Looking for tube guitar preamp

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Hey, here's my situation:
I have a 130watt transistor amp and frankly, the sound is crap. What I'm looking for is a tube preamp I can rig up as a clean and dirty preamp and plug into the 'Power Amp In' on my guitar amp. This way I have a good tube distortion and the smooth clean sound, with a more reliable solid state power amp (this amp takes a fair bit of abuse live).
Does anybody have a schematic?
I was thinking maybe i could mod a mono tube preamp to work as well... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Mike
 
Mike,
There are numerous places on the web to find schematics for guitar amps. One such would be http://www.triodeelectronics.com
(They also have stereo schematics for those interested in tube gear.)
Aspen Pittman has a large book of guitar amp schematics called, oddly enough, The Tube Amp Book. There are schematics in there for Fender, Marshall, Ampeg, etc.
However, getting good tone from a solid state power section is an iffy proposition. The tone you get from an overdriven front end isn't the same as you'd get from the power section. If you want tube tone, you may need to go to an all-tube head.

Grey
 
As a fellow guitarist I would suggest looking into line 6 stuff. Maybe the POD thing, its not tube but it has a bunch of amp simulators and from the little I've heard sounded pretty good. Can be kind of pricey though. My friend bought used a tube head pretty cheap never heard of the brand though. I would think you could maybe find a Marshall JCM800 or JCM900 head fairly cheap. Still may be out of your budget.
 
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