Recent content by Tommy_G

That's what happens to my amps when my power tubes are biased too cold and or is malfunctioning. Give exact details of the power tubes you have in it. Brand, color, hardness or current rating, etc., any details you can find. If there is nothing, you may want to find yourself a set of Mesa...

I don't use my Nomad much since I discovered how great my heartbreaker sounds with EL34's, but....one day I will trade my Nomad 100 (overkill) for a Nomad 55, and mod it. Its got a lot of potential and I'm pretty sure that with some small circuit tweaks I could get it to where I'd like it more...

I never buy combo amps for this reason. If the JBL's sound steller, pull the amp and put it in a head cab, and refinish the empty spot with a nice piece of wood where the amp dial face used to be. Two 50 pound loads is better than (1) 100 pound load.

Chasing tone can be an expensive habit. You have to first define your need. I came from the 80's school of hair metal, and that is the tone in my head and shaped a lot of my technique...but.... I play in one of the top bands in my area, and we play classic rock, country, a smidgen of blues...

I have a closed back diagonal 2x12 and 4x12. Its not with rectifer tones, but with classic tones. You can get the tone in your head a lot cheaper with the diagonal 2x12. Part of the quest for tone is finding out what speakers you love the most and which one's mike up the best for what you're...

two other things to check into are: Some pickups are 'unpotted' with wax and are microphonic. Also, if there is a defect in a string where it's weight is not near perfectly uniform along the length of it, there develop disharmonic frequencies along with the fundamental, and those would be more...

a vintage Raytheon long black plate in the first stage, and vintage RCA short greyplate in the second position. Prior to that, I had those tubes reversed, and found the RCA short greyplate was clipping very unmusically - sounding a lot like what you describe. Just swapped the two tubes around...

Another thing to watch out for, particularly if you have little kids, is they will hide their toys in the back of the amp, and fridge magnets, all kinds of stuff that can cause great greif. Not to mention poking holes through grill cloths and speaker cones, denting in dust caps, etc.

Some preamp tubes definately do not respond gracefully in Fender style preamp circuits (eg like the Lonestar)...I had a similar thing and replaced the preamp tube with something very different, and the problem was gone.

Some of the things mentioned above bring back memories. With my very first amp, when I was a teen, I was getting this raunchy distortion tone, but the clean was buzzing. I found a hockey puck lodged between the speaker and the speaker frame.

Gigged this weekend with these settings for my country tones....well, had to roll the bass up to noon. Preferred the low gain setting and the preamp gain dimed over the Mk1 channel, otherwise everything else the same. (Had a hotter output active pickup guitar, so the Mk1 channel was overkill)...

1) Microphonic tube? Tap on your preamp tubes with a pencil and see if noise from the tapping comes through the speaker. (of course everything needs to be on, and channel and master volumes at appropriate levels 2) There's a manufacturing defect that occassionally shows up in speakers that...

I've been playing around endlessly with the Mk1 Boost channel since I started trying to find that elusive but famous Mk1 "Liquid Lead" violin tone. (The Express 5:50 Plus in Class A 20W mode gets it rather easily, BTW) What I found along the way was a great set of country 'chicken pickin'...

A lot of what I've read indicates that the power tubes need pushed quite a bit to get that greasy liquid violin thing going. I'll give er a whirl with 6v6's one of these days.

I mostly use the Brit channel on the Heartbreaker, and I've got it dialed in so that it rocks. The Fender low gain channel is easy to dial in for a crisp clean tone (classic country lead tones with gain about 4:00 and treble at 2:30! Awesome with tele's). Recently a friend of mine bought an...