jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

dark terror = high gain amrshall preamp and a vox powermp, not unlike their OR15 (or the jet city 20s for that matter), personally I like the OR15 better, but I don't play a lot of metally metal

mesas suffer from a myriad of problems, the real icing on the shit cake is that they have overcrowded PCBs that can be hard to access without taking the entire amp apart so that a lot of fixes will require you take the whole thing apart for one lousy switching jfet.... come to think of it their switching is the worst ever, it always fails and you cna enver diagnose which little switching transistor is responsible so you wind up changing all of them and on amps with lots of option that are gfootswitchable this is a massive nightmare. The amps tend to have so many features that each switch or extra control represents another failure point and it takes a long tiem to troubleshoot these amps as you anrrow down where the problem could be in the circuit and then figure out which of the pointless switches and knobs is responsible! Its awful. Its a get your money up front repair because as it spools on and on you run the risk of the owner being unable to pay you for your hourly labor.

Its just a thought about the transformer, the combination of 6550 tubes and the dynaco transformerseem to be the secret sauce of the original model T. Try a hiwatt soetime, its a very similar sort of thing, but the design isn't just fender based, its much more clever. Anyone who likes Sunn will love hiwatt. Altough hiwatts cost more then sunns, but hey. It sounds like you would really like a 70s amrshall with 6550s standard (they put those in the US models stock because el34s had a high failure rate during shipping) and they have a sound all their own. Not for me, but they definitely bring those amps abck to their fender roots some. Fender guys love superleads and master volume amps with 6550s.

alright back to amps.... I HATE mesa, they're a serviceman's nightmare, steer clear... I won't even repair them for money anymore, whatever you pay me it ain't worth it.

depending on which mdoel T you like (there were 2 versions) its just a mega-basman, not unlike the earliest 100 watt marshalls with 4xKT66 tubes (baically a fancy british 6L6) isntead of EL34s... it so happens that the early marshalls are also very close in the preamp to the bassman, once they go to EL34 they start to do their own thing.... so if you want a small model T you're looking at a JTM45 with a solid state rectifier added or a 50 watt plexi with the early shared cathode preamp from the bassman and 45 that you could mod very simply to use 6L6es or a pair of somewhat udnerpowered 6550s for ane ven mreo sunn-like sound, although roe ehadroom too. Most Model Ts are pretty uch tweed bassman/twin type amps. Lots of amps are. Bass amps from plush/earth, traynor and univox fit this topologyusually... any marshall kit cna be made into a model T.... now, there was another short lived model T variant that's totally its own design. I like those, but msot people have ony tried the bassmanish one. Looking at the modelt T that's bassmanish, the thing that stands it apart is the iron, those transformers are hefty dynaco hifi transformers and the output transformer is going to separate the model T from a plexi just like a laney supergroup is just a plexi with a hifi partridge tranny (simialr to hiwatt and early matamps/oranges)... no biggie though, if you wanna get that sound from pretty much any abssman type amp just go on triode electronics and order their dynaco output transformer and replace what's in tehre and it'll probably get you in the ballpark. Use a tretrode, not EL34s (6L6es, 6550s and all their variants are beam tetrodes, the american EL34, the 6CA7 is also a beam tetrode with the same pinout as a EL34 and similar specs so tis drop in but has its own sound versus a true pentode el34 in the same circuit, van halen fvored these in the 70s)

any of these bassman topology amps really just differs in a handful of part values and the transformer cosntruction

nothing, warm up your iron and do it yourself, passive guitar electronics are so simple even a chimp can modify them

Thanks brotha. How things with the "Evil Bassist" today lol.

what the young guyon this forum? he's okay, I like him.... he's supposedly got a record for me to mix but its been like 6 months and it ain't done...

My MetalZone came back from AnalogMan & it sounds damn good for a pedal I hated, ha ha!!

the metalzone? couldn't sound worse... okay, that's not fair, it does what tis meant to do, even stock, I just don't get it.... metal stopped in the early 80s for me. I lvoed like priest, metallica, various bands as akid, especially priest but w kinda grew apart by the tiem grunge happened. It got sillier and I learned more about making music... at that age I felt that Queen and Zep were 'metal' (although that may have been the prevailing opinion in the mainstream then, thigns were still pretty tame, the 800 was high gain amps till)

uh, same old same old this week, you?

rock on!

flagged

I feel bad for suggesting even more tasks to the administrators of this website but I have to admit it's a little hard to find a faq in this place. I was expecting to find it in the footer but it wasn't there. If people keep adding themselves as pro artists because they don't know any better, perhaps this problem can be circumvented by taking this excerpt from the faq...

If you’re not a pro artist technically there’s nothing stopping you from adding yourself, but we don’t encourage it. If you don’t have a big fan base then nobody will really see your pro artist page anyhow, so it’ll sort of just be lost in the ether.

...and paste that in with the tips and suggestions section of the "Add A New Artist/Band/Group" page? I guess you can't expect the userbase to be modest enough not to add themselves unless it's specifically mentioned somewhere haha.

I think a lot of people use it as a point in their press kits when they don't have any actual clippings... it looks like someone's been writing about you and your backline on a legit, well known website for like when like a booking agent just quick clicks the links in the EPK deciding if you'll draw enough to give you an opening spot, they have to dig deeper to realize you're posting all the gear from your regular user account and these people don't spend that long on new acts. You can tell teh guys doing this EPK stunt by the fact that they write in the third person.

And I assure you better than 50% know better... it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that if you couldn't pay the rent without your day job but you probably could without playing shows, then you're not a professional.... the word has a definition.

that said, its a good suggestion to add it to the 'submit new artist' page.... in bold triple tall font with an animated gif of someone getting kicked in the ass by a giant boot....

we'd really prefer people don't make their own pro pages

or at least that was the party line LAST year.... where are we at now, Admins?

I'm really sorry to hear you're widowed. Okay I'll give the admins a go, thanks! Oh, maybe you could tell me what's the best way to get their attention? Turns out Mickey Melchiondo (aka Dean Ween) has two band pages so I'll have to hit them up about that as well. And it looks like it's the same thing for Aaron Freeman (aka Gene Ween). What a mess. Maybe if the artist forms on this site had another optional textbox where users fill in alternative names for an artist? That way if someone looks up Dean Ween, the server could link that back to back Mickey Melchiondo and throw that in with the results. Hopefully that keeps people from making duplicate pages.

we used to have a suggestions thread, but at some point it got repetitive with people just asking for gear categorization and 'used to have' on their personal equipbaords (which obviously we have now) and it got unstickied from the top of the general board and people stopped posting to it

I'll get an admins attention for these couple changes, no worries... I just want that stormblasterx guy to tell me what he needs changed so I can get it done in one go round

Me too I've a problem with a name. Someone can help me ?

link it and describe the problem, I'll try to get an admin to fix it asap...

we know moonlake should be monolake, admins... and then whatever stormblatxl here has

I have over 25 years in, just on guitar, so there's bound to be a lot of crazy stories, I don't think I have more or less than anyone else, you'll aquire them if you keep with this

now marriage, heh, I'm actually widowed so that didn't turn out either

I don't have any band stuffon ym soundcloud.. wait, the band with the evil manager has some tracks at the bottom, the new band is still keeping things on the DL, we're not even disseminating our band name yet, just saying mike and jim have a new band after like 15 years of doing separate projects

artist name corrections though, turns out they're the 1 thing that's admin only, so that's 2 guys who can do it for you, 2 busy busy guys.... so try to get the names of the artists right peeps, double check before you post

I find the easiest thing to do is do a search, find the 'keeper' on the list of similar items, click the 'merge duplicate' link and then fill in the url of the dupe in the empty dialog box... when you do it that way sometimes you spot multiple items that should be merged instead of just the one you were already aware of, it becomes a lather rinse repeat operation

I had some drama as asideman after that and then I quit professional music, got married etc etc... I was in a bar band when I lived in DC before my sonw as born, that had another piece of shit drummer and then my kid came along and I didn't have time, especially with all the crazy wife drama that ensued.... I was just dabling in electronic music on my own for years but now that my kid's 5 I started a new band with my best friend, our drummer is a great guy, very reliable... in a power trio that isn't trying to make a living at music there's less drama and its way more fun anyway

welcome, nice guitar colelction

no, no we did not, our manager wasn't doing the books, ever.... so when we got in dispute we had no way to track our earnings, she was just pocketing sums of money, ad this was one of my friends.... I'll never have a friend manage my band or anything again. Anywy, it all ended badly and the career she worked so ahrd to get going she just lsot itnerest in when she signed some more bands, none of whom were realy doing anything.... then we wound up in a lawsuit when she tried to block us from signing to a small label where she ahted the owner personally, and eh was an asshole but it wasn't really her call in the end and her reasoning wasn't anything to do with business, it was just the 2 of them couldn't get along. Terrible stuff. She ruined my career, not a good manager. She started outs trong, but thatw as msotly the booking stuff, beyond that? incredibly unreliable and often dishonest

so what I can tell is that the big thing with new orange amps, ones made sicne the 90s, is that the firste dition of all these new amps were made in the UK and then production moved to china and some people are worried about that...

from what i can gather its the rockerverb 50 you're thinking of which was originally a 4 6V6 amp goosing about 25 watts out of each pair whereas it ebcme a normal dual el34 50 watt head once the rocker 30 was discontinued (a real crime, that was orange's best new design). See they wanted all the rockerverbs to be different and they had apair of catode biased EL34s that were supposedly running in class A in the 30 so they decided on a quad of 6V6es in the 50 to give each amp its own voice. For whatever reason the 30 didn't catch on even though tis a wicked sounding amplifier. Anyway, thats the story as far as I can gather

I watched a video one time saying the Original Orange ThunderVerb 50's came out with different power tubes that's how you could tell the old from the new. I know most of my stuff is not vintage but would love vintage gear over the stuff I currently have like a ROSS Compressor, etc. I agree, "vintage" is like 70's & older but some stuff is harder to find ya know? I thought the ThunderVerb 50 was from the original Orange.

vintage isn't 'better' its what you like.... in tube gear vintage has an appeal because of the transformers whre they don't make them like the used to,,, in pedals you can addequately clone anything, no biggie... but amps? The iron has a unique 'time stamp'

I watched a video one time saying the Original Orange ThunderVerb 50's came out with different power tubes that's how you could tell the old from the new. I know most of my stuff is not vintage but would love vintage gear over the stuff I currently have like a ROSS Compressor, etc. I agree, "vintage" is like 70's & older but some stuff is harder to find ya know? I thought the ThunderVerb 50 was from the original Orange.

I;ll look into it for you, I'm unaware of any change i tubes, hnestly if its a pentde or kinkless tetrode in an amp with such a colored preamp I suspect it will sound the same unless you dime it

philly and proud of it! I have aklso lived in DC, less proud of that

I see

I'm wearing a game of thrones t-shirt my son gave me for my birthday, it says "I drink and I know things." Its fairly accurate

I went to art school but I work in heakthcae and can build amps because I'm not a moron. I can read a book, retain it and apply what I learned. Reading and experience.

no, you never need to change a working output transformer unless you want to.... you can go etween totally different tube types like el34 to 6L6 just by changing the pin outs on the sockets around to work and rebiasing... eengoing down to soemthing small like a 6V6 is no biggie you just have to respect the primary impedane so if the transformer runs at 16, 8 or 4 ohms with a big tube with a 6V6 it runs at 8, 4 and 2.... but even that you can get away with in a combo if you keep to the rule that low into high probably won't fry, but high into low is going to blow

I don'tthink we were signed that early on? its been ahile I'm aging rapidly

we'll merge them

I don't know what tubes are interchangeable. I wanted to get my Crate rebiased but nobody I contacted in SoCal wont do it. Maybe it's harder than I think. Guys on YouTube make it look simple, lol.

biasing is simple

you cna doit

inerchangeable tubes... el34=6ca7 kt77

6550=kt88

6L6GB=kt66 and 5881

6L6GC is its own hing but can eb itnerchanged with any 6L6 variant if the plate voltage is low enough

that's honstly about it for easily interchangeable power tube types in common guitar amp tubes

sorry, I just don't think of a 90s or 2000s amp as vitntage... it can be good, it can be getting older.... vintage is like 70s or earlier

vintage? orange had like a handful of vintage models and noe of them were like the thunderverb? that's a enw model. The old ones all share basically the same matamp preamp with a few variations with different poweramps... some are very simialr but they have differing amounts of pwoer and clean ehadroom, feedback loop changes and some little thigns int eh pre that effected voicing and gain levels.... the new ones are mostly amrshall and vox based with the cathode follower preamp and DC coupled long tailed pair phase ivnerter arrangement whereas old orange was 2 cascading stages followed by a low loss baxandall2 band tonestack right into a classic cathodyne phase ivnerter with a driver stage and the signle triode invertor. also DC coupled but otherwise totally different

only the custom shop models seem to share this vitnage arrangement.

ifyou dont like EL34s the direct pinout replacement is the 6CA7 that's an american beam tetrode version (favored by van halen in his pelxi period) and the KT77 kinless beam tetrode which is a british tube built like and american tube on crack with no midrange dip at volume. Hence kinkless.

You were opening up for these guys? That's crazy! Small world.

yup, I had no diea who hey were and still wouldn't but out manager said it was a good gig and it was

I've opened for gobs of famous people actually

I think I have pictures of the massacre show, it was that band's first big show... they ahd like line 6 heads and I ahd these giant plexis and fenders, vintage... it was hysterical

it takes balls to steal a name from Dio and Blackmore, even as your surname,.... or maybe I'm showing my age and also the fact that I ahd pothead dungeons and dragons friends. I mean, my version of being the dungeon master usually involved girls even then, but yeah, I knew those guys who were like putting on rainbow and taking on imaginary cave trolls. Those kdis in stranger thigns are no joke, man.

Oh shit I opened for these guys one time! probably 15 years ago, trocadero theater when this crazy gambling addict was my drummer and he disappeared into an alley to shoot craps with some hoods or soemthing and we couldn't find him at show time LOL but I'm thinking it wasn't thought through, the sword and sorcery metal reference now that I realize who this guy is... apparently I'm unable to change names still? or I can't figure it out because I didn't drink enough coffee.

both fixed

Later bro, we can talk anytime about gear.

Mike

definitely

Damn Jim, sounds like some good shit over there. I'm gonna take off but I'll talke to you guys later.

Mike \m/

I used to have more junk LOL, it was silly at one point... see, I got into amps and pedals when people thought old stuff was just old stuff and not vintage so I wound up buying all this stuff and its been self funding swapping it around ever since as the values of what I have increase all the time.

later

oh, and I forgot, I have that reissue tweed pro in my closet.... but I dn't play it much unless I want to use a tele

I remember when they were cheap also. What are you playing through now? Some guy has a Budda TwinMaster Plus head in Palm Springs. I wonder how it sounds. I also wonder if it's pre-Peavy or not.

I have paired down the collection lately, but I still have 3 different ac30s including my beloved 62, a selmer that I'm planning on selling, my matchless that I need tos ervice... and the jim-watt which is a traynor PA head with my own circuit inside now. Oh and I have a spare one of those tryanor PA heads stock that's more of the orangey version of that circuit, but it needs fitler caps and stuff and probably a circuit tweak too.

Lately with my band I've been playing my ac30hw at 8ohms loaded with 2 celestions S magnets with pulsonic cones in aprallel to get a marshallier sound, but we're going for kind've a cream thing more and more so that's a good mate with a 335 or SG to summon those tones at a somewhat reasonable volume for practice and jamming ideas out (which is still loud as fuck)

the new oranges have nothing to do with the original design apart from using 12ax7s and el34s... although msot agree that f you can stand 200 watts of fury the kt88 equipped oranges are the finest ones.... somehow I doubt that their weird little cathodyne phase inverter cna drive the 200 watt output section but hey, maybe that's some of the charm? I dunno, never tries one... but yeah, model Ts used to eb affordable, I know tons of people who own them... most of them are really amrshallish, bigbassmans, although they have better iron and a strogner pwoer supply giving them a punchier feel... erpsonally I always enjoyed the early sunn designs and wish I ahdn't sold the one I had

I actually think I had bought the sunn I had around 2002 LOL, probably for 200 buks? they were giving those away.... and ampegs...

Yes but Sunn model T's put out some awesome doom tones Jim. We all know about Soldano's & Lee Jackson modded amps. Are you working today or what? I gotta leave later to apply at some MJ dispesaries. Do you prefer 5150 or 5150 Pt.2 . I either want a Orange ThunderVerb 50 or the Buddah SuperDrive 80 I've seen on CL. Also Sovtek puts out some mighty Doom metal tones also. Which tubes do you like. In my next amp I want something different like 5881's, 6550's, or even some KT's. My Crate has EL-34's. I want something that sounds different.

we all know ALL sunn amps cna do awesome doom tones, just different flavors.... this is due to the enormous dynaco transformers and robust power filtering in the well designed supply lines

and no, I'm puttering around the next few days although I have band stuff going on tomorrow night and I'll probably be exhausted all day saturday

the prs se santana sig is good as an intermediate guitar, indonesian iirc but prs build quality doesnt slack. sounds damn fine too, like a full fat prs

heel of death... they made that giant heel to aleviate dead note issues in the small heel in the mid 90s, but there musta been another way to fix that because it amkes the upper frets uncomfortable to use and an itnermediate player should be working on using the whole fingerboard

for me, metal's a lot mor doom/sludge/drone and a lot of my favorite artists are sunn users. i agree, trad metal amps are def that post-soldano gain cascading thing. rivera amps are pretty metal too

I'm just saying I wouldn't call anything from that era a metal amp, they're just amps... no one was even thinking 'lts time to design a rock amp' let alone 'lets make a METAL amp' until the late 70s or early 80s, they just designed amps... some amps leaned a little in one direction like the ampeg V series, but you cna turn around and play jazz on those, you know? The whole specialized amplifier thing is enat and interesting, but the old design aestthetic was really superior which si way they never go out of favor. Anyway. Yes Sunns are very good amps, just great all arounders, sort of like America's hiwatt in some ways.

Guys I'm looking to get one of those small WH40 even though they are hard to find. If I can't find one I'm gonna go with a FYD low wattage MarCh amp. It has a Marshall preamp and a power section of a Fender Champ, Hence the Mar- Ch. Also I like other music besides Pantera, ha ha ha lol. Dime is obviously a GOD \m/ .

I don't thik that'll do that much for you, there's not enough headroom or transformer iron on a champ to give you modern emtal headroom and bass transfer with a marshall preamp which is light on abss and designed to feed the power amp very effectively... also, part of the marshall thing when you're talking about getting soem pwoeramp breakup is the phase ivnerter distorts before the EL34s even on like an 800 and ona champ its signle ended, no phase ivnerter.... I am ositive the MarCh will sound good but I think you may not care for it in this aprticular application, Mike

I would be looking at 2 power tubes, push/pul AB configuration for a tube amp for metal… solid state rectifier with a solid power supply design, at elast JCM800 good, maybe better. Big output transformer, lots of iron.

the only metal amp i'll ever play is a sunn. \m/

but i have never heard of that before-- sounds weird. what's the wattage on it?

sunns aren't metal, they predate specific metal applications and most of them predate the term itself.... the thing about sunns is the tube amps are just big blackface preamps (more or les) stapled to dynaco hifi amps, no joke... the mdoel T has more a marshall/bassman style preamp although one version from early on has its own thing going... I don't think the ebta and coliseum solid state line was designed for any specific purpose either,, but they did stick a fuzz circuit in some of them as I recall, because thatw as thing back then. Vox had set the standard with the fuzz circuit in their solid state line as early as like '66 I think and Kutom did it too...

when someone says 'metal amp' I'm thinking post-soldano.... even teh mesas with the graphic EQ weren't designed for emtal uses, metal guys just gravitated to them... soldano was the guy who really started to specialize amp design.... I guess rivera too, but not as much as mike soldano who really targeted the sort of tones these George Lynch types... I eman the guy famously was like calling van halen's agent before van haen finally got in touvh with him. ANd it allw ent from there with the 5150 being peavy's take on a soldano type circuit for VH that still ranks as a metal amp of choice designed specifically with the emtal tones of the era in mind.

Ironically, a lot of the original super heavy guys lke Kerry king have stuck with the JCM800 which is a design that's beena round isnce the alte 70s and really wasn't targeted at anything but a bit more gain and a useable master for smaller venues

anyway, when someone says emtal amp my mind is going to like 5150 of some sort, an engel or a deizel where more than anything, very heavy rock and especially modern metal was the design goal at the expense of other sounds a lot of the time