A New Album from Dark Fiber

Very recently the exciting and energetic new album from Dark Fiber was completed. The album is called FIBRATE. I co-wrote the album and did some co-production too as well as played all the guitars.

It was a slight departure from my usual style as Boy@Heart, but it has proven to be great fun and I got my beloved Fender ’56 relic Custom Shop Strat all over it. What I’d really be interested in hearing from people is if they can tell what amps were used in the recording too. The Strat was the only guitar by the way.

Cool, have a listen and enjoy.

A New Adventure Ahead

So just like I travelled to another country to begin the next chapter of my life, so has my Brown Fender Concert. Although this is not the first time the amp has migrated. It came to the UK from the USA (when I bought it) and now it has arrived safely in Holland, where I hope it has some great new rock ‘n’ roll adventures with it’s new owner.

It is sad to know it has gone, because I always felt that I had a secret weapon with that amp. In my opinion it is one of the most overlooked Fender amps in existence. It will out ‘Marshall’ a ‘Plexi’ (in my opinion), is tighter and more punchy than a tweed Bassman and warmer and gutsier than a Super Reverb. It’s the perfect amp and if I go looking for a large vintage amp again in the future the Brown Concert will be the first thing on the list.

Farewell to my old amp and all the best to it’s new owner, you’ve got a real gem there my friend!

Soon to be Parted

This is just a quick post to say that I am, regrettably selling my beloved ’63 Brown Fender Concert amplifier. I have had this amp since 2002, but since relocating to South East Asia, it has been carefully take care of by a good friend and fellow amp lover in the UK.

The amp has been listed on Ebay and there is already quite a lot of interest in it. It’s really sad to know that soon I will no longer have one of Leo Fender’s best ever amplifiers (in my opinion), but I can’t use it where I am, so I would rather it gets some love and attention from someone who can take it out for a run regularly and maybe teach it some new tricks!

I have moved over to the dark side a little really. For convenience and seeing as I needed a new audio interface for my recording system I got myself an Avid Eleven Rack amp simulator. I have been so impressed with it that it shaping up to be my main amplification of choice for all applications from studio to stage.

I still would love to think that I’ll have a big amp again in the future. I absolutely love the 4×10 configuration, so a Bassman LTD or a Super Reverb Reissue would be cool or even a 3×10 Vibroking.

I still have my Princeton Recording Amp and my Champion 600, but fort the most part I have gone digital (I’m still a bit shocked about that myself!)

So if you fancy getting hold of a fine example of Fender’s history then check out the Fender Concert Amp on Ebay.

A PRA with Minor Modifications

I love this amp. It sounds fantastic, pretty much like a Princeton Reverb and it has it’s own, built-in stomp box circuitry, namely an overdrive (reminds me of a ts-9 tube screamer) and a compressor, which is pretty good, although a bit noisy. The main reason I bought this amp though is the following feature: A built-in power attenuator.

Since discovering the convenience and flexibility of using a power attenuator back in 2002 I regard it as essential equipment in any application. Seeing as I was about to relocate to the other side of the world from the UK to Asia and I didn’t know what the availability of Fender amps was like there (not as easy to get as in the UK), and I didn’t want to ship my beloved 1963 Brown Concert I was attracted to the Princeton Recording Amp due to it’s compact size and heavyweight features. An all in one solution?

After a fault with the power attenuator was fixed under warranty by Fender UK, it has served me well in the recording studio. I recorded my solo album with this amp (plus a few guitar tracks with my trusty little Champion 600). I am also a fan of Tonetubby Speakers and I had a 10" alnico to hand, which improved the sound of this amp exponentially.

The Tonetubby soaks up a lot of brittle-sounding top end, but retains the sparkle. It also has a very tight, solid bottom end, which makes it sound somewhere in between the sound of a 10" and a 12" driver. It’s the perfect guitar speaker in my opinion. I also invested in some decent tubes: JJs. It’s a heavy amp for its size and now it is even heavier because that Tonetubby is about four times the weight of the stock Jensen (but sounds about 1000 times better too!).

In hindsight I probably would have waited until I moved and tried to find something like a Bassman LTD, but the Princeton Recording amp did tick many boxes by itself, including the fact that I already had my ultimate speaker to go in it, so no extra stuff to acquire to experience so much convenience in such a small space.

I haven’t used it live, but I think for a small venue it would probably hold its own with a drum kit and be heard. It’s rated at 15 watts with the attenuator off and it’s a pretty loud 15 watts. However in the studio it really lives up to its name. The attenuator can go really low without the tone becoming disappointing. Of course it doesn’t have the same authority at low levels, but I’ve been recording guitar for a long time and I have come to find that unless you have a very beautiful-sounding room (i.e. an expensive, sound-treated studio) micing up a loud amp sounds pretty crap. In a top-quality studio you can afford to have high sound-pressure levels and move the mic further away to capture more of the amp in context with the room, rather like zooming out with a camera to capture a bigger picture. In the case of most home studios in my opinion however I always find a close mic is the only technique that really works properly and that means you are better off not hammering your microphone with very high sound-pressure levels.

More recently I have been tempted by the "dark side" and have been using an Eleven Rack for recording guitar sounds, which I like, but the Princeton is still a great tool to have in the studio. It may even become a great gigging amp for me as long as it remains reliable. I don’t think there’s much chance of getting this thing serviced out here in Asia.

I do love it’s tone with the volume around 6 or 7 and treble above 6, bass on about 2 or 3. It has a very vintage quality to it, especially with a touch of reverb. At full tilt it sounds like a bit of a monster (in a good way) and to be honest I hardly ever feel the need to use the overdrive circuit. I guess it would be handy for gigging though. The compressor is fun too, but I don’t use it that much because I apply all my effects post recording. Again, it may be very useful live for standing out during solos with a band.

Released onto an unsuspecting public in 2007 I believe and discontinued sometime in 2010. A short-lived affair that never quite caught on, which in some ways is a shame and in some ways is a relief to be honest. I also found a guy who has two Princeton Recording Amps, which is pretty cool.

It’s basically modern, Frankenstein version of an old classic amp with some modern features added, which explains why it looks a bit odd – like an old amp with an extra, modern control panel added. Not that pretty, but it grows on you.

The extra features are: Overdrive, compressor and a power attenuator, which is a proprietary design by Fender. I enquired with Fender in the UK about how it worked when my amp went in for repair (quite common with these amps it seems) and my hunch as to how this thing works was pretty much correct.

The TIPA: Trans Impedance Power Attenuator works, in very simplified terms like this: (by the way I jokingly refer to it as the PITA!)

It sends the signal from the tube power amp into some kind of solid-state power amplifier, the level of which is then controlled by what Fender call the data wheel (not very rock and roll), a stepped control knob, which goes from Silent (speaker off) to Full Volume (attenuator out of circuit) in 15 clicks of the dial. The stomp-box type effects are true bypass when switched off and switchable via the included foot switch as is the FX loop and spring reverb. The reverb sounds sweet enough, but it pretty overpowering above about 2 on the dial.

The Princeton Recording Amp was designed to capture all the vibe and tone of a classic Princeton Reverb (although it lacks the tremolo/vibrato circuit) and it is pretty true sounding to the original Princeton Reverb; pretty much the same cabinet dimensions, except deeper and significantly heavier due to all the extra stuff it has crammed inside it.

I relate it to a hot-hatch car, like a VW golf. The standard car is fairly compact and modest with the GTI version being the same, but with about twice as much engine under the hood and fatter tyres etc.

It’s a loud amp, for 15 watts and the sound of the amp is still impressive at fairly low settings on the power attenuator.

The one big, bad thing about this amp is that if you take it to amp tech for a service, you may receive quite a blunt response like "Sorry I service amplifiers, not computers!". If you look inside the chassis, it looks like a PC! It may be a tube amp with a 50-year heritage, but it’s definitely a 21st Century design! Maybe this is why it has been discontinued.

If you can find one for a good price on Ebay, you may be onto a good thing. One word of warning though: Many people report of a fault where the amp cuts out in the middle of some overzealous playing at higher gain levels. I can vouch for this as I had this fault myself. It was repaired under warranty, but it still lingers in the back of my mind. I haven’t used my amp live yet, so it hasn’t been enough of a worry to think too much about it though.

Just be warned and make sure you can return your amp to the seller if you experience the fault yourself. Just to clarify though, it sounds excellent, especially with a Tonetubby in it.

Is it a Reissue? Is it a New Fender?

Fender Champion 600 Amplifier.
The above questions were on my mind when I first heard about the Fender Champion 600 Amp. On the Fender website it’s listed as being part of the "Vintage Modified" series, so already, there’s a hint that this is not a reissue.

It is also made in China, which is a problem for some people, but in any event, whatever your politics about the global, economic market place, it is a decent amp. I believe Fender made a significant breakthrough by introducing this product. For the first time in my life I simply went and ordered it online without really thinking about it. Kind of an impulse purchase, just like the little extras and the candy by the checkout in the supermarket. My view was if I didn’t like it then I hadn’t really lost anything. I imagine they have sold a large number of them on that impulse-buy basis. It’s not really a long, thought-out buying decision when getting a tube amp for $200 – It cost me £115 on Ebay UK. I mean, how bad can a Fender tube amp really be? It turned out to be a good purchase, but initially I wasn’t sure, until I modded it and then it really came to life.

The other advantage to it being such a cheap amp is that I had no worries about hacking away at the inside of it and treating as a testing ground. It just might be possible to turn this thing into an amp that sounds much more expensive. Those were my thoughts. So I set myself one strict rule: To spend as little money as possible modifying it.

So to make it clear. It isn’t a reissue, but the cosmetically it is pretty faithful to the late 40′s Champion 600 in two-tone burgundy/brown & cream and format wise it is the same too: 6 inch speaker and 5 watts output. Actually it’s slightly higher wattage than an original 600 because it has a solid state rectifier. The original one used half of the 6V6 output tube as the rectifier (as far as my terrible knowledge of tube electronics recalls).

Tone stack wise it is a different amp to the original too and after a bit of reading up on it and using my ears (very important) it seems to have a similar type of preamp circuit to a blackface champ, but with fixed tone controls, which initially I was a bit disappointed about.

A few years ago I had a 1955 Champ (5D1 circuit) and that was basically the same amp as a Champion 600, except covered in tweed with a "Wide Panel" style front. The control panel was the same except it read "Champ" instead of "Champion 600". That was a beautiful amp, even the little 6" speaker sounded nice. Of course it sounded small, but it sounded nice!

Back to the modifications I made to this amp. I discovered on Ebay in the UK that a guy was selling modification kits for the Champion 600, which corrected the voltage supply to the amp (Fender make the UK version 230v, when the UK has a 240v power supply), reduced the amount of hum coming from the amp dramatically and also, if you wish to go further there is a mod to alter the tone stack to be closer to a 5E1 or 5F1 tweed champ.

I opted to go for all the mods and purchased the kit to install myself. It was fun and it works a treat!

I have written in some more detail about the really cool Champion 600 modifications that I made to my amp.

One big issue for me with this amplifier is the standard speaker. I think it is absolutely terrible. It sounds ok up to about 4 on the volume dial, but above that I just can’t bear to hear it. I didn’t bother to upgrade the speaker with a higher quality replacement because of the other issue I have with this amp:

I have tried to mic it up for recording and as soon as I get my SM57 mic
up close in front of it, the hum coming from the amp is enough to render it useless for recording, even after the hum-reducing modification. I assumed that a new speaker would not fix this issue as it may be more to do with the proximity of the output transformer to the speaker. It is therefore not of the same quality as an original champ, but at the price it is still amazing.

Using an external speaker cab for this amp will give you great results though. With the mods, the Tonetubby and the NOS Brimar tubes (I replaced both the tubes in this amp) it is now a terrific recording amp. Despite the low output of this amp, it is still necessary for me to use a THD Hotplate power attenuator to keep the level down when I crank the volume knob, so as not to disturb the family, but I can get loads of great tones out of this amp now. It can even sound like a little plexi with a tube screamer in front of it!

All the mods, except the external speaker cost me about £40 or £50 ($70), which still makes it a very cost effective recording solution without using any digital amp modeling for you purists out there.

Fender Brownface Concert

Of all the brownface Fender amps I have played through, the concert, to me cannot be beaten. I am biased though. I have a 1963 Concert, which I bought in 2002 (pictured).

I am a big lover of 10" speakers. They are by far my most preferred size guitar speaker in any configuration. I really wanted a tweed 59 Bassman, as many guitarists do, but I couldn’t stretch to the crazy price that a Bassman would cost me, so I opted for a Concert, which was Leo Fender’s attempt at creating an amp to follow on from the tweed Bassman, designed from the ground up to be a guitar amp. I am still yet to give a Bassman Reissue
a proper tryout.

The Concert has a solid-state rectifier, which tightens up the low end and gives the amp slightly more power than it would have with a tube rectifier, maybe. I like solid-state rectified amps. At least the Fenders I have used that used them. I usually set the volume of my amps at maximum, using the guitar’s volume to clean up when I need to and I use a power attenuator to remain friends with other musicians and sound guys at gigs, not to mention neighbors!

The Concert has what I think is the most beautiful tremolo (incorrectly named Vibrato) of any other Fender amp. Well there are a few other Brown Fender models that had this particular "vibrato" circuit. I don’t really know how it works exactly, but the result is something similar to a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet or a univibe type effect. Absolutely gorgeous.

In June 2010 I will attempt to record a few sound samples of this amp as I will be visiting England, where the Concert currently resides and where I am from originally.

The solid-state rectifier enables the amp to retain a little more clarity when the power tubes are cooking at full volume due to having less sag. The sag from a tube rectifier, seems to make an amp more flabby in the bottom end when the amp is well into it’s distortion range. However, that is what a bass control is for anyway!

The Concert went through a couple of incarnations between 1960and 1963, which you can read up on at the Fender Amp Field Guide. This amp has been the one that helped me really hone in on what I define as "My sound". Before I got the Concert I chopped and changed amps as most guitarists do, looking for something that was just right. This amp seems to do it for me. This is even more the case now since I discovered Tonetubby speakers in 2003.

My Concert has 2 Tonetubby 10" Alnico speakers in the bottom and retains the two original Oxfords in the top and this amp sounds absolutely fantastic with my Custom Shop ’56 relic Strat. However I miss this amp because it still resides in England and I am currently in South East Asia. I was not keen to ship such a precious (to me anyway) vintage amp 6,000 miles! I may still do so or I may have to sell it rather than allowing it to remain idle for too long. It deserves to be used.

Fender Amp Page Categories

Fender Champion 600 Modifications

The Fender Champion 600 amplifier is a great little recording amp, but in my experience the stock unit is not quite good enough. The reasons for this are mainly personal taste, but one or two I believe are big factors in getting a useable recorded sound out of it.

First of all, here are the mods I made to my Champion 600 and then I’ll go into more detail:

• Replaced preamp and output tubes.
• External speaker cabinet for recording.
• Modified the circuit (voids warranty!).

Replacing the Tubes

This part is simple and non-destructive. It is also fun if you like scrutinizing sounds, which I do!

As soon as I took delivery of my Champion 600 amp and plugged it in I knew it could benefit from new valves. The ones that came with it sounded pretty poor to me. I went straight on Ebay and had a look around for good-quality output tubes.

Of course I didn’t know which of the two tubes in this amp (one 12AX7 preamp tube, one 6V6 output tube) was influencing the sound the most, but seeing as I like to turn the volume up high I started by buying a replacement for the output tube only. Remember, this is a cheap amp, so part of the fun for me was to improve it without spending too much money. It seems crazy to spend the same cost as the amp again to make it sound better. You might as well buy a better amp to start with!

I found a pair of NOS Brimar 6V6′s on Ebay in the UK and they were a crazy price. Something like £10 for the pair. I only needed one and incidentally a friend of mine had bought a Champion 600 the very same week as me, so I gave him one as a gift. I noticed a difference right away with my Champ. Noticeably better. Fatter, warmer, rounder and with some extra midrange, which made it seem louder. It was much less of a harsh sound. My friend thought it was a great improvement too.

Modification number one then was a success – £5 for a "real" output tube! Bargain.

With a step up in sound such as this I decided it was worth locating a better preamp tube too, but first I remembered I had an old valve Fidelity tape recorder from about 1960 lying around and not working properly. It had a 12AX7 in it and it was an original Mullard – Great, one of the best valve brands ever made. Unfortunately it was well past it’s prime and it didn’t sound that great. It had a nice tone, but it crackled a lot and was obviously close to becoming a deceased valve!

I found an original Brimar 12AX7 on Ebay and it was more expensive then the two 6V6′s I had bought previous – about £15 I think. After the positive Brimar experience I had with the 6V6′s I bought the 12AX7 (ECC83) and again experienced an impressive step up in tone quality. This actually was more noticeable difference to me.

Summary: Well worth changing the tubes. There are only two of them, so it’s cheap and fun.

External Speaker Cabinet

I thought about replacing the speaker in the amp and I may do so in the future, but this will be just for messing around. For recording I wanted a truly pro speaker and was still conscious of keeping the modification cost down (mostly for the challenge and, again fun!). Fortunately I already have another amp: A Fender Princeton Recording Amp. Seeing as this already has had an upgraded speaker, a Tonetubby Alnico 10" (My absolute favorite guitar speaker), I thought I’d try it through that.

It’s not a perfect match because the Tonetubby is an 8 ohm speaker and the output of the Champion 600 is 4 ohms, but it safe to use. I think the result is that the volume of the amp is a little less than if the impedances were matched. It sounds really great through this speaker – In fact everything sounds amazing through this speaker. It’s expensive, but worth every penny in my opinion if you are serious about guitar tone, especially in the recording studio. The 10" Tonetubby has as much sonic girth as a 12" speaker with the detail of a 10".

The best way I can describe the benefits I get from using this Tonetubby speaker is to use the following analogy:

It does for my guitar tone what a quality tube mic preamp and analogue tape do for digital recording. It takes off so much harshness and presents you with so much clarity, you can actually listen to the top end. The sound doesn’t fly at you like a beam of treble! It goes around you so you can listen to it rather than have it thrown at your ears.

Bottom line, try out a few speakers or just go to your favorite one. A bigger speaker will make the Champion 600 sound like a bigger amp.

Circuit Modifications

This was the most labor intensive modification and actually involved me hacking away at the internals of the amp; not too much, but it did void the warranty, which is understandable. I’m not an amp tech, but I can read instructions and use a soldering iron. I also found it fun to do this, but if it had been a more expensive amp I either would have got a professional to do the work or not bothered with the mod. at all.

There are many different after-market modifications for the Fender Champion 600 amp available now, but I went for one that seemed simple, practical and was based in the UK (where I’m from). I went for the "alnicomagnet" mod kit on Ebay, which is excellent, fairly easy to fit and comes with a really good instruction guide on CDROM. This modification does a few things:

• Greatly reduces hum.
• Sorts out the voltage supply discrepancies for the UK-spec model
• Modifies the tone stack to 5E1 or 5F1 Champ specs (late 50′s model)
• Adds a 3 position switch for standby and selecting between Pentode/Triode operation (2watts or 5watts)

This amp is greatly improved after these simple mods and now, through the 10" Tonetubby, it can get close to a Tweed Deluxe tone – to my ears anyway, which considering the cost is a fine, fine result!

I love my Fender Champion 600. I will post some sound clips soon too. If you use an external speaker, it is a great recording amp, but I find that there is still sufficient hum audible if you close mic the built in speaker. However that may just be my amp. My friend’s Champion 600 had a better stock speaker in it, which didn’t crackle like mine does (before and after the mod).

There are Fenders all Over This

Apart from this post being a blatant plug for my limited edition Vinyl CD, it is for the purpose of highlighting the reason why Fender guitars and amps are so popular and successful.

My Album: All in a Life’s Work was recorded by myself. I played all the guitars and bass too, which are all Fender, except for the acoustic, which is a Martin and the bass, which is a Squier, but for the price, it is every bit as worthy of being called a Fender as an original Fender (I’ll probably write about that bass sometime). All amps are Fender too.

So for a quick rundown on what was used, here goes:

• Electric guitar – Custom Shop Time Machine series ’56 Stratocaster relic.
• Main Amplifier – Pro Tube series Princeton Recording Amp
• 2nd Amplifier – Vintage Modified series Champion 600 (further modded by me)
• Bass – Squier California series ‘J’ Bass

There is I think one lead guitar part in the song "Happy if I Wanna be", which was recorded a few years before on a Fender Japan ’52 Reissue Telecaster, which I had fitted with an original ‘F’ branded bigsby. I sold that in 2008.

There is a beautiful Tonetubby 10" alnico speaker in the Princeton Recording Amp, which I also used as an external cab when I recorded the Champion 600. With the mods I made on the Champion 600 and using a bigger speaker in a bigger cabinet, it sounds as close as you can get to an old tweed deluxe for about 5 or 10 percent of the price!

I’ll be publishing more pages about the above-mentioned Fender guitars soon and I’ll probably have something geeky to write about them too in a few posts, oh and the amps too!

In the meantime though, you can download the album for whatever price you decide (including nothing) or you can buy the ltd edition CD, of which no more copies will be pressed. Conventional CDs may be pressed in the future people are still buying CDs that is!

Fender Set the Tone From Day One

That above title is an intended pun of course. My first guitar (apart from the Westone bass) was a Fender American Standard Strat. It shaped me as a guitar player and I am forever grateful for it. I decided that the best policy was to buy an expensive (for me) guitar from the beginning, so it would encourage me to stay motivated to learn how to play it! I could have got a cheap copy as a less risky investment, but that’s the point. A Fender guitar is a sound investment because it’s not a toy, it is a professional instrument and overall will tend to appreciate if you hang on to it long enough!

That American Standard Strat cost me almost an entire month’s salary, but I was still happy about that. It was well worth it in my opinion. The smell inside the guitar case was unforgettable and to this day I find that same smell emanates from the case of all new Fender guitars, unmistakable!

I didn’t have any lessons. I chose to start off by playing along to records, that I was getting into. One other thing I used to spend most of my wages on was CDs and I had a huge collection of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Blues albums, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Thin Lizzy. I had a lot of other genres of music too, like old soul records, James Brown, Bob Marley albums, but I used to mostly accompany Jimi Hendrix.

As you can probably imagine I wasn’t (and I am still not) in the same league as Jimi Hendrix, but knowing this I didn’t try and emulate him. What I chose to do was to play my own thing as if I was another guitarist in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, playing my own riffs and licks that complimented his playing. It proved to be a great way to learn guitar, but after nearly a year of this I found I was a pretty adept lead player, but I didn’t know many chords!

Still it didn’t stop me finding a way into my first band and moving to a new town. I made a load of new friends and a whole new world opened up to me. My life got a lot more exciting and fulfilling as a result. Amazing how an electric guitar could have such an effect. Yes I can honestly say that buying a Fender Strat changed my life in a most significant way. Thanks Fender!