The quest for my perfect guitar tone continues…
After a few weeks of playing with the settings, re-biasing, and changing out tubes I finally decided that I just didn’t like the power tubes, and that they were likely the source of my problems with tone. So I called up my friends at thetubestore.com and had them ship me a set of EL34B’s.
So I pulled out the JJ EL34′s and slapped these Tung Sols in. Now its important for me to say that I liked the JJ’s, but they just didn’t have that rock and roll sound that I was looking for. I wanted something more musical and just a little tougher on the bottom end.
The TS EL34B’s went in smooth, needed little bias to get them down to 43.75 mv. This is half of what marshal tells you to bias this amp at since I am running just 2 tubes at 50 watts. I also ordered up and installed a TS ECC803s gold pin for the V4 position preamp tube.
This is a beautiful tube. It’s really extremely musical and brought out everything in the preamps that I was looking to achieve. So now I am happy with the sounds… finally! Now I get to move on to the next phase of this project, micing up the cab!!! LOL any engineer will tell you that good mic position is crucial to capturing all that tone you just worked so hard to achieve. Ill try to write another post chronicling it with sound samples.
