems to do well with everything up to 10

http://burlapandblues.com/bluesblog/reviews/amp-cleanvol10.mp3

So, at this point, I turned the gain switch on and hooded up a BBE Boosta Grande to feed the amp a hotter signal. During this clip I turned up the Boosta about 20% each time. The master volume was at 7 during this clip. The clip ended with the Boosta Grande all the way up.

http://burlapandblues.com/bluesblog/reviews/amp-leadvol7boosta.mp3

Now with all those clips, I decided to see how things ran together playing a tune. I got a great backer up and set the Amp on gain and at 7, rolled the volume on the strat down a little and we took off...

http://burlapandblues.com/bluesblog/reviews/amp-composition.mp3

Great sustain on the notes was provided by this amp. There were really no concerns about the amp. This amp's tone goes for miles and miles. I could really get into playing this amp all day long. Pro's: Tone for weeks, CON's: Seems to be somewhat scary when you look at how this put together. I have felt I need to take a few extra safety precautions when playing. I am going to build something to ensure that I don't accidentally shock myself... But the tone is really killer!