A DIY practice guitar Amp? Yeah, that sounds good!
I’m not sure if I was just bored, or I have a persistent jones to buy some guitar gear, but I was looking at low-wattage tube practice amps today. I’ve been down the 100 watt half-stack road already (a VHT Pittbull Ultralead, if you must know) and failed miserably. In retrospect, it was a huge mistake. Buying the Ultralead was nearly as fatal to my playing as selling my seafoam PRS EG-3. I should have stuck with a small practice amp that I could actually play in the confines of my apartment.
You know, a small tube amp with maybe 5-10 watts with a single 10” speaker. In other words, great tone in small, easy to use package. Sort of like what I stumbled into at AX84 today. As far as I can tell, it’s a community site for building DIY, low-wattage guitar amps today. Neat. There are a couple of different flavors:
- AX84 P1 - A great first tube amp project with surprisingly good tone.
- California Dreamer - Go for that blackface tone
- FireFly - A low-wattage “bedroom practice/recording amp” with a 12au7 triode output stage.
- High-Octane - A simple tube power amp combined with a great hi-gain preamp.
- November - Capture the tone of a classic “plexi” head, without the ear crushing volume.
- October - A little bit of Leo, a little bit of Jim, the October gives a variety of vintage tones.
- P1-eXtreme - The P1 eXtreme is an evolution of the P1 amplifier which pushes the original design out to the limits and part way into HO territory.
- P2 - Go from P1 clean to Octane grind in the same amp.
- Renegade - Combine a Hot Channel-Switching Preamp with a Push-Pull EL34 Output Stage!
Some of the designs are still in the early stages of development, but others like the P1 and November sound great. Yep, there are even .mp3 samples on the site so you can get an idea what each of the amps sound like before you jump in. November sounds great, especially Mark Huss’ 6V6-powered version. Not up to my current fav small amp, the Bogner Metropolis, but they’re not bad. Not bad at all.
I’m not sure how I can justify building a guitar amp when I don’t even play guitar very well anymore at all. Still, I can’t help but think that building one of these little guys and throwing it in a wood cabinet with a wicker grill—a la some of the old Mesa Boogie gear—would be a trip. There’s even a company that sells kits. Nice. I could probably do this one without any kind of kit, but having a pre-punched chassis would make it go sooo much faster.
Hmmm… something to consider once I get the Borbely EB-396 working.