Bottlehead guitar amp

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Bottlehead guitar amp

Postby EWBrown » Thu Jun 07, 2012 8:03 pm

Doc B has a new small SEP guitar amp, uses an EF86 and an EL84 (yikes, Doc uses pentodes ?!?!?!?) Somewhat "unconventional" circuitry.

Calls it the" Tode".

OK, I'm a little "thick" sometimes. PENTODE....

Image

No standard volume or tone control, he decided that using the guitar'svolumr, pickup and tone controls were better than putting them in the amp. In their place, there is a "scoop", feedback and "brake" (output pad) controls. Combine that with the guitar's controls, the possibilities become nearly endless [:)

The red glow on the speaker cone is from an LED pilot light mounted in the center of the front panel, aimed at the speaker.


Small unit, the speaker is an 8 inch Weber,.


Sounds pretty good! At least they used good quality recording gear, which, in itself, is rather unusual for a YouTube production.

Three good sounding, and high quality video demos:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTlAMKeg ... detailpage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iokiqln ... ure=relmfu


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DS6xu40 ... ure=relmfu


/ed B
Last edited by EWBrown on Sun Jul 22, 2012 10:16 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Postby Geek » Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:49 pm

HiFi people getting into guitar amps has a 99.9% failure rate. Maybe Doc can pull it off?

Cheers!
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Postby Doc B. » Fri Jun 08, 2012 8:23 pm

Actually the amp has a form of tone control - two different mid-scoop filters. And you have two ways of adjusting level - an adjustable brake that you can turn all the way down to silence and a feedback adjustment that will vary the gain about 20dB as you increase and decrease the feedback control to vary how dirty or clean the amp can play. We put up a third demo video today, that shows the Tode being used at a clean setting with an acoustic electric that has no volume control of its own.
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Postby Geek » Fri Jun 08, 2012 9:04 pm

Wish you the best on this, Doc! :))
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Postby EWBrown » Sat Jun 09, 2012 1:10 pm

I added the third demo to my earlier posting.

It does sound very good, and this is one of the very best quality "YouTube" sound recordings I've ever heard [:) (love)


Took me a bit to figure out what "EMish" and "EFish" stood for ;) (lol)

If my rather meager guitar playing ability really justified it, I'd buy one in a heartbeat! My ability is about what appears around 3:22 on the second demo video. Basic 4/4, 12-bar rockabilly stuff :))

/ed B
Last edited by EWBrown on Sun Jul 22, 2012 10:30 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby Hotsauce » Sat Jun 09, 2012 4:41 pm

I think if there was a head only kit I'd consider it.

I wonder if the headphone jack could feed another amp so you could use it as a pedal?

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Postby Doc B. » Fri Jun 15, 2012 2:42 pm

EWBrown wrote:
It does sound very good, and this is one of the very best quality "YouTube" sound recordings I've ever heard [:) (love)

/ed B


Wow, thank you, Ed. We kinda goofed on the first videos in putting the room mic a little too far away to get the dialogue up where we needed it to be. So I had to do a little touch up with the mix - just a bit of NR on that channel and a bit of panning. But no compression, limiting or EQ, I wanted the audio to sound just as the guitar amp mic was picking it up. By the time we did Mino's video we had that sorted out. Hopefully we won't shoot ourselves in the foot by having audio tracks with a fairly wide dynamic range. Most guitar amp demos on youtube are really pegging the old meters.

Re a head amp version - the headphone jack and external cab jack on the back are controllable for output level and the amp itself is very quiet. It's also really small, only about 14" x 14" x 4". So it's more or less head amp sized. It could run an external cab, be used as a head, and even be used as a DI, I think. Hmm, we may have to try a demo video like that...
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Postby EWBrown » Thu Aug 02, 2012 5:11 pm

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