First post

[yowza]

Hello all,

I've been a musician and guitar instructor most of my adult life and after playing amps for years I was seriously bitten by the amp building bug about a year ago so I ordered a Matchless Lightning clone kit from Ceriatone which I built and put in a Gabi kits head cab. I had a blast and learned so much and I'm totally hooked now, I wish I had started doing this years ago. I really want to understand the theory behind what's going on so I'm learning about electronics and trying to put it all together. Now that my workshop is done I'm ready to dive in and build another amp as well as mod and tweak the amps I have so I'm sure I'll have questions for you all. I joined this forum a while ago and have been hanging around lurking, soaking up as much info as I can on amps in general and Trainwrecks and Dumbles in particular and I'd love to build one of each so I will rely on all of your input when I get around to that.

One interesting amp that I own is a 70's Fender Twin that I sent to Paul Rivera back in the 80's and he rebuilt it to be a channel switching amp based on his Fender tenure II series circuit. Here's a thread that I started on TGP a while back if anyone is interested:

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showth ... p?t=792641

I do have a couple of questions for you all:

The Ceriatone Lightning I built has too much bass for my taste so I'd like to tweak that some. The layout diagram is here: http://ceriatoneforum.com/index.php?topic=16.0

Where is a good place to start to tame the bass on this amp? Tone caps, coupling caps? I've thought about putting a mid pot in the amp, would that help? Also since this amp is a Vox variant it's already got some similarities to a TrainWreck Rocket. Are there things I can tweak in this circuit to make it more Rocket like?

If I wanted to build a Dumble clone, is there any consensus on the best way to do this. Which D circuit to use? I've seen one website that sells D clone circuit boards- is this the way to go? Is it easy enough to source the iron and parts, etc? Maybe this question is best for the Dumble section of the Forum.

I'd love to map out the circuit for the Rivera modded Fender mentioned above. Any recommendations on the best way to do this? Like I said it is based on the Fender Twin II circuit so I guess I could start there. I've looked at the Twin II schematic and major sections of the circuit look the same as my amp.
Any suggestions on a way to go about this would be very helpful.

Best regards and thanks to you all!

Ed

[Andy Le Blanc]

Welcome...

[Structo]

Welcome Ed,

Somebody that has a Lightening or other Matchless may weigh in, but if it were me I would probably start with a lower bypass cap on V2.
You have a 25uf there now, maybe try a 10uf or 5uf .
Then if there is still too much bass you can mess with the coupling caps.

Do you like that Master Volume?

I tried that cross line type before and didn't care for it.

[Structo]

Double weird debug glitch.

[yowza]

Somebody that has a Lightening or other Matchless may weigh in, but if it were me I would probably start with a lower bypass cap on V2.
You have a 25uf there now, maybe try a 10uf or 5uf .
Then if there is still too much bass you can mess with the coupling caps.

Do you like that Master Volume?

I tried that cross line type before and didn't care for it.

Structo,

This is just the type of feedback I'm looking for. I need to get some lower value bypass caps to try that. I figured some cap values might be too high and letting too much bass through.

You know it's funny you mention the master volume because I'm not sold on it so what other ways could I hook that up? This is exactly the type of thing I want to learn so please point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

[yowza]

Edited: Snip

Sorry for the double post, there was a weird glitch when I posted but I couldn't figure out how to delete the whole message,

[M Fowler]

I built the Spitfire, Lightning and DC30 and one thing each of those amps have in common is they are very trebly not bass heavy?

Mark

[Structo]

On the amp I tried that MV on I ended up using what is called a back strap master volume.
There are quite a few master volume circuits out there.

Many like the post phase inverter MV.

It depends on the amp and how it reacts to the MV you choose whether or not you would like it.

There is the double bootstrap and single bootstrap MV.

You might want to try the single first just to see if you like the way it works.
Fewer parts to sub in.

Simply, you replace the input side 1M resistor on the phase inverter with a 1 Meg audio taper pot.

Here is a schematic of that and of the double boot strap MV..

[guitardude57]

My Spitfire has some strange tone issues too, mine is cranked to get much treble at all. Sounds good, but not very flexible in the tone control department.


The crossline MV can be LarMar MV, but Structo's ideas will work too

[yowza]

I built the Spitfire, Lightning and DC30 and one thing each of those amps have in common is they are very trebly not bass heavy?

Mark

Hmmm that's what I thought, it's supposed to be trebly but this one is bassy so I wonder what that could mean? Bad component somewhere?

The bass is better than it was before when I switched from a closed back one 12 inch cab to a two 10 inch open back cab but it's still pretty fat. for the record I mostly use lower output PAF style pickups. Maybe what I'm not nuts about is the fixed mid frequency on the amp like there is this whole portion of the spectrum I can't affect. I can turn the bass down but it seems to take out the mids too, that's why I was thinking about adding a mid pot. Also I forgot to mention that I am not using the 180pF brite cap on the master volume, I think it's 47 pF right now but I'm going to keep playing with that.

Thanks!

[Kregg]

Yowza, I'm currently building a Spitfire. I found this discussion helpful, https://tubeamparchive.com/viewtopic.ph ... t=spitfire

[Kregg]

Sorry, DEBUG ERROR CODE

[Kregg]

Sorry, DEBUG ERROR CODE

[Kregg]

Sorry, DEBUG ERROR CODE

[lumox0013]

I have built many a spitfire now each one sounds different because I use mostly donor amps for trannys but one thing I find effects all of them greatly is speaker selection. what type of speakers are you running?