[][][][][] HEy SAm dot COm [][][][][]


Welcome to my amp site! These are a few of these amps that I've rebuilt or modified over the years...

	This is one cool looking amp! I found it in the basement of the Blue Lamp in SF after a gig. It was probably a vocal PA in the 60's but it was covered with about fifty layers of dust. It's a Bell, made by Western Electric, the same people who originally designed all the best sounding tube amp circuits! The transformers were still good, but it sounded tired, so I redid the circuit and made it similar to a Tweed Deluxe. Sounds sweet!
This all steel amp was made by Rauland in the 60's. It originally had several transformer taps for two tube rectifiers, one for the preamp and one for the power tubes. It was a cool design, but the plate voltage turned out to be way too high (close to 600.) Now it has a new Ruby power transformer, one tube rectifier, and a hand-wound plexi-replica output transformer. It's a basic Marshall/Bassman AB style circuit with parallel tonal preamps and an extra gain stage on the front end. It also has two hidden lamps that light up the front panel, and it looks very cool at gigs.
	I love these cool old amps! This one was made by McGowan as a small PA amp...I think it's from a skating rink. It was found in a thrift store for $5. I then replaced the anemic circuit (of course), and made it very similar to an 18 watt Marshall. It's a great studio amp! The EL84s give it a sweet compressed bell tone, with no buzzy overdrive.
I've had a lot of Marshalls, but this was my first one, and it was always my favorite. It's a '73 50 watt that I bought in 1982 for $175. While I'd like to tell you that it's NBFW (never been f***ed with), it has. It's been changed dozens of times. It's still pretty basic...an added gain stage on the front end pushing the old style deep and bright parallel stages (vol I & vol II) patched internally. I also added a master volume. The 4-12 slant has 25-watt Greenback Celestions. This rig is the righteous tone.
	Here's an example of the "Silver Screamer" mod I did on Fender Twins. When I got this '74 Super Six Reverb at Real Guitars in SF in '92, it was actually two 80 watt silver-face Fender heads in this cabinet with the speakers removed [see original photo]. It was once one of Neal Schon's stereo rigs, post-Santana. The circuits had been modified, normal channel converted to front-end gain stage, much like the original Boogie amps. The original mod was probably done in Marin County by Sal Trentino, who sometimes worked on Santana's amps. Randall Smith used the same concept of cascading gain stages to produce his own line of Boogie amps, which made him a fortune, and Santana still uses them today. Wonder what Sal's doing... Anyway, both of these heads sounded pretty good, but I was needing a more flexible gig rig. I bought these drilled out old silvers so cheap that I didn't mind just gutting them and trying different things. On the Super Six, I completely changed the power section to a sweeter sounding 40 watts, tube-rectified like a blackface Pro Reverb. On the front end, dual preamps: Stock blackface reverb circuit for the classic Fender tone. The (normally) unused normal channel is converted to a fully seperate preamp and tone stack similar to a hotrodded Marshall/Bassman.The two channels are footswitchable, and it has an active FX loop. I've played a bunch of gigs with this rig, and it's a great little workhorse. Bluesy reverb tone when you want it, or you can rock out without the buzzy pedals!
And here is the wild-ass White Widow... It's a 1983 anniversary series Marshall 100 watt, serial# AS 00013. Lucky number, I guess...this amp was a great score. When I got it, it had already been modified by Jose Arredondo, who was the most sought after tone guru in LA in the '80s. It certainly had killer tone, but there were too many extra bells and whistles for me. It had dual master volumes, slave in, dual passive loops, and a lot of redundant switching. It was all the rage in LA to have fully loaded Arredondo Marshall and flood it with massive gain, but it could be a real hair-trigger to dial in sometimes, oscillating like a bastard. I tried a lot of designs in this phat kid over the years, and found that the simpler the circuit, the better the sound. The basic mod design changed very little though. Arredondo did something that few other amp techs bothered to do. He liked the sound of the original Marshall deep and bright parallel stages (vol I & vol II) patched together, so instead of compromising with one happy-medium preamp voicing, as all the stock JCM800 master volumes models did, he added two parallel gain preamps on the front end to keep the two channels seperate. That way you can dial in your gain and just the right amount of fat-ass deep channel tone, especially useful in those clubs that sound like the inside of a trashcan. Jose was one wise old dude and a solid inspiration to my amp-tweaking days.
	Halldorson Transformers convention booth.
Firebird! Over in the background is my 20 watt AOR Laney mounted in a tube frame. It has a bass boost which is great for low volume situations like practicing or rehearsing, but I've also played gigs with it. It's so light, you can lift it with 2 fingers. Good sounding British amp, and totally stock!
	Strat through '80 Marshall JMP at the Blue Lamp.
Here's the first guitar related thing I built. It's the "Buzzsaw I" distortion box! I almost called it Distruction + ... perhaps too obvious a reference to the esteemed MXR product of a similar name. I put it together in 1979, a year before I got a job at MXR and made the real things. Before that, I used to raid their dumpster for parts, but the Buzzsaw I was made entirely from parts from the local electronics store put together on a breadboard. It still works great ... in a raspy transistor-tone kind of way! OK, well it's a good conversation piece anyway.
Need a schematic? Arredondo Mod Marshall Gain Mod Another Marshall Gain Mod Marshall Gain Mod selectable Silver Screamer Silver Screamer 2 Fender Dual Professional Fender Tonemaster Matchless DC30 Matchless Chieftain (preamp) Matchless Chieftain (power) Sovtek Mig50 Sovtek Mig50H Sovtek Mig100H