Time to buy an amp. What?

Nothing the matter with it I don't think.
You can rip ZZ top but the cleans aren't to my liking. It seems way more Marshall than tweed.
My son and I have been tinkering with it for a while now and haven't found but one clean tone we liked. He says "very plain sounding cleans."
 
Elias Graves said:
Nothing the matter with it I don't think.
You can rip ZZ top but the cleans aren't to my liking. It seems way more Marshall than tweed.
My son and I have been tinkering with it for a while now and haven't found but one clean tone we liked. He says "very plain sounding cleans."
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Very odd. Mine is clean all the way up and it sounds very full. I am going into a Vox 1x12 cab with mine, but mine doesn't breakup really at all. Almost a mix between a Fender clean with some Vox chime.
 
Chad said:
Very odd. Mine is clean all the way up and it sounds very full. I am going into a Vox 1x12 cab with mine, but mine doesn't breakup really at all. Almost a mix between a Fender clean with some Vox chime.
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That's what I keep reading in the reviews but I'm not hearing anything like that with mine. Very nasal in the mids. Honky as all get out and this dissonant spike in the upper mids that's not good. That's all on the clean side.
Dirt starts about 10 o'clock on normal and 9 on boost. The dirt sounds good and, while I need it, cleans are mostly what I'm after.
 
Elias Graves said:
That's what I keep reading in the reviews but I'm not hearing anything like that with mine. Very nasal in the mids. Honky as all get out and this dissonant spike in the upper mids that's not good. That's all on the clean side.
Dirt starts about 10 o'clock on normal and 9 on boost. The dirt sounds good and, while I need it, cleans are mostly what I'm after.
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What guitar are you using with it? I am using single coils, so that may explain some of it. I haven't changed the stock tubes. Did you get the Ultra or the plain Special 6? I just have the plain one. I had the the Special 12/20 and with the Watts knob, it would get pretty dirty, but without that on my 6, it is pretty clean all the way up.
 
Just the plain Special 6. Mostly using the white guitar and the PRS...both P90s. We tried the strat, the tele and the LP, though and just didn't like it.
And it may just be that this amp doesn't get along with this cab. That's entirely possible.
 
Elias Graves said:
And it may just be that this amp doesn't get along with this cab. That's entirely possible.
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Or we have different tastes in tone. :grin:

Maybe I got an odd one. The 12/20 I had could really break up when you cranked it, or maybe the cab really makes a difference. My Vox cab has a Celestian and my Epiphone cab has an Eminence Lady Luck and both stay really clean.
 
Update.
I took the head into the local GC and the nice young man with the hipster handlebar moustache was kind enough to hook it up to a cab to test it out. So, we played a P90 equipped Les Paul 50s Tribute gold top (on sale for $599. If I had the money, I'd buy it. It's a rippin nice guitar) into a Marshall 4x12 cabinet an it sounded killer. Easily loud enough to play a bar gig, too. The cleans were there and the drive didn't go from blah to LaGrange instantly.
Now I gotta figure out what's up cause this is exactly the amp I hoped it would be.
 
Ok. I'm officially in the twilight zone here.
When I got home, I decided to set up in the garage because I thought I might rewrite the speaker cab to 16 ohm and try that. The solder is in the garage.
So I set up the amp, cab and the PRS and tried it out to see what I got.
And it sounded fine. ??? WTF
It does not sound as good as the Marshall cab, however. :lol: But it sounds normal. On the normal side it sounds basically like my champ 600 did. On the boost side it's tweed. The weird crap we heard last night isn't there.
 
That is odd. I wonder if you had a bad cable, or didn't get something plugged all the way in.
 
The only thing I can imagine is maybe I plugged the cab into the wrong tap by mistake?

The cab is 4 ohm now. That was the only output the Champ had. I'm not gonna rewire it now, though. It sounds fine. I was just theorizing that this amp might like 16 better. But what the hell do I know?
 
I replaced the preamp tube with my JAN Philips 5751. Yeah. That made a difference, too. This thing is beginning to sound really good. The gain is maybe just a little light on the 5751 but the tone is much improved. I gotta get over to Ron's soon and pick up an RCA power tube.
 
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