Amp reccomendation

[galtjunk]

I need to find an amp/speaker combination for a 7 string jazz box.
It needs to be able to reproduce a 55 hz A three octaves below 440.

It needs to have lots of headroom and it needs to be touch sensitive.


Has anyone tried anything like this?

[tubeswell]

BFPR is a nice lightweightish toob amp. 5F6A is loverly'n'cleanish but weighs a lot more. a blonde bassman is much more 60sish but you need to haul 2 boxes around. How much power do you want?

[Colossal]

I recently took in a repair for BFPR clone from a fantastic local jazz player. It had a modified cathodyne and a 6L6 power section for a bit more headroom. Great sounding amp and I played it a lot while I had it. Lovely wet Fender reverb and a touch of the onboard tremolo added some additional thickness. I play 7 strings. If the Volume (essentially the gain) was down between about 9-12 o'clock, I felt the amp performed really well down to the low B. Bringing the volume up to about 2 o'clock produced a comfortably loud tone and you could tell the amp was really opening up. Still stayed clean but sounded much more full, as might be expected when the power tubes get working a bit. However, the low end started to fall apart rather easy and most especially on the low B and low E, if you dug in a bit hard. The amp is very touch sensitive and responds well to pick attack. But you could tell that cathodyne was being pushed very easily and if you dug in hard, could make it totally collapse. It was easy to induce continued resonance in the speaker by snapping a low note and holding the guitar near the amp. It would just totally collapse and resonate with a round, rubbery skidding sound without any sort of definition. This effect was reproducible whether with the stock speaker (an Eminence Legend) or with an EV in a separate 1x12 (so it's not the speaker).

Now, this is probably not something that a jazz player is likely to be doing but I wanted to see how the amp reacted to that low B string. I am looking for Eric Johnson squeaky cleans but want that 7th string to hold together and the amp to stay totally defined when played as a clean amp. The Fender tone stack takes a little getting used to, is fairly interactive, and seems to get very boomy quickly with a strong mid scoop to it. It was easy to get a good tone with the BFPR, fantastic and inspirational actually (reverb is incredible), but I'm not sure the cathodyne is going to be the right choice for a 7 string, I think it depends on the desired amp volume and headroom. The guy who owned the amp only opens it up to about 9-11 o'clock so the amp stayed quite clean and very defined (plenty of low end too). He plays arch top and hollow body guitars.

I think the BFPR is a great choice for jazz but maybe a Vibrolux with a long-tailed pair PI might be a better choice (for the 7 string player). For less power and slightly different tone, a Deluxe Reverb would be great too I'm sure.

The one thing of note is that the PI entrance cap on a BFPR is 0.02uF and on a Twin it is a mere 0.001uF! So, while I did not get to try this mod on the BFPR I serviced, I suspect it would be a very good choice for controlling that huge low end content a 7 string brings to the party. That way you get to keep the sweetness of the cathodyne in the BFPR. I spoke with someone very experienced with Fender amps on that and that was his suggestion too as a specific place to tailor the amp to a 7 string. I wish I had gotten to test that.

[selloutrr]

you may have the best luck with a bass amp solid state with a very flexible eq and tweeter / horn combo. or even making a small rack mount PA system and running into a Direct box - per amp - mixer - power amp - speaker (that can reproduce the freq you need accurately