Category: DIY Audio
TrainWreck Rockette: 2 Headshell
A good find this old, 70’s VOX transistor amp, from my old music teacher no less, seems the perfect candidate for a Trainwreck build (a VOX AC30 top boost with EF86). Non functioning and quite dusty first step’s in making […]
Splitter pedal: Two guitar amps at once
Splitting the output of your guitar/pedalboard to two separate Guitar Amps is one of the most powerful way in shaping your tone and ‘broaden’ the sound, but to do so you need some tricks. In this post I build a […]
Headphone repair
When headphones wear out it’s not unusual to effect the soft fabric parts only, so can eb saved by replacement, or you can prevent failure by some tactical application of superglue. In this post I’ll show how to repair and […]
Dumble Overdrive Special: 3 Mods
Doing a copy of an amp can be a good learning experience, modifying it to suit your needs and taste, however, can be the really rewarding bit. Here I detail added FX loop, footswitchable; dual HRM, with bypass, FETboost, moved […]
Guitar rebuild: 1 onboard preamps & hardware
From 70’s hard rock, to a credible metal guitar this one started its life 1982 in Japan, built in the great Matsumoku shop. Known for making some of the world’s best mass produced guitars at the end of the 70’s […]
Pedal Progression: 1 Range Master
In this series I revisit and re-build some of my favorite guitar pedals. Here a treble booster is given some of the best vintage parts possible, protection circuitry, power supply filtering, a negative voltage supply, some indication circuitry, and a, […]
TrainWreck Rockette: 1 Redesigned
The trainwreck rocket is a highly coveted and copied guitar amp, however it, in part, is a copy itself. It is the core of a vox ac30 and where made by Ken Fischer. Here I design my interpretation. Ken started […]
Dumble Overdrive Special: 2 Headshell
Head, strange word for this but is what it’s called, a head being the amplifier, presumably sitting on the ‘body’ represented by the stacks of speaker cabs. Using a schematic from the ampgarage.com forum as a base I set out […]
Dumble Overdrive Special: 1 Head & circuit
The Dumble amplifiers are clearly the highest priced guitar amplifiers ever to exist, and with good, or at least understandable, reason. These amplifiers fetch more than 50.000$/€ a piece, a staggering sum. Why this is understandable can be gleaned by […]
High gain SLO/Ubershall: 1 Intro
The machine, this is the main amp I play and the platform I most try to optimize. Origins in Sloclone, It can be switched between key components of an Ubershall, tastes of a Rectifier, controls of a Larry(Fortin), Friedman and […]