Tube Amp

[Ed Fowler]

Hi there,

Lately, I've been thinking about picking up a small tube amp (something around 10 watts). So, I thought I'd get some ideas from everybody. What have you used? What worked? How do they work with the freq range of the mando, seeing as it's at the top end of what a guitar would be?

Thanks, looking forward to your input.

Ed

[rico mando]

i love my tube amp! it is a 30 watt with twin 12in speakers and i have no disappointment in the sound. but 10 watts is plenty and probably lighter to carry .I think you will be completely happy with a tube amp purchase and as far as what to get , that depends on a lot of trail and error until you find what you like best.

[Rob Beck]

Hi Ed

I use an old Vox AC50 that had been living in my loft for about 15 years. My band and I gig this amp with my mandolin quite frequently, and it has always been fine!

Rob

[Chip Booth]

Will you use it with a solid body electric mandolin or an acoustic mandolin with a pickup? A good tube amp can sound great and very appropriate for a solid body electric but you will likely be less than thrilled with an acoustic instrument through a guitar amp. If that is the case I would look at the various electric/acoustic amps marketed towards the plugged in acoustic guitarist.

[donnall]

The Vox VT15 is a great little amp, MF price is only about $129. I have a bunch of amps of various sizes/brands
and it' my favorite little carry around and jam amp. Check out the reviews for more info.
Don

[Jim Hilburn]

The Fender Super Champ XD is an unbelievable little 15w tube amp with a 10' speaker. and you can get them new all day long for $300. Made in China to get the price point but it's really amazing sounding. Just straight in to the clean channel has all the Fender vibe you expect only at living room level.
Then the real fun begins with the modelling section. A friend got an early Line 6 and we could never get it to sound any good but this one has about 4 settings that are unbelievable. setting 1 is supposed to sound like a tweed deluxe and I had a great one once. This doesn't sound like that to me but it sounds like you have a good compressor plugged in.
Setting 2 is supposed to sound like a cranked tweed and I'm not sure if it does but this is a very useful overdrive setting. With the gain and volume controls you can get light break-up to pretty crunchy and it's all very convincing. Sounds great.
Setting 3. Don't get me started. This is Santana magic. Gobs of saturated overdrive. Hit it with a humbucker and it will feed back into harmonics but still at living room sound levels.
The next few settings are Deluxe Reverb settings and to me it just sounds better in the clean channel. The AC-30 setting is disapointing because you can't get it clean enough. But setting 8... Clapton land. Sounds like every classic rock tune you ever heard. I don't like any of the rest of them.
The effects are equally great...at least some of them. I thought digital reverb could do everything except one thing, a decent spring reverb. But this is totally acceptable. There's a surf setting but the regular setting turned all the way up sounds better to me. Some fun delays but with the slap turned to 10 your riding the Mystery Train. The choruses all suck.
BUT, I use this with an acoustic band and can play totally within the volume restraints and still get great sound. The overdrives and effects are just fun. Check out some of the demo's on Youtube of this one. You'll say like I did "a $300 amp can't sound like that" But it can.

[Jim Hilburn]

I lost my mind and forgot we're talking about mandolins, not Tele's. The Fender has an acoustic setting but I've never used it.
I would think one of the acoustic specific amps or maybe a Roland cube would work best, even though they're solid state.

[mandofarmdog]

A good tube amp sounds good with most anything. If you find a Class A tube amp, it will be loud. I have a Gibson GA15RV -- 15 watts, but super loud. Even my Epiphone Valve Junior Head is loud and it's just 5 watts of Class A power. The Epiphone only set me back 99 bucks!

[mtucker]

don't know what you want it for but probably better off with a solid state .. phil jones makes some cool stuff, like a really small acoustic .. cub 100, i think. Around 10 pounds an about the size of an auditor's bag! Not cheap but high quality.http://www.philjonespuresound.com/products/?id=13 click on video.

[mandroid]

Solid state you can turn it off and pack up and leave, Tube amp you have to turn it off,
then let it cool [so hot filament in tube wont break] for a while, maybe a pint's worth of time..

[foldedpath]

Ed, the reason you're getting conflicting advice on tube vs. solid state, is that we need more info on what type of mandolin you have (electric/solid body vs. hollow acoustic with a pickup or mic), and what type of music you play.

All the tube amps on the market (with one very expensive exception: Rivera Sedona) are designed for electric guitars, with speakers voiced to emphasize the mids and lows, and roll off the highs. That can sound great for some styles of music like rock, blues, and jazz, especially with a solidbody instrument. With a hollow body mandolin, you'll lose some of the distinctive "acoustic" tone due to the lack of high frequency response in the amp, but sometimes that's desirable in those music styles. A small tube amp like a Fender Champ or Blues Junior would be good for this.

If you're thinking of using some amp distortion, keep in mind that this can trigger feedback fairly quickly in an hollow-body acoustic mandolin. It works much better with a solidbody instrument.

If you want to preserve the acoustic tone of a traditional hollow-body mandolin, a solid-state amp with a 2-way speaker system is a better solution. In the small size category, I'm a big fan of the AER Alpha amp, or the AER Compact 60 if you need more power... but that little Alpha is a sweet amp.

One more thing.... if you want to add a little clean tube tone enhancement while keeping an essentially acoustic sound with a traditional hollow-body mandolin, you can run the pickup signal through a high-voltage tube DI, and then into acoustic amp or PA system. I've used the Groove Tubes "Brick" tube DI for this, but it seems like it's out of production. You might be able to find one used. Other tube DI's are available like the A Designs REDDI and the Summit Audio TD-100. Some people do this with the much less expenslive, low-voltage ART TubeMP, but it's not as effective in getting the most out of the clean tube + transformer sound as the more expensive tube DI's.

[Ed Fowler]

Thanks for the info so far.

I started with a straight up acoustic set-up: Acoustic mando, LR Baggs radius through LR Baggs preamp into acoustic guitar amp.

Then I moved into a pedal board with an overdrive that I use to boost the sound when I was taking a solo or playing some slide mando with a blues band.

That's when I thought to try a tube amp; to bring in that tube overdrive sound to the slide work instead of a solid-state pedal. I would probably mic the smaller amp into the PA instead of running a larger tube amp with a line out. I'm not keen on lugging large amps onstage. Trying to keep it small and simple.

[Rob Gerety]

I wonder if the Sarno Black Box might be worth considering?

[mandroid]

I'm OK with an un-tube Roland AC60, for my acoustic , Schertler pickup into the mic channel,
and magnetic coil pickup in the other channnel, I have a CGDA 4 string that I alternate with.

FWIW, a pedal board works as an effects loop so it takes the balanced mic input, and pre ,
then it sends the mono out , and has a stereo return.

[Jim Hilburn]

Ed, watch Don Anderson go through the Super Champ model settings on Youtube. You can hear that it will do every kind of overdrive you can imagine and it's totally natural sounding, not like a cheesy effect. With the footswitch you can go from clean to overdriven.

[Gwernen]

If you've ever heard a hand made 1 watt amp, they kick serious. They are just born to overdrive when you'd got a mind to do it. Zappa and several others used tiny wattage amps for recording lps, they really are all you could want. I've got a Fender Princeton Chorus but I'd trade for one of these little gems.

www.guytronix.com

check these out, and check out the sound clips. Also check out the various speakers available, I dig the blues oriented version.

[Narayan Kersak]

I used to have a great suped up Fender Blues Junior that was a 15 watt amp.

You can listen to a mandolin playing through it here.

http://ashevillemandolin.wordpress.c...ndolin-review/

I was more into rocking with it, but it had a great clean tone, when needed. My guitar tech rewired it to run cooler and replaced the stock tubes with some great Mullard style tubes.

[pops1]

I have tried a lot of amps, until recently a Trace Elliot was my preferred amp. Then i plugged into a tube amp i custom built for harmonica. An acoustic mandolin thru a Baggs para DI into the tube amp with an 8" speaker sounds more acoustic than any transistor amp i have tried. I feel an 8" speaker sounds warmer than most speakers out there. The amp is built to not have a lot of highs to warm the harmonica and it also warms the mandolin. Sounds really GREAT!!!

[Ben Milne]

I play through a Blackstar HT-5s (5w ministack.) and I love it. enough EQ and tone control and i like the fuller bottom end that comes from having 2x10" drivers.
Blackstar also do some HT series amps with higher wattage (HT-venue) in combo form.

I'd also recommend a Fender blues Jr. awesome little amp, and small enough to lug around.

[ShaneJ]

If you've ever heard a hand made 1 watt amp, they kick serious. They are just born to overdrive when you'd got a mind to do it. Zappa and several others used tiny wattage amps for recording lps, they really are all you could want. I've got a Fender Princeton Chorus but I'd trade for one of these little gems.

www.guytronix.com

check these out, and check out the sound clips. Also check out the various speakers available, I dig the blues oriented version.

I had a 2-watt version of this amp once. Actually, it would switch between 2 watts and 1/2 watt, depending on the tube you put in it. It was an AWESOME little head. Great for recording or use around the house. I sold it along with my Tele in order to buy a mandolin, but I wish I had kept the amp.

I now have a Fender Vibro-Champ XD that is a 5-watt version of the 15 watt Super Champ that Jim mentioned. I love the Vibro Champ. It's like an old Champ with all the added amp modeling tones and extra effects, and it's only $199. http://guitars.musiciansfriend.com/p...Amp?sku=483069

Reverb is nice. It's not a real spring reverb, but it sounds very close. The chorus, like Jim said, is cheesy, but if you set it on the least amount of chorus and tone it down a little, it isn't bad.

The other thing I like about it is that the speaker isn't hard-wired to the amp. It plugs into a 1/4" jack on the back, so you can unplug the built-in speaker. Then you can plug into the Line Out jack and run it into another cab or PA or computer interface for recording or whatever. I like to plug my acoustic guitar into the amp on the #2 setting with some reverb added, and then run that out to my Fishman Solo Amp. The tubes really liven up the sound - MUCH better than any solid state setup you can plug into. There is nothing that sound as good as a good tube amp. I run voice mics through tube preamps and every instrument through either a tube amp or a tube pre amp. Tubes are just necessities, IMO.

[Denman John]

I recently picked up a Fender Blues Junior ~ 15W tube amp and couldn't be happier. It was the best sounding amp I tried within my price range, and even better than the Genz Benz Shen. that I tried that was more expensive. It was rated at 60W, but didn't nearly have the volume or tone that the Blues Junior had. It's a pretty straight forward amp without many features, but it sounds great. I just picked up an analog delay pedal that really ads nicely to the acoustic mandolin sound. I'll probably pick up a chorus pedal as well in the near future.

Hope this helps

[Jim Hilburn]

After getting the Super Champ I actually sold my '65 Deluxe Reverb, the last of my vintage stash. It was just too loud for anything I do and the Super Champ is much more useful for what I need. But I can still go hear the DR anytime Haldon Wofford is playing nearby.
I wouldn't mind having a Blues Junior too but they seem to shine when they're played wide open.

[TonyP]

wow, talk about bring back memories....I had blacktop Deluxe that had to be from the 60's. Sold it with the 67 Goldtop Les Paul for what I paid for them, $450 back in the 80's. Guess they are worth some bux now, eh? I also had an old blacktop Champ my roomate, who was a tech, turned the vibrato ch. into an over drive. He had the schematic for the pre on a Marshal amp, and that's how he wired that channel. That amp would just howl! Sold it to the resident guitar wizard who went pro. I heard he still had that amp. Glad I'm over that phase

[CelticDude]

I am using a Vox AC4TV combo for a Jonathan Mann electric mando. It's 4 watss, and even has an attenuator to go down to 1 or 1/4 watts. The sound is great. However, it does hum, and this seems to be endemic to the amp.

I don't like the sound of an acoustic/electric thru it, so if that's what you're using, you may not either. Obviously, the thing to do is take your mando to your local guitar mart and try as many as you can.

[Ed Fowler]

Thanks everyone for the info. I appreciate all the different ideas. I guess I'll have to try a few and see if the sound is what I've got in mind.