Thanks for the kind words.
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Originally Posted by special-K
That`s really impressive.I don`t play,but am a music buff for sure.So,you can create old sounding amps for that raw sound or anything other characteristics desired from an amp.That`s cool! My brother-in-law is a professional guitar player in a roots r&r/blues band and I know he seeks equipment to get that "sound".
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I originally got into this thinking that I would build me one decent-sounding amp and I'd save some money at it. That was about 15 amps and $BOOKOO ago. There's just something about a saturated tube output stage that just hasn't really been duplicated in the solid-state world. Sometimes you can't hear it in the audience, but when you're playing you can feel the difference in the reaction.
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Originally Posted by Kinghat
Hey. I've done some BYOC and GGG pedals and am really wanting to build a JTM-45. How difficult was it and how do you rate the sound from it as compared to the other amps you have built? Also what company is it? Which amp pictured is your favorite?
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I've built quite a few GGG pedals, a few tonepad, and a few runoffgroove.com ones also. As for the JTM-45, it wasn't too hard but it was my 4th or 5th amp. I've got some clips of it on my server but I need to figure out where I put them. The amp sounds really good, a really classic JTM45 sound but with a little bit more breakup because of a little less negative feedback. I usually run it through a 2x12 cab w/ greenbacks but it sounds its best through an old EV-SRO/12 that I picked up a couple of months ago. The alnico vibe from that is hard to beat. I actually won the JTM45 kit in a fundraiser for the family of one of the founders of 18watt.com who was killed in a car accident. Most of the parts were donated and are top of the line. All the 12AX7's are NOS (philips, tungsram, and adzam). The trannies are Marstran. The chassis is from GDS. The board. Wow. Let me tell you about the board. It's built by Ray Domizalski (I'm sure I got the last name wrong) and it's a work of art. NOS mustard caps all the way around.
I bought the power tubes (Valve-Arts KT66s), some of the other small parts, and the cab which is just a black small-box head cab. It gets borrowed quite a bit by people who can play guitar much better than myself. The ironic part is that since I started building amps, my practice time has gone through the floor.
As for my favorite, it's probably the Plexi6V6. Which I sold. I needed the money for medical bills and sold it to a friend of mine. It can go all the way from a JTM-45/Tweed Bassman sound to a late 70's SuperLead with the flip of a switch and adjusting a variable feedback control. I liked it so much that after things calmed down, I built another one. Not selling that one. I've actually built several of them, all slightly different. There's just something amazing about the sound of a pair of 6V6s being pushed nice and hard.
Something else that is fun is running the amps in parallel. An 18-watt on one side with a Tweed Deluxe-ish amp on the other just sounds amazing. Especially when I'm not the one playing.
Matt