I am a total gear freak. I have always been into tone. “Tone is in your head”, Frank Zappa is quoted as having said to Steve Vai, who wondered why his own guitar sounded like “an electric ham sandwich”. And I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Zappa: the touch of the musician is what makes the tone. Not having the fanciest gear should never be an excuse. But I’ll be danged if I don’t love to obsess about cool gear just the same, always searching for that “one more piece I need to get my tone”.

When I was 14 I found a mint Vox AC50 in the classified ads (before the days of Craigslist). The amp had been used as a church PA system in a rural area, and had possibly never had a guitar plugged into it. For a few hundred bucks, earned on a paper route, I walked out of that church with a guitar rig fit for a Yardbirds-era Jimmy Page. It even had the swiveling chrome trolley! Not bad for a kid playing three-chord punk rock with his high school buddies.

Sadly, during my metal years I gave my holy Vox back to the universe, in an ill-advised effort to raise funds for a more ‘metal’ rig, something rack-mountable with a lot of knobs, a huge 4 x 12 cab, capable of rocking stadiums. It was metal all right, but over time I found myself struggling with getting a good musical sound. Previously, I had just plugged into my Vox and rocked, never considering that every rig I plugged into might not yield such an effortlessly musical result.

OK, so maybe gear does matter….

Going back to the music shop to find another Vox like my old one, I found that I had paid about 10% of what these were now going for. The vintage craze of the ‘90s had begun, the internet was mainstream (along with sites like Ebay), and gone were the times of finding pristine vintage amps in church attics… It made a person feel helpless to see a beat up AC50 (without the chrome trolley, even) going for a few $K at Hollywood Guitar Center. Something was wrong here. The world made much more sense (to me) when all the vintage amps were hiding out in a basement, waiting to be discovered by some enthusiastic kid, not a jaded collector or well-funded record producer. I got myself another vintage Vox, ultimately, this time an AC30. Finally I had my tone back, but dearly missed the arm and the leg I had to part with.

…

I started making my own gear when I was in graduate school, living in family student housing, with two small children to support on my stipend. My gear-obsession lived on in full force, but I had not the funds to feed it with. So, one dark evening, after staring at way too many protein sequences, I insanely thought, “I’m learning to decode genomes, how hard can it be to make my own music gear..?”.

The first thing I tried was an A/B box. I liked the two channels of my Vox, but didn’t like having to pull my cord out to switch between them. So with a power drill, a soldering iron, $25 worth of parts from Small Bear Electronics (http://www.smallbearelec.com), and a diagram downloaded from the internet, I built my first switching box, complete with a couple of LEDs. Nothing fancy, but it worked and cost peanuts. More important, I had overcome a key hurdle: thinking electronics was too hard for me, and that I would forever be forking over my cash to those “other people” with the magical knowledge to turn electronic components into musical mojo.

Next, I decided I needed a bit more distortion, as the normal channel on my Vox AC30 sounded a bit flat, and my brother had just lost my Tube Screamer for me. I had always liked Brian May’s sound, and wondered how he made his wall of Vox amps sound so cool. With a bit of research, I found out he’d used a treble booster in his normal channel (built by him and Queen bassist John Deacon, if I recall the story correctly). They had taken a bunch of parts from a junked car radio, soldered them together, and gotten one of the classic rock guitar sounds of all time. What icons of musical DIY!

A bit more research uncovered that Dr. May’s treble booster was based on a ‘60s effect called the Dallas Rangemaster (in fact he may have used one of these on the early Queen albums). Moreover, sites like Small Bear and DIY Stompboxes (http://www.diystompboxes.com) had endless descriptions of, and schematics for, the Rangemaster and its variants. Here, I had to infer the key elements of the schematics – as no two were quite the same. But, in the process I got an idea what the different resistors and capacitors did – how a circuit was put together. You needed an input cap to filter bass frequencies – making this larger would allow more bass through, making the effect more of a ‘mid boost’, or ‘full-range boost’. This resistor prevented a switch popping noise, those ones biased the transistor, etc.

Part of the fun was hunting down the funky old Germanium transistors used in ‘60s treble boosters. These Cold War-era relics predate the more efficient (and now ubiquitous) Silicon transistors of today, but have a special mojo when applied to guitar. Luckily, Small Bear stocked some of these, but that didn’t stop me from trolling Ebay for stashes of Mullards being sold out of vintage radio shops! This was becoming an obsession of its own.

After melting way too many rolls of solder, drilling unnecessary holes, and repeatedly burning my fingers, I had a working unit! The interior of the aluminum box was an incomprehensible mess of disorganized wires, but it worked! I could easily nail Brian May’s tone (or certainly a respectable poor-man’s approximation of it) with this thing running into my formerly bland AC30 normal channel. This was fun, and I was starting to get hooked.

A confusing tangle of wires. My Germanium treble booster’s innards (see text). Parts available from www.smallbearelec.com.

I modded like a freak, changing cap and resistor values, swapping in new Germanium transistors until I got something really working for me tonewise. Before long, people were asking me how I got that tone and asking me to build them similar boxes!

My DIY pedalboard Left: A/B box, instructions at www.fulltone.com; middle: MosFET boost (from www.muzique.com); right: Germanium treble booster (see text). White plastic cutting board from IKEA.

Like any obsessed tinkerer, tweaking treble boosters only kept me entertained for so many months. Also, the neighbors’ unsociable banging on the adjoining apartment’s wall had me thinking my AC30 (the same amp Brian May used to rock entire stadiums) might be a bit loud for my environment. I needed a new amp. Something smaller, like an AC10. But alas, those were going for $2,500 on Ebay, again, way out of a grad student’s budget.

So I started hanging around www.18watt.com, learning first what an 18 watt amp is (it’s a clone of a small amp Marshall built in the ‘60s, known for its awesome tone, and now subject to endless experimental variations and tweaks by its online community of enthusiasts). This site contained all the information I would need to build my own specimen of this classic amp. Incredible!

“How crazy,” I thought. “I can’t build an amp!”

NOTE TO THE READER: NEVER TRY TO BUILD A TUBE AMP UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED TO BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL! THESE AMPS HAVE HIGH VOLTAGES THAT WILL KILL YOU IF YOU AREN’T COMMITTED TO SAFETY!!!!

Ok you are warned.

Finally pulling the trigger, I bought an 18 watt amp kit from GDS Amplification (http://gdsamps.com). The GDS manual walks the first-time builder through every step of the amp-building process. Although the schematic was intimidatingly more complex than that of the Rangemaster, the GDS manual was quite thorough, and the resistors and capacitors even had little labels on them, informing you of their values. These extras made the process a lot less confusing than it might have been, and ensured that I actually finished the build. To my astonishment (after just a couple of aborted start-ups, having forgotten things like grounding the center tap on the power transformer, etc.) the amp actually worked and sounded pretty badass!

Amp innards. You are looking at about 40 hours of work here.

Over the following months I tricked my 18 watt out to my own personal specs, reading posts on 18watt.com, finding out how others had modified theirs. To give the amp a Vox/Marshall-hybrid vibe, I gutted the amp’s normal channel and added an EF86 pentode tube (used in the very early Voxes, and later in some Matchless and Dr. Z amps). I read, tweaked, posted my results on 18watt.com, read the replies and tweaked some more. Finally, I had a totally custom, rocking amp, that kicked major booty in the tone department (and which you can hear, along with my treble booster, on all of my songs).

The finished 18 watt amp in my home studio. The fancy white cabinet was made by Swanson Cabinets (www.swansoncabinets.com).

Was my new homemade 18 watt amp any quieter than my AC30? The U-haul I saw outside being loaded with the neighbors’ belongings said perhaps not.

With a sigh of remorse about the harsh realities of apartment life, I felt that perhaps it didn’t matter that the amp was still darned loud: I had learned to build my own gear, a lifelong habit that would give me endless fun, an individual guitar sound, and save me the indignity of forking out too much cash for vintage amps.

-Robert Riley

http://www.myspace.com/rileysonus

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