Headless Guitar Kit Revisit (non PBG kit)

[Simon Barden]

The two people who started me off playing guitar both had 1960s AC30s - one was a combo, one a head and cab. But mid-late '70s, they were cheap amps - old and very few people wanted their sound at the time (apart from Brian May). They were very loud and it was rare that you could turn them up enough to get them really singing. Even though they were transistor amps, a lot of people were using HH combos because you could get a distorted sound at any volume.

Master volume valve amps were just coming into fashion, but being new, they were relatively expensive, and you still had to turn them up to get a good sound out of them that wasn't all fizzy. Most were 50W or 100W amps, so pretty loud. But this was before the days of decently powerful portable PAs, so in bigger venues, you needed the amp power. Great fun, but the cause of a lot of hearing damage.

[DrNomis_44]

The two people who started me off playing guitar both had 1960s AC30s - one was a combo, one a head and cab. But mid-late '70s, they were cheap amps - old and very few people wanted their sound at the time (apart from Brian May). They were very loud and it was rare that you could turn them up enough to get them really singing. Even though they were transistor amps, a lot of people were using HH combos because you could get a distorted sound at any volume.

Master volume valve amps were just coming into fashion, but being new, they were relatively expensive, and you still had to turn them up to get a good sound out of them that wasn't all fizzy. Most were 50W or 100W amps, so pretty loud. But this was before the days of decently powerful portable PAs, so in bigger venues, you needed the amp power. Great fun, but the cause of a lot of hearing damage.

I think I can remember playing through a couple of HH amps, they definitely have a distinctive sound which is very 70's, Marc Bolan from T Rex used an HH Solid State preamp as part of his stage rig, this one time I was asked to play bass guitar for a mate's band that was playing an after-wedding gig, anyway, I needed an amp to play through and ended up borrowing an HH amp head, I managed to get a pretty good tone out of it, which is interesting because I seem to recall that they used LM741 ICs in the preamp circuitry, and the LM741 wasn't known for being a good Op Amp IC for Audio, but somehow they seem to work pretty well, HH amps have a certain kind of warmth to them that's kind of like a valve amp, the distortion sound wasn't that gainy, it basically added a slight fuzzy-ness to the sound.

I've watched some youtube videos of Vox AC30s being overdriven with a Rangemaster Treble Booster, I though that the tone was pretty unique so I ended up building a Rangemaster pedal, I used an AC128 PNP Germanium transistor in it if my memory serves me right, it seemed to work pretty well, I've got quite a few old 60's Philco Surface Barrier transistors, which I bought on eBay, I weeded out all the bad ones and put all the good ones in a cardboard box so I could use them to build some vintage Fuzz pedals.