Guitar Amp help

[peegee]

Im going mad, can anyone give me information about a a simpel solid state amp to start (i've never made an amp before) Fetts are even better. I got a small combo of danelectro, Nifty Fifty to be exact can any give me the schematic for it and maybe even tell me how i can double the power (15 --> 30 watt)
Thx
Regards Piet.

[Giaime]

For power amp just use a Gainclone, see in the Chip Amp forum or here at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/nuukspot/decdun/index.html

For preamp, make some sort of fet preamp like these listed here:
http://www.runoffgroove.com/articles.html

Happy buid!

[teemuk]

Originally posted by Giaime
For power amp just use a Gainclone, see in the Chip Amp forum or here at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/nuukspot/decdun/index.html

Yeah, GC - or any other chip amp - design is simple enough to start with. Also, GC has quite much power which is a good thing for a solid state guitar amp. With GC's amount of power you'd better concentrate on building a good power supply too. For less power than typical Gainclone there are also other chip amps like TDA-series.

Peegee, forums like these are an easy path to get everything served on a plate. Don't fall on that trick. I advice you to read thoroughly some articles from the chip amps forum. You will soon bumb into other links than just the one above, plus you get some insight to chip amp designing tricks.
Also, run a google search of solid state guitar amp schematics. There are plenty of Marshall and Fender schematics around the internet that use a chip amps as power amplifiers. If you don't find them on the first search try more or check the links of pages concerning the issue. Gather yourself as much as you can these schematics. Studying them will give you some valuable reference allthough you'd never end up building them.

Originally posted by Giaime
For preamp, make some sort of fet preamp like these listed here:
http://www.runoffgroove.com/articles.html

Peegee, keep in mind that almost all the circuits in the runoffgroove.com are designed to make distortion. What you probably need from the preamp instead of distortion is just clean amplification and some frequency shaping. Distorting amplifier may become quite limiting in a time. You can later add a distortion channel when you get the power amplifier stage and every other thing to work.

The GC is said to work better with a buffer so my advice would be to experiment with a preamp like this: Simple jfet amplifier stage (like the runoffgroove's Fetzer valve), a fender tonestack or something similar, another simple amplifier stage, jfet buffer. Then just adjust it to fit to GC design.

Build the preamp on a different board than the poweramp, that way you can change or improve it without touching the poweramp in a case that the preamp doesn't suit your needs.


Teemu K

[Giaime]

In fact I was thinking about that little jfet pre built based on a Fender Tweed... they say it's fairly clean...

But if you aren't sure about the power amp, don't use a distortion preamp: if the pwr distorts you won't know... better to implement a system for rapid exchange of the pre.