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.

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KaPLOW! There goes the power tubes… so I decided to take some time and really invest in the overall sound of my Marshall JCM2000 DSL100 by retubing and rebiasing the beast.  I had some great friends in the studio recording a few months ago. The guitar player Andy had a hot rodded jcm900 and I was really digging on the sound. I picked his brain and got some great insight into tubes and amp circuits, feeling brave I decided to jump head first into hot rodding my head (that doesn’t sound right).

So I decided to first try some new power tubes (JJ EL34s). I threw these suckers in and decided that I would go a little lower on the bias then marshall suggests. Personally I think they are a little too conservative with the settings. Marshall suggests a 90MV balanced voltage. This leaves the sound a bit bright and whiny for my taste. Since I wanted something with balls I decided to knock this down to about 87.5 MV. WOW punchy and tight great F**king power tubes.

The problem was that I was still feeling like I really had to blast it to get them to break up nice. After a quick call to my man Andy, he suggested pulling 2 of the power tubes and running the amp at 50w instead of 100w. BAM there it was. I was now replacing all that headroom with a warm crunchy chunk of guitar tone. I was ecstatic.

So now I had to battle the preamps. I ordered some JJ ECC83s (12ax7s) replacements for the original tubes. I threw them in and buttoned it up.. holy shit, that’s a lot of gain. Listen, if you want the most amazing death metal sound you could ever hope for, these are the tubes for you. Me, not so much.. So I followed up the order with a set of JJ ECC832′s these guys should reduce the gain enough to make me happy… Not the case :( although I did throw one on the V4 inverted socket which gave me some really great clarity, I was still unhappy with the overall tone of all the gain stages..

So here we are today. After a few more quick texts to my man Andy, I think I am going to get some Tung Sol 12ax7′s these are supposed to be really warm and chunky. I’m going to couple them with some ecc803′s that will round out the mids and hope for the best… Ill post some sound clips when the new tubes come in.. But I am crossing my fingers that I might just have the right combination…

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