I built this amp for 3Bays Studios in Elizaville, NY a few years ago. It is a straight clone of the famous British amp that was featured on so many “regal” recordings, if you know what I mean. But it’s only half power (thankfully) at 15 watts and even better, half the weight with only one Alnico Blue speaker. I’ve built more of these amps than any other.

These 801A – a superior grade directly heated triode, probably approaching centenarian status at this point. I am lucky enough to have a few new in their boxes. This amp uses a set of salvaged Fisher 400 transformers and is ridiculous sounding. The EL34’s in the background are just there to regulate their heaters!

I have a few of these to put up. I don’t know how many tube signal tracers were made, but they are all different and interesting, and they are very adaptable to guitar amp-hood. This one is particularly raucous and features a very cool, to me, magic eye tube (top right) to monitor your level.

This was originally a straight EF86 into a pair of EL84’s: punchy phase inverter, solid state rectified, no tone control, just raw, direct power tube distortion. The client wanted more flexibility so we added a tweed styled tone control – huge improvement! – and then a pair of 6V6’s and the ability to switch between tube types. It’s a lot of fun, and hard to choose a favorite setting: the 6V6’s are bluesy and sing while the EL84’s cut, bite and scream. The punchy pi and power supply still cut through, but I think the real secret ingredient is the high quality, full-range output transformer.

The only time a client asked me to build a spare copy of the custom amp he’d already bought. This fella uses a 6DJ8 in Cascode operation – I had scored a couple dozen Amperex models of these tubes from my old oscilloscope. Running them in Cascode gives a sweet, compressed sound. Next comes the relatively raw sounding one-knob tone control and variable output: single ended, single-ended parallel, 15 and 30 watt push pull operation. Power tube distortion galore!

Had a good friend and incredible bass player who asked about making a higher powered version of the classicest of classic bass amps. I went back to the GE datasheets and ran a pair of 6550’s at a whopping 600 volts, using Zener diodes to bring the screens down, and a 6SN7 for a dual impedance buffer between the preamp and the power amp. What a monster amp to play through – loud on bass and absolutely deafening with guitar, but I was nervous powering up those giant transformers for the first time!

This was a unique build. 4xEL84 output section in the “British” tradition, EF86 preamp into a cathode follower hitting the ubiquitous “TMB” EQ that gives you the classic tone shaping you expect from a crystal clear workhorse amp. The EF86 in front of it gives it an extra huge, well-defined tone. What was really unique was building the reverb tank into the chassis itself! Had to use a smaller tank, but it worked and sounded great.