How did you get into the modifications of tube equipment and building some of the oddball things?
I think mainly because when I was in bands before and in doing Karate everything always sounded bad. I always used old amps and everybody's amps sounded bad and the one thing I noticed was that there was a huge amount of myth about tube amps and stuff among people like me and my friends. Not being high end blues players the information just isn't there. I just wanted stuff to sound good. When we went into this studio about a year ago to make the Karate record, I wanted to see if I could make things sound better. I read a lot of old tube manuals I would find at thrift stores or libraries. Like school libraries with engineering departments and stuff. I started to get a basic knowledge of how a tube works and why it is used. I'm totally a hacker. I know so little math, I'm unable to do a lot of the math work you need to do to be a real engineer. I really have this fragmented knowledge of everything. That's how I got into it. I had this one amp that was a '68 Fender Twin; Fender was sold to CBS in '65 and in '68 they changed to "silver-face" amplifiers which supposedly don't sound as good. What I learned was that the circuitry didn't necessarily change, the things that changed were relatively small for the first couple of years, in '68 and '69. If you know what you're ding, you can go in and rip out some of the parts and go to Radio Shack and get a couple of certain value resistors for a quarter and just make a few little changes and have a really amazing sounding amp. I just happened to have one of these [Fender] amps and since then I've gotten another one from the exact same year that's three serial numbers away from the one that I already owned. I kinda knew what I was doing when we did that record. I wanted a real clean guitar sound and it came out pretty good. So that's basically how I got interested in it...just having everything sounding terrible and everyone having amps that sound mediocre or don't sound good at all.
And they don't really know why.
Yeah, the myth is that you need to get new tubes but you can buy new tubes and if your amp isn't biased correctly it'll still sound terrible. A lot of Fenders don't even have a bias control. They have what's called a balance control; two of the tubes will be working really hard and two won't be doing anything. You'll spend $50 on new tubes and you're ruining them, basically, and your amp doesn't sound any better. Here in Boston, which is a huge music city, there's a whole lot of mediocre or bad repair people around and a few really good ones. I've taken my stuff out and had it worked on and it doesn't sound any better. There's one guy in particular who's notorious for being just not good at all.
Had you had any experience with doing electronics before?
Not really. I've always been into trying to fix things myself but I've never had any real electronics experience. The guitar player in Karate, my friend Eamomn, is actually this total computer geek and electronics guy, or was at one point in his life. He gave me my first little lesson on it. I was on tour for three months and all I did this summer was read electronics manuals and two or three really good books about tube amps. I just really tried to get a concept of how things worked. The thing that I started to realize about it is that there's no real physical metaphor for how electricity works. Like current is a metaphorical term. That works up until a point but when you start to think about the difference between voltage and current...current flows in one direction but what's called holes, this sort of negative space which creates voltage, moves in the other direction simultaneously and it's just kind of weird. The metaphors just kind of break down. You have a certain degree of that and then you have this practical knowledge and you know that if you change these two resistors that it's gonna sound good or it's gonna sound different. It's not something that I've been able to figure out. If anybody has that total grasp on it then that's great for them! It's really difficult!
What are some of the books on tube amps that you mentioned?
There's three books that are really good. The first one I read was by a guy named Gerald Weber and it's called A Desktop Reference of Hip Vintage Guitar Amps and it's kinda cheesy but it's good. He was a weekend-warrior blues guitar player and he was in the meat packing industry and he got rich packing meat. He wanted to buy the best tube amp and there wasn't a good tube amp, in the 80's, to buy. So he learned about them and built one and now he has this company called Kendrick Amplifiers which, if you ever get the chance to hear one, it's a treat. I don't know any punk rockers who would spend $2500 on an amp but we played in Florida over the summer and the club next door was a blues club and I went over there and there was this really amazing guitar player playing one and it's just a treat how good they sound. You don't realize what a guitar can sound like til you hear one. But, anyway, his book is basically a whole bunch of excerpts from his writing for Vintage Guitar magazine and it's also got all the Fender schematics and the great thing about the Fender schematics, that no other amp company ever did, is that Fender printed layouts of amps. A schematic isn't a physical layout. It has a schematic on the top of the page and the layout on the bottom.
Where the parts are on the circuit board.
Which is really valuable when you're not that versed in reading schematics. The thing about this book is that it's really poorly written, actually all three of the books are really poorly written. There's a lot of really great stuff that you have to dig for. Little tricks you can do. For example, you can buy a resistor at Radio Shack and solder it to a couple of RCA plugs and plug it into the reverb in and out and use the reverb foot pedal and you have an extra gain stage. It actually sounds really good. That's what I used in Karate for a couple of years. There's another book by this guy Aspen Pittman, who runs Groove Tubes, and it's called The Tube Amp Book and it's volume 4.1 by now. That one's cool 'cause its got a lot of pictures of all these old amps and stuff and it's really and has reproductions of all these old Fender ads and everything. But it's also a huge ad for Groove Tubes which is kinda annoying. My personal opinion is that they're more of a marketing company. I can't tell the difference between them [Groove Tubes] and Sovteks, which cost half as much. The great thing about that book is that it has this little part of it in the back that has this step-by-step way to troubleshoot an amp. Where to start looking for problems. It's a way to service tube radios; this system you can use to troubleshoot amplifiers, and I've never seen that printed anywhere else. It's really valuable just for that. The other one is a book called Dave Funk's Tube Amp Workbook. This guy Dave Funk is really a total goofball. He's a genius, a real electrical engineer, and he's worked designing lab equipment and everything that you can imagine. But he's a terrible writer. The book's terribly written. I have a Masters in English and I edited journals and everything like that but I don't think I could have read these books without having that knowledge. There's a lot of stuff in there that's really valuable. To really get a sense of what I was doing, just being completely ignorant, I had to read all three of them a lot. The Kendrick book in particular is really great, down-to-earth and the most accessible of all of them.
What other kind of modifications have you done to amps?
