Ep. 124: "Night Train"

The Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons

It's the 124th installment of the Truth About Vintage Amps with Skip Simmons: Conductive paints, speaker impedance mismatches, pizza hacks and lots of dad jokes! Want to be a part of our show? Just email us a question or voice memo to [e-mail].

Our sponsors are Emerald City Guitars, Amplified Parts, Stringjoy Strings, and Grez Guitars. Some of the topics discussed this week:

:57 Skip works on a Jim Kelley Amp

6:30 Rancho Gordo beans, redux

7:49 Converting a SF Champ to the Princeton schematic and recommended plate voltages; Skip makes a tweed Harvard out of a Champ; pilot light washers from Daniel Petrzelka (Instagram: @dpetrzelka)

13:39 The 1970s Whole Earth Catalogs are now online (link)

15:21 What makes a great A/B box?

17:24 A '55 Tweed Bassman with a replaced output transformer and 7025s; Skip finishes the Tweed Deluxe overhaul

25:41 Impedance mismatches in 1950s Fender amps, using the external speaker output

31:26 Did David Lindley play on the Rockford Files theme song? Toots Thielemans

33:43 Eminence, Kentucky and Colonel Sanders

35:07 Can anything other than tubes be microphonic; the one-wire mod to have the reverb and tremolo on both channels on a Fender

37:12 Fuse-eating rectifier tubes on a Victoria Bandmaster clone; 5U4 vs GZ34 tubes

39:38 Converting a '50s Philco record player console for guitar use; Commander Cody; the Louvin Brothers' 'Satan Is Real'

43:26 Bringing up an old amp on a Variac

48:49 Experiments with conductive paints 52:36 Very loud noise floor in a low-wattage amp 56:21 A tube amp setup to compliment the Fender Tonemaster Pro 1:00:00 Biasing an old record player amp 1:05:22 Homemade pizza hacks, pizza stones, buying dough, Don Pepino, Rainier beer

Hosted by amp tech Skip Simmons and co-hosted/produced by Jason Verlinde of the Fretboard Journal.

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