2011 - Fender Princeton Reverb

The year is 2011.

Things have changed.
Gone are the days when a Fender Amp would command a few months wages. Thanks to the GFC and the peculiarities of the stock market, the Australian dollar became strong against the greenback, and the price of owning a new Fender amp dropped to something achievable to mortal men and women. I've owned many nice amps over the years, but for some reason, I've never been 100% satisfied in my sound. The amps I've owned have generally been very nice bits of gear. OK, maybe with the exception of that valvestate I had way back when. By and large, they've had their merits. The Marshall's had the the classic rock crunch, Peavey produced many good amps, similar to Marshall in tone, but generally way more power than I could ever need. My Epiphone's are sweet and simple low power amps, but still loud enough to make the windows rattle in my house.

The Peavey Delta Blues came really close to nailing the sound that I wanted.
A killer amp for a clean tone at high volume with a nice, but somewhat tame reverb.
There's only so much saturation an integrated circuit can provide an inductor.
The Tremolo is a bonus for the Delta Blues too. So from the control panel it would appear that I'v traded down in features, since the Princeton doesn't have a second channel, middle EQ and a boost switch. Also it's rated at half the power.

I'd originally thought about getting an external tank to add to the Delta Blues in order to gain that super drippy surf sound. The Delta is more than up to delivering the goods on the clean channel with this supplement. It performed superbly with the Line 6 Verbzilla pedal. So why not stick with what I had?

Any rational person would have been happy with that setup, and indeed I was. Until the day I was bored on my lunch break and decided to go an harass the guitar stores in town. First I tried the Fender '63 Reverb Reissue through an Orange Tiny Terror. It was nice and I would have bought one on the spot, if it wasn't for the asking price of $1400 in Australia. After that I sought out a Fender Deluxe Reverb at another store. Boy oh boy was that thing nice. Super long drippy dark reverb and the clean tone which had a bottom end that seemed to ring out, threatening to break up if the strings were struck just that little bit harder. I was happy as could be, playing in an isolation booth. I even turned it up as far as it would go. The overdrive was beautiful. And the price was pretty tempting. If I had the cash, I probably would have bought it on the spot.

A week or so went by, I'd been reading up on my amps and thought I'd give the Princeton Reverb a try.
Finding one was easy. At first it seemed just all right. Nice, but not the killer tone that I'd heard from the Deluxe at another store. I went on a mission to try and find a store with both in stock. There isn't much between them in regard to pricing, but I'd read so much about the Princeton being a favourite for recording. Since I do more recording than I do playing with a band, it was definitely an appealing idea.

I finally managed to try them out side by side. And this time I was torn between the amps.
The Deluxe has a slightly bigger sounding reverb and larger speaker, but the Pricneton was pretty nice.
I left the store leaning toward the Deluxe. I still had that magic sound in my head, from the store where I played in the iso-booth. The place I was trying to A/B test the amps was noisy and I am very self conscious about my arthritic playing style.  I left empty handed. But I'd decided to sell some of my gear to purchase an all in one, wonder box.

Mostly I play clean with verb and occasionally tremolo.

A week later, I had raised 2/3 of the cash required to make a purchase. With my lovely ladies' approval I made my way back to the store with a fist full of dollars and a gold card.

This was a tough choice. I walked in there with a 70% leaning toward the Deluxe Reverb.
I A/B'd them back and forth, feature for feature, for an hour or so. Even to the point of plugging the Princeton Reverb into a 12" cabinet. The cabinet wasn't impedance balanced for use with the Fender, and was a little quieter than the on board speaker. In the noisy store, it was hard to tell much more in the bottom end.

I felt that the Deluxe Reverb was stronger in the Bass and Reverb area, but the Princeton Reverb had a nicer tremolo. Both amps have Valve Rectifiers and Tube driven reverb tanks, but the Deluxe uses an opto-coupler on it's tremolo circuit, where the Princeton has a valve biased tremolo. And that was the deciding factor.
The Fender Deluxe Reverb has a Tremolo(Vibrato) that is more of a Square wave and the Fender Princeton Reverb has a smoother more Triangle shaped Tremolo.

It was the throbbing Tremolo, rather than the chopp chop chop that won me over.
The reverb sound was so close that I'd be happy with either. Just to be sure I cranked them both up. The deluxe is slightly louder, but the difference between 15 and 22 watts is pretty negligible when it comes down to measuring output by decibels. All it really means is that the Deluxe would stay cleaner, longer.

I'd brought a little trolley with me, and as it turned out, my choice of the Princeton was a better choice for carting it home, as my octopus straps were barely adequate to keep the thing upright. Anyway I walked home with it rather than get on a packed tram. It wasn't too bad actually. The amp is only 12kg and I walk to and from work every day anyway. Getting it through our non standard doorways was a little tricky. But I managed it. The night I got it home I was only able to play for a short time. But the amp did sound very nice. Actually it exceeded my expectations with the Mosrite. Lots and lots of bottom end, with far more volume than could be used in my home.

Today I've had the house to myself and managed to turn the amp up to the mighty level of two on the dial.
At this level, everything in the lounge room vibrated heavily, actually it was as if the house was having a guitar quake (My Epiphone Valve Jr gets half way before that happens).

My doubts on the quality of the tone were completely unfounded. The Fender Princeton Reverb has the same resonant clean tone as I experienced with it's bigger brother. Either amp would be an excellent choice, but for me the Princeton Reverb is the perfect choice.

I know this reissue has a PCB and isn't strictly to vintage spec, but I don't think that really matters. Fender has made an excellent product and it's supported by a generous warranty. Hopefully I'll never need it, but if I do, I've kept the receipt in a safe place (unlike my Dremel, which died today while making an isolation cabinet).

I don't even see the need to get it biased, change the speaker, or valves. The stock amp, or at least my stock amp sounds warm and recording ready.

Man I wish I was getting a kickback from Fender for the above review.....

2010 - Behringer DC9 Compressor

The humble compressor.
An oft misunderstood, yet incredibly useful device.

I have two of these MXR clones. One modded, one stock.
Like the original, the stock version filters out a bit of bottom end, which gives the perception of a treble boost.
Modding it to get some bass back is as simple as adding a .1uf cap in parallel with the input cap. You don't even need to pull the PCB out to do the mod either.


I have a few different uses for these pedals.
One of them is to add a master volume control to my Peavey Delta Blues, via the FX loop.
The amp is far too loud for my flat. Actually even a 5w Valve Jr is too loud for my flat, but I can't do much about it. The Delta Blues on the other hand can be tamed.

Adding the modded CP9 to the FX loop and reducing the sensitity to minimum gives quite a bit of control over the volume of the amp. It's easy to get the clean preamp distorting at maximum volume, while still having good standing with the neighbours! If you need to add a little compression, it's just a turn of the knob.
This is especially handy in the FX loop after the Line 6 M13, which has compressors built in, but they don't reduce the overall volume nearly as well as this bargain basement clone.

The CP9 is also incredibly useful for driving a DI before a mixing desk when recording Bass.
It adds Volume obviously, but also allows the Bass to sound more controlled and clean into themixing board, perfect for manipulating with your favourite bass amp modeler.

My main use for the CP9 is actually something not really music related, ans certainly not for performance.
I use them in stereo to control the volume of my television!

That's right I'm using them on the TV and now I no longer have to put up with being blasted out of my chair by overly loud commercials or having difficulty hearing dialogue when the volume of the hifi is set to a sensible level for watching action movies.

Since there may be problems with impedance on some consumer devices, I recommend the addition of a simple circuit on the input. The unmodified pedals were fine with a DVD player output, but when it came to the TV output I was getting some strange noises due to mismatched input/outputs.

All that needs to be done is a 22k resistor in line with the positive lead and a 1k resistor from the positive lead to ground. This drops the output impedance of the TV to something that the pedal can handle and improves frequency response as well as noise rejection. I actually got the idea from one of Ken Stone's circuits, the Stomp Box Adapter V2.

I'm certain this mod would work on just about any pedal if one were inclined to mess about with processing the TV. that's why I just built it into a black jiffy box with sockets to plug into whatever I want. It's also useful for dropping Keyboard outputs to be used by the pedal (it's original intent I believe).

2010 - Boss SD-1

This one came to me nice n' cheap. I bought it at a 2nd hand dealer in the city. $65 and practically brand new.
What do you do with cheap pedals? Mod them of course!

I'd read that this is basically a tube screamer with some parts changes.

Stock this pedal is pretty decent sounding, a moderate overdrive on full and a nice clean boost on minimum.
Unfortunately the filter caps on the input remove a lot of bottom end. So rather than add some punch, it cuts some of the guts out of it.

The first thing I did was to do the SD808 mod and turn it into a tube screamer.
Basically it's just changing one cap, removing another as well as a diode in the clipping stage.
What this does is make the clipping asymmetrical and alter the tone control.
To my ears and playing style, it wasn't much of an improvement. It still lacked the bottom end.

The next mod I did was the bass mod.
This is done by simply bridging two components, a capacitor and a resistor.
It was three weeks before I got around to testing it out, but when I did, the pedal was a whole new beast.
The gain still isn't much really, but that's OK I like it like that. The bottom end is nice and big, though a little muddy as there's a slight octave effect on some notes. But for the tone I'm after, this is almost perfect.

Placed in the FX loop of the Delta Blues, the pedal is responsive to dynamics and has the added bonus of acting as a master volume, though the extra gain from the preamp means that the pedal never completely cleans up.

I may end up doing some further mods to the clipping section and maybe change out the opamp for something else. But for now I'm pretty happy with this cheap pedal that cost about $1 and 15 minutes of my time to get close to what I want out of an overdrive.

Not too smooth, and just a little raspy.

1993/94 - Sovtek Big Muff Pi

Long long ago in a land far far away (660km if you want this definition of far.) I learned to play guitar.
Most of what I knew of FX was what my friends had or was built into school amps.
The guitar store in town had a couple of cheap Arion pedals, but they were just overdrive and distortions.
I think I owned the overdrive for a while, but it was pretty tame so I just relied on the sound of whatever amp I was using at the time.

I was about 14 or 15 when I got into the Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream) and was an avid reader of guitar magazines. In one, I think it was Guitar Player, there was an interview with Billy Corgan where he talked about an EBow(what they hell was an ebow?) and his distortion sound.

The distortion was the Big Muff. What a funny name I thought. I was interested right away. I had to have one. The only problem is that they'd been out of production for years and weren't easy to find. (Remember this was pre-internet and no ebay). Around this time I'd become a regular at a music shop in the larger neighboring city.
When I had nothing better to do I'd just hang out there and more than likely was considered a bit of a pest. In their front counter they had these big army green boxes that looked like they belonged in a cold war bomb shelter. These boxes turned out to be the first incarnation of the rebirth of the Electro Harmonix line (I had no idea at the time). They shipped in wood containers labeled in Cyrillic letters and just oozed cool.

If I remember correctly I purchased the Big Muff at the same time as I bought the JCM800. It took some months to pay off but when I got it home, I played all the time. This was my main distortion for years. Big and fat and dirty. It was all I knew of distortion for a very long time. And it was awesome!

I ended up parting ways with this pedal at the same time as my Classic 50. It was lost to me for all intents and purposes. But.... around 2005 I got it back! My friend that I'd sold them to when I left town, just gave this and the Small Stone phaser back to me.

At the time I was playing synth and a bit of guitar in a band and the return came when I was broke and in need of some FX. Unfortunately the reunion wasn't all that happy. They were a bit broken. As a teenager I thought it was indestructible. This pedal took an absolute battering between shows and rehearsals. We'd all thought we were punk rock and beat the stuffing out of our gear, I was probably the worst though. I managed to shatter the plastic input on the board. This was something I'd forgotten about until the return. Upon opening it up to fix the battery lead, I re-discovered some of my earliest solder work. It wasn't pretty! It was functional though and I vaguely recall fixing it with whatever the local Tandy had in stock, which was a chassis mount open stereo socket. I ended up re-repairing it with something closer to original spec and it works just fine.

Since getting it back I have struggled with the tone. It's a finnicky pedal in regard to the load that it needs to sound good. Humbuckers and high impedance pickups are a no-no. It just doesn't sound any good with it.
My only guitar that sounded ok with it was the Teisco. The Surfcaster and Les Paul just don't sound any good. So the Big Muff has lived in a drawer more often than it has on my pedal board. I pulled it out again the other day to play with my new amp and guitar. Guess what? It sounds great with the Mosrite and the Peavey Delta Blues!

The guitar has the right electrical characteristics and the amp can handle the low end hump!

So there's another pedal dusted off and ready to play

Now there's not much I recall about the purchase of the small stone, I suspect I bought it at the same time as the BMP, or at least so close together as makes no difference.

The Small Stone is pretty famous, makes a nice swoosh and I like it for the very slow LFO. It does have a bit of an issue with a volume drop when engaged. I modded it to stop this, but the mod changed the tonal characteristics, so one day I'll just change it back.

I've actually built one of each of these pedals for friends.

They were both tricky builds in a way, it took a while to get them working well.
The Small stone clone also had the "univibe" mod, nothing at all like the univibe, but allows the shifting of the phase degree by switching some capacitors. It was a bit quiet, so I added a small preamp booster to the input which overdrives the phaser circuit and creates a small stone phase tone with a twist.

I liked the sound quite a bit, and the last I heard, the guy I built it for was pretty happy with it too!



.

2009 - Fulltone Mini Deja Vibe2

For years I wanted a univibe clone. Always baulked at the expense.
All of the clones cost a heck of a lot. There are a lot of clones too, so which one to pick?
Obviously I eventually settled on the Fulltone, but it was an almost agonising decision.

The MDV2 costs RRP $565 or there about the last time I looked.
No way was I going to pay that much for what is essentially a glorified phaser.
So I started looking further afield...

USA prices were much more reasonable, and our two currencies were nearly at a ratio of 1:1.
I'd sold a bunch of lesser pedals and had a few $ sitting in my paypal account waiting to be put to use.
There was a shop in Melbourne that had one in stock, but when I went to try it out the sales guy told me it'd been moved to another store on the outskirts of the metropolitan area and wasn't coming back for at least a month. Since my effort to try one out in person was thwarted, the only thing to be done was hit the internet.

Not a heck of a lot of information was available on this unit. Not many demos either.
So it was a bit of a leap of faith when I decided to buy online. It was a little over half the Aussie RRP including postage.

So I bought it and then had to wait....
It seemed to take ages to get here, but in reality only took a week.
The unit is fairly large, with considerable weight.
Nice and creamy coloured and the PCB is compact and nicely laid out.
It's been modified from the original to allow a higher and brighter output if one chooses.

When I finally had the opportunity to play it, I had mixed feelings.
The wobble and whoosh was nice, but on my DI rig and Epiphone amps it seemed to drop a lot of bottom end off when engaged. The MDV2 does the lopsided swooshy throb thing very well. Vibrato mode sounded quite subtle but more of just an add on option rather than a useful effect. I liked it, but wasn't really all that impressed. So for most of the time I've had the pedal, it has remained in a drawer and potentially facing the auction block. Also the phase on the lowest speed almost sounded as if the effect was off.

That was until yesterday....

Yesterday I dusted it off and plugged it into the Delta Blues, oh boy what a difference!
I swear there's something about that amp that maxes everything sound good. I'm not saying magical or mojo, but something fundamental on the electrical level. The difference I suspect is the input impedance.
On a stock Epiphone Valve Jr, the input impedance is about 100k and on the Delta Blues spec states 470k.
The end result is the Delta Blues has a greater frequency range on input and your guitar and effects can drive the valve stage a little harder (The Valve Jr is easily modified to rectify this).

The effect that this had on the univibe clone was an overall improvement in sound quality. The bass cut I'd experienced before has gone away. The phasing at low speed is much more pronounced and the pitch wobble in the vibrato mode is now clearly audible. In fact on both settings, the depth control doesn't need to be on maximum. The effects come through nice and clear, great on clean and distorted alike!

In all, I'm glad I didn't part with the MDV2. It's definitely a keeper.

2010 - Peavey Delta Blues 115

Classic 50 head, with custom decal from a beer poster.

The last piece in the puzzle has been aquired.

About 12 years ago I owned a Peavey classic 50 head.
It was one of the nicest amps I'd ever owned. Unfortunately it had to be parted with as I was moving 700lm to a new city and the need for cash was greater than the need for a big valve amp.
I didn't have a speaker cab for it and it wasn't all that long after I'd injured the tendon membrane in my left hand and wasn't allowed to play guitar for a year. That was all a bit sucky and it left me ampless for a long time. I did have a BOS Gt-5, but it wasn't the same thing. So for years I'd regretted the unavoidable sale of the Classic 50 and have been trying to buy it back from the friend who I sold it to for the last 5 years. He won't budge. I've had a number of small amps in the years between then and now, but could never really justify spending a large sum of cash for an amp when a: I didn't have a car and later b: I didn't have a band.

I'd been planning on picking up a Classic 30 combo for a long time, but every time I'd found one, I had no spare cash. After getting the Mosrite a few weeks back I discovered that the classic series had two more amps in the line. The Classic 20 and the Classic Delta Blues. Since the 20 has no reverb, it was of no interest to me, as that directly affects my playing style. I like big gobs of reverb. I discovered the Delta was basically a Classic 30 with the addition of tremolo! Well, that was it. I was on a mission. I had to have a Delta Blues 115.

It didn't take long. I found two on ebay within a week of each other. One was in Brisbane and was a bit more than I wanted to spend, once couriers were factored in. Also i had no guarantee that it would have arrived in working order as the guy had not packing material. I let the auction go, only to find one for sale a mere two suburbs away!  I was the only bidder, so naturally I won the auction (all with the blessings of my dear lady). I took my $2 shop trolley along on the 109 tram and collected the amp. The guy I bought it from was really nice and we had a good old chat about amps and kids and whatnot. He even helped me tape the thing solidy to my trolley for the trip back home.

I got it on the tram in the opposite direction, fortunately it wasn't overcrowded and the trip up the hill took about 10 minutes. Not bad for peak hour.

It's not the heaviest am in the world, but I was glad to have the trolley as I had a half kilometer walk with it after the tram ride. Time was ticking and it seemed to take forever to get the thing home safely and fired up.
But get it home and fire it up I did.

I set it up in the middle of the lounge, switched it on and went for a cup o tea.
After letting it warm up a little while I was ready to play. I cracked out the Mosrite and got to playing.
The clean tone from the Delta Blues is big and rich and um.... I can't think of any other superlatives. suffice to say, it's particularly nice! Almost as good as the Classic 50 of old.

I've read a lot of reviews on the amp and have to agree about the dirty channel being a little disappointing.
Not so much disappointing, but not as inspiring as the clean channel. The lead channel has this bass cut which just makes the Delta Blues sound like and asthmatic bulldog. The amp has a 15 in cpeaker damn it, gimme some bass with my distortion. Fortunately it also seems to be a fairly simple mod to rectify that issue, if only one could overcome the fear of death at high voltage.

The reverb is pretty nice but is lacking a little. At maximum the reverb is just enough. But I want to gave the option to have far too much. Ok I can achieve this with an FX unit, but I don't always want to carry the m13 around. The schematic shows a simple 4558 opamp circuit which can be upgraded easily enough to get more gain and higher headroom. I've got some spare OPA2134's floating around which should take care of that rather nicely.

My last beef with the design of the amp is the tremolo, I've tread that there is a bit of a volume drop when it's engaged. It turns out that mine does it too. You can manage it if the depth knob is no more than 5, but then you don't have the full throb of a tube amp wit tremolo. The implementation is very basic, and I suspect it is to keep the cost down. It's much easier to create a tremolo effect via optical circuitry than it its to have a safe valve bias tremolo effect. 1/2 of the 4558 seems to be feeding the tremolo circuit and should prove fairly easy to correct for the slight volume drop.

I do plan to modify the amp some time down the track, but for now am happy as is and can augment it's function with an effects pedal or two.

The boost switch seems to get a lot of bad press. From my limited experience on the amp I kinda get it, but when I was playing my Jim Dunlop Octavio through the Delta Blues, the mid boost was actually quite beneficial in bringing out the dirt and octave up produced by that effect.  I've only used one pedal with it so far, but the Octavio sounds fantastic through this beast.

A couple of days after buy the amp I decided to try adding a master volume to the FX loop.
Worked a treat, I was now able to reduce the volume to something sensible for playing in a built up area.
I have my suspicions about the pot that I used, as the volume drop was a lot more than I had anticipated.
Since I broke one of the tabs off the pot this morning, I'll be getting a new one in there instead. Another option would be to use a rotary swtich with different values from 100k to 2.2m(which is supposed to be the return impedance).

I played around with it some more tonight, ran it on low volume, to keep the peace. The line 6 m13 really sounds great with this amp. I just went with it placed in the FX loop and discovered the reverb on the Line 6 is actually nicer than the real deal spring tank (go figure). This was mostly down to the level of noise the analogue version introduces.

After this I decided to run all of my guitars through the amp.

First up was the Surfcaster. It was light and cheerful, not particularly driven, which I found surprising. The lipstick pickup sounds great with this amp, as does each coil of the Seymour Duncan P-Rail.

Next was the Teisco Kadet. What has consistently been the quietest guitar on my other gear turned out to be a big fat tone machine! It sounds thick and powerful and its made of plywood!

The 3rd guitar I tried was the Guyatone LG127-t. Similarly beefy in tone to the Teisco, but it was a little quieter and the tone was more balanced than the others.

The 4th guitar... you guessed it was the Mosrite Ventures.
Very country. A lot more treble than the two vintage guitars, but thicker sounding by far than the Surfcaster.
I twanged away on it for ages, til the phone rang and I realised that my whole leg had gone to sleep when I went to answer it.

The amp does get very hot above the power valves. Too hot to touch. I think its normal, but could do with a little research. Overall the amp has excellent tone and volume, even with the mid range EHX valves on board.
In a year or so I might consider the mods and change the valves for better spec. I'm glad I bought back into the classic line. It's a great sounding amp, and with the right guitar, very fendery.