SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by PLX »

330µF fat cap gone
variac down to 76VAC re-biased EL-34's to 60mA
two SM-57s (cap edge 2" and cone 2")

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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by harddriver »

PLX wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:42 pm 330µF fat cap gone
variac down to 76VAC re-biased EL-34's to 60mA
two SM-57s (cap edge 2" and cone 2")

And there's the tone.... NICE! 8-) 8-) The woof is gone, the aggressive crunchy mids are back and the amp has a nice kerrang and attack to it with that plexi sqwauk. The amp literally sounds like a different amp.. I love it! There are a few more tweaks and you'll be there.

Yeah I'm running 47K on the speaker jack so I usually run on 8 ohms to 4 depending on the load, right now I'm on 4 ohms because I pulled two power tubes.

What's on V2A in this clip? .68uf or .68uf/25uf?

Were you still pushing the amp with Boss GE10>EPPRE>EPPRE>SHcafferVega> Marshall amp 76VAC> Greenback cab.

Was this the mic'd speaker or the suhr load with IR's?

I gotta go cook dinner for the family so I be be back later with more Ed spec analysis and talk.
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by PLX »

harddriver wrote: Mon Jun 06, 2022 12:19 am And there's the tone.... NICE! 8-) 8-) The woof is gone, the aggressive crunchy mids are back and the amp has a nice kerrang and attack to it with that plexi sqwauk. The amp literally sounds like a different amp.. I love it! There are a few more tweaks and you'll be there.

Yeah I'm running 47K on the speaker jack so I usually run on 8 ohms to 4 depending on the load, right now I'm on 4 ohms because I pulled two power tubes.

What's on V2A in this clip? .68uf or .68uf/25uf?

Were you still pushing the amp with Boss GE10>EPPRE>EPPRE>SHcafferVega> Marshall amp 76VAC> Greenback cab.

Was this the mic'd speaker or the suhr load with IR's?
It did make a huge difference in the tone of the amp.. But I had to compensate a lot by adjusting other parts of the signal chain to get back some warmth and low end. :?

For example, I had to dial my tone knob on the guitar down to 2 to get rid of the ice-picky shrillness.

I dialed the treble pot back on the amp from 10 to 7.

And I cranked the pot on the EP-Pre to 10 with the FAT switch engaged.

Now, I know from listening to the isolated tracks from Ed, his early amp tone was very shrill, high-pitched, all treble, hissing Marshall tone, but I am seriously thinking about putting a 220µF cap across the 25µF that's in there now.

I had the GE-10 both EP-Pres, and the SVDS pre all on. If I turned off any.. I lost the gain you need to make that chugga-chugga on the low E string happen correctly.

On the mic's, one is a real SM-57 on a Scumback BM-75, which is Jim's clone of a G12M mid 70's era "Blackback". The other is an IR cab sim of a Marshall 1960A cab loaded with a G12M and mic'ed with an SM-57.
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

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Quite honestly the ice picky shrill is kinda how the Super 70 sounds and that pickup along with a Mighty Mite 1400 is VH1 all day long. IF your favorite tone is VHII then you really should look at a Duncan 78 or a Jalen Origin(His 78 model copy). Funny thing is the Duncan 78 can almost pull off VH1 but it is lacking in the shrilly crunch factor that is VH1, the 78 model is warmer but full of harmonic goodness. I have the 78 model in my black and white Frank and the Mighty Mite in one of my 83 Kramers. My guess is Ed had only a volume pot on the Super 70 explorer but I could be wrong. Chris Holmes's Ibanez only had a volume pot... ;) I never go over 9 or 10 oclock on either of my EP-PRE's pretty much where I ran the volume on my actual EP3 echoplex when I had it.

What are you cathode values for V1A V1B? Are you running Synergy .68 uf caps on V1B and V2A? What brand and value PI fizzy cap do you have, 100pf or 47pf, if you have a another black Sang Silver Mica there you may what to try a Red Lemco dogbone 47pf but if you like the smoothness of the mica leave it. I tried the 100pf in the PI fizzy cap and preffered the 47 pf dogbone. I prefer Ceramic for the PI cap and Mica for the tonestack and 470K mixer bypass caps, NOS RS or Lemco if you can get them or the 80's brown CDE's sound like the Lemco/RS IMHO. You can try a 220uf cap but I think it will go back to sounded rounded off again in the mids.

I'm surprised you need the GE10 with everything else to get the gain you feel you need. Were you still using the Ed japan setting or did you back the level off some? There's some days I feel I need EQ and other days not so much it depends on what side of the bed I wake up on.... :roll: :lol:

What resistance is the Super 70 9K? The originals were like around 8K weren't they?

The last thing you can try is the Jose Master. I am pretty convinced VH1 and VH2 had the Jose Master installed on the back of the chassis with the white plastic pot knob. His amp was the Rose Palace house amp and probably had the diodes hardwired in to the pot. I installed a 1 meg push/pull in the open 4th preamp tube in the plexi chassis and used some shielded wire to run over to it I always have it full up, the Jose master in a plexi only is meant to shave a few DB off at loud stage volume IMHO. For VH1 I usually have the 20V/20V engaged assymetrical orientation but the Ossie Ahsen video said Jose like the symmetrical clipping so YMMV. I like the headroom the and crunch the assymmetrical 20/20V give and it give you that clanky kerrang you hear in Jose amps and Cameron amps. FWIW Mark C felt Ed's amp had the Jose master with diodes as well, I asked him straight out in a PM on Metro and he said he thinks it did. That's about all I got, sometimes the journey can get a little maddening at times but if you prefer the 330uf that is your ears. Doesn't Gaustad run a 330uf fat cap on V2A I don't recall him saying? FWIW I think the Synergy Mustard sound real close to NOS Mustards.
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

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harddriver wrote: Mon Jun 06, 2022 3:01 am Quite honestly the ice picky shrill is kinda how the Super 70 sounds and that pickup along with a Mighty Mite 1400 is VH1 all day long. IF your favorite tone is VHII then you really should look at a Duncan 78 or a Jalen Origin(His 78 model copy). Funny thing is the Duncan 78 can almost pull off VH1 but it is lacking in the shrilly crunch factor that is VH1, the 78 model is warmer but full of harmonic goodness. I have the 78 model in my black and white Frank and the Mighty Mite in one of my 83 Kramers. My guess is Ed had only a volume pot on the Super 70 explorer but I could be wrong. Chris Holmes's Ibanez only had a volume pot... ;) I never go over 9 or 10 oclock on either of my EP-PRE's pretty much where I ran the volume on my actual EP3 echoplex when I had it.

What are you cathode values for V1A V1B? Are you running Synergy .68 uf caps on V1B and V2A? What brand and value PI fizzy cap do you have, 100pf or 47pf, if you have a another black Sang Silver Mica there you may what to try a Red Lemco dogbone 47pf but if you like the smoothness of the mica leave it. I tried the 100pf in the PI fizzy cap and preffered the 47 pf dogbone. I prefer Ceramic for the PI cap and Mica for the tonestack and 470K mixer bypass caps, NOS RS or Lemco if you can get them or the 80's brown CDE's sound like the Lemco/RS IMHO. You can try a 220uf cap but I think it will go back to sounded rounded off again in the mids.

I'm surprised you need the GE10 with everything else to get the gain you feel you need. Were you still using the Ed japan setting or did you back the level off some? There's some days I feel I need EQ and other days not so much it depends on what side of the bed I wake up on.... :roll: :lol:

What resistance is the Super 70 9K? The originals were like around 8K weren't they?

The last thing you can try is the Jose Master. I am pretty convinced VH1 and VH2 had the Jose Master installed on the back of the chassis with the white plastic pot knob. His amp was the Rose Palace house amp and probably had the diodes hardwired in to the pot. I installed a 1 meg push/pull in the open 4th preamp tube in the plexi chassis and used some shielded wire to run over to it I always have it full up, the Jose master in a plexi only is meant to shave a few DB off at loud stage volume IMHO. For VH1 I usually have the 20V/20V engaged assymetrical orientation but the Ossie Ahsen video said Jose like the symmetrical clipping so YMMV. I like the headroom the and crunch the assymmetrical 20/20V give and it give you that clanky kerrang you hear in Jose amps and Cameron amps. FWIW Mark C felt Ed's amp had the Jose master with diodes as well, I asked him straight out in a PM on Metro and he said he thinks it did. That's about all I got, sometimes the journey can get a little maddening at times but if you prefer the 330uf that is your ears. Doesn't Gaustad run a 330uf fat cap on V2A I don't recall him saying? FWIW I think the Synergy Mustard sound real close to NOS Mustards.
I think the phenomenon revealed here is; what sounds good "in the room" never sounds as good recorded, and then compressed by a hosting site (YouTube, Soundcloud, etc.) and the inverse is also true.. That clip sounded like crap while I was playing it. I really do not like that sort of tone, but when I started listening to the playback in my digital audio workstation, it sounded much better than the previous clips of the same VH song section.

Once I started tweaking with the Pultec EQ, it started to sound more and more like the isolated VH tracks.

That amp is probably gonna get a 100µF Orange Drop cap as a "fat cap" and I will put it on a shelf and start working with my AH-50. It's very close to being finished and I can start playing & recording some stuff with it. In the end, the 330µF fat cap was just too damn much low end.. though it seemed to work well with the Super 70 pickup.

The Super 70 clone I have from HighOrder Pickups is 8.1KΩ with an Alnico 8 mag

The thing about this amp is it's a 2203 with transformers from a Laney AOR 100, so it's a real red-headed stepchild of an amp to begin with. :lol: It is basically a "test bed" for me to try out mods over the years.

I'm picking up the custom head case for the Ceriatone AH-50 tomorrow, and I'm gonna finish that build and start trying out that little 50W gain monster. :mrgreen:
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by harddriver »

So this amp is a 2203 cascaded preamp or is it a full on plexi? with 2 gain stages?
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

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harddriver wrote: Mon Jun 06, 2022 4:04 amSo this amp is a 2203 cascaded preamp or is it a full on plexi? with 2 gain stages?
It's cascaded. So there's only two inputs, a high and a low.

It's Marshall's 1974 take on a Jose modded Marshall - where you cascade the Plexi's 'bright' channel into the 'normal' channel, add a pre-phase inverter MV and a cold biased gain stage.
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by harddriver »

So it's a 3 gain stage like a JCM800 with a JCM800 pre-pi master volume...

What's the cathode values on V1A V1B and V2A?

820/330uf V1A

2.7K/.68uf V1B

820 V2A

I don't think you will ever get a 2203 cacaded preamp to exactly sound like a true plexi preamp IMHO. I'm not sure my plexi tricks will fully translate to a 2203 cascaded circuit, it kind of sounds like a Randy Rhoades type cascade. Ralle tried the cascade many many times and while it has the gain it never sounded of had the feel like a 2 gain stage plexi cranked and variaced... I feel there is just something special with the 2 gaing stage plexi cranked pounding the PI. I cascaded my Ed spec 68 once and I didn't like it at all and went back to stock pronto.

If it is 3 gain stages you shouldn't need the GE10 , EPPRE's and the Schaffer. Unless you are willing to convert it to a full on plexi you may chase your tail.
My Ed spec 68 is the stock two gain stage preamp and so is Jim Gaustad's amp...just sayin...
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by PLX »

harddriver wrote: Mon Jun 06, 2022 4:59 am So it's a 3 gain stage like a JCM800 with a JCM800 pre-pi master volume...

What's the cathode values on V1A V1B and V2A?

820/330uf V1A

2.7K/.68uf V1B

820 V2A

I don't think you will ever get a 2203 cacaded preamp to exactly sound like a true plexi preamp IMHO. I'm not sure my plexi tricks will fully translate to a 2203 cascaded circuit, it kind of sounds like a Randy Rhoades type cascade. Ralle tried the cascade many many times and while it has the gain it never sounded of had the feel like a 2 gain stage plexi cranked and variaced... I feel there is just something special with the 2 gaing stage plexi cranked pounding the PI. I cascaded my Ed spec 68 once and I didn't like it at all and went back to stock pronto.

If it is 3 gain stages you shouldn't need the GE10 , EPPRE's and the Schaffer. Unless you are willing to convert it to a full on plexi you may chase your tail.
My Ed spec 68 is the stock two gain stage preamp and so is Jim Gaustad's amp...just sayin...
I took some hi-res pics when I was in there this morning.

Image
Image
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Re: SGMAD Solo Clip - Tone Test

Post by PLX »

On the "Fair Warning" video Gaustad shows that he runs the amp at 68V on the variac without correcting the bias.

So, for example earlier today when I ran mine amp at 76VAC I was getting a B+ of 292VDC.

But Gaustad is dropping his B+ to 233V, so low that the heater voltage is at like 3.5V.

And that puts the bias of the power tubes at 4.7mA. He leaves it that way, does not re-bias the amp..

That's the thing I've yet to try.
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