Tube pre into a solid state

[Brion55]

A few months back, I was watching a video of a concert, but for the life of me, I can't remember who it was. Anyway, the guitar player's rig was somewhat unusual (which got my attention), but sounded great. Every now and then, the camera angle was just right to catch a glimpse of a small Fender (probably Champ) amp behind his main rig. It was sitting on some kind of stand with a mic attached, pointed at the speaker with a slight angle. Of course I couldn't see how it was all wired, but it looked to me like he had an A/B switch which ran to a Fender Twin, for a clean sound or through the small amp with the mic running into a half stack Marshall for a dirty sound. He had an effects pedal board too, but I thought the small amp was a great idea for getting a “full out” amp sound, but still under control.

 

[tapehead ted]

Time was I rejected all gear fascination and pulled incredible sounds out of solid state amps- Yamaha made some nice ones. Then I acknowledged the crucial role all these dynamics play, and now I'm a puriste gear snob. Improvement? The deer seem to think so.

 

[Printer2]

Marshall JCM800 preamp running into a SE output. The power level was too low so I ran it into my SS 10W amp. It was far from clean. Not sure if I am happy with the tone control though. When I get it all worked out I am going to scrap the output tube and run into a chip amp.

 

[Minion]

I have a 4 chanel DIY Tube/solid state guitar amp , actually it is two 2 channel amps configured as a 4 channel amp .......

It has a couple FX in/outs so i use some rack gear to get the tone im looking for ......

#1 amp uses a PIAA stack on a box kit for one channel that uses one 12ax7 with speaker simulators and a starved plate , it has quite a few tone shaping options but no tone controlls , the other channel is a totally clean channel (no audio curcuitry) that has a FX in/out that I use with a Tube Screamer ......

then it goes into a Sonic Maximizer and then into a 15 band EQ and then into a compressor and noise gate which then goes into amp #2 .......

Amps #2 is a 2 channel Tube preamp that uses 4 x 12ax7 per channel with a 3 band marshal style tone stack .......

Each amp has a 50w LM3886 amp in it so I can run two seperate speakers and each amp uses Realy switching activated with a foot switch ......

The amp sounds great , it does heavy really well , does blues really well but only does clean well with the clean channel ........
It is as close to my holly grail sound as i have gotten , to me it sounds better than my buddies Dual Rec ......

Cheers

PS> here is a pic of Amp #2 ....

 

[Passinwind]

In my experience just adding an SRPP valve front end doesn't give a rich valve type sound. I found it sounded too clean.
You really need more than one stage and maybe the added distortion of an output transformer to really get there.

That's pretty much my experience too, although "too clean" is often just fine with me for my bass applications. This bass preamp started as a straight 6SN7 Aikido build, but adding a 6SL in front and sticking a tone stack between stages gave a lot more "tube vibe."

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An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.

I run this into a 1000 watt IcePower module with an extensive DSP section for multiband compression/limiting and EQ capability.

 

[ITPhoenix]

Hello to all.

i want to make a tube pre-amp to try to integrate some tube sound into a solid state amp. And wondering if this is anything worth trying. I will be trying at my own construction of a pre amp. I plan to run it like this:

Guitar --> pre amp --> solid state head --> effects loop --> speakers

would this work at all?? and is there any benefits here??

Thanks

Guitar --> tube preamp --> cathode follower --> FX loop --> cathode follower --> solid state power section (NOT Valvestate) >--speakers.

The Valvestate power section is junk and will burn out prematurely. I would use anything else, but make sure you eliminate or bypass its preamp, if it has one. No point in having two, end on end.

 

[engel dela pena]

heartke lh500/1000 also a perfect example of this hybrid
buffer,tube pre,solid state power amp