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A friend at work who does a lot of guitar playing asked me the other day if it would be possible to just make the output section of a tube guitar amp. The reason he asked is that a lot of the effects boxes he has apparently cover the pre-amping and overdriving pretty well, but of course, they won't drive speakers. His question was also inspired by the Mesa Boogie 20-20 (http://www.mesaboogie.com/Product_Info/ ... tereo.html), which fits the bill nicely, but is kind of expensive.

It seems fairly straightforward to just feed the effects box to the output section of an EL-84 PP Amp. Would it make sense to have the input through an isolation/matching transformer? Other considerations?

thanks in advance,

david

Sure, lots of companies make them...Peavey, Mesa, etc.

They are simply referred to a tube power amps. They used to be more common in the big hair, big effects rack days. You could definitely build one of these based on the power amp of any good guitar (or even hi-fi) amp.

Until I finish my guitar amp (probably in a couple of weeks ) I'm playing through my ST 35 which, in a way, could be similar to the 20/20 ( 2 EL84 per channel) . I use a replica of an Ibanez TS808 that I built as a "preamp" and it sounds fantastic ( through speakers that are not even voiced for guitar ). This overdrive box is intended to be used along with tube amps (it will sound just nasty on solid state amps ) since it's based on MOS op amps . My point here is that your tone will depend on what you're gonna drive your amp with , obviously even a 20/20 will suck if driven with a $50 Danelectro OD .
SUSO