tweed deluxe kit

[griehund]

Hey greihund!
Got your email and spent some time surfing the web looking for a ready made head cab for a tweed champ and had about the same luck as you did. Anybody will make one on special order, but only Weber has them in stock. When I built the reverb kit, I also ordered the cab from Weber. I thought it was pretty high quality and I wouldn't hesitate ordering another.

Thanks a bazillion,
Just for curiosity, the customs seem to be $150-$200 while the Weber was a $75 deduction from the kit order. Any guess what the price range would be from Weber?
Did I start something? Build it and they will come? :?:

 

[fronobulax]

... I'd actually consider trying a bass amp except that the Google searches I have done suggest that tube bass amps are either not very good as bass amps or not very good projects for beginners.

Hi Frono; there are '59 Bassman kits but for reasons known mostly to real (excludes me) guitar and bass players, the Bassman is maybe more revered by guitar than bass players. I guess I'm not sure that there are iconic bass amps like there are guitar amps that somebody would dupe into kit form.

And ... they'd get pretty expensive tube amp transformers increasing exponentially in size/weight/cost with power output. It's just a guess but buying the transformers to dupe one of Guild's pretty successful Thunderbass line of heads would run $200-$300. Without some agreement among kit-makers on 'what's a good bass amp design' ....

I've never been on a quest for tone so the whole tube vs. solid state is an intellectual exercise for me.

The things I turned up on line basically said that a tube bass amp requires seriously more power than a guitar amp producing similar volume and getting components to operate in the lower frequency range tends to cost more than the same function in a guitar equivalent. That may all be doublespeak for "a bass amp needs big honking, expensive, transformers". I suspect the cost effective solution which might still give the tube sound would be a tube pre-amp that would then go through some kind of massive (solid state) power amp. But then you're way outside of the "I built my rig myself" territory.

 

[Default]

One of the stories I heard was when the Showman (100 watt) amp came out, the guitarplayers would swap amps with the bassplayers, so the bass would have more clean watts and the guitar players could get overdrive at a "reasonable volume".

Went to a rockabilly bar last night and a DeArmond-equipted Gretsch sounds great through a Blonde Bassman! Frono, you'd want a tube Portaflex and you'd need to mic it, unless it was a bar-sized gig.

 

[Default]

Hey greihund!
Got your email and spent some time surfing the web looking for a ready made head cab for a tweed champ and had about the same luck as you did. Anybody will make one on special order, but only Weber has them in stock. When I built the reverb kit, I also ordered the cab from Weber. I thought it was pretty high quality and I wouldn't hesitate ordering another.

Thanks a bazillion,
Just for curiosity, the customs seem to be $150-$200 while the Weber was a $75 deduction from the kit order. Any guess what the price range would be from Weber?
Did I start something? Build it and they will come? :?:

That deduction looks like "no cabinet" to me? They do have heads under the Custom cabinet link. Looks like $165 for the one knob tweed champ and 205 for the two knob. Also specifies it's for the Weber kit amps, so it may or may not fit anyone else's kit.

 

[capnjuan]

... The things I turned up on line basically said that a tube bass amp requires seriously more power than a guitar amp producing similar volume and getting components to operate in the lower frequency range tends to cost more than the same function in a guitar equivalent. That may all be doublespeak for "a bass amp needs big honking, expensive, transformers"

Yes; that's right ... more power for equivalent loudness and more power = bigger transformers/more cost.

I suspect the cost effective solution which might still give the tube sound would be a tube pre-amp that would then go through some kind of massive (solid state) power amp. But then you're way outside of the "I built my rig myself" territory.

Yes; best of both ... warm tube tone sprayed around the room by a couple of muscular transistors. I don't know Ampeg's product line as well as others but somehow I think they must have tried that somewhere along the line but ... model name/# ???

If you are semi-serious about looking for a design, could live with a more modest 15 watts, and would be happy with a good-sounding bass practice amp and having a bonus of it being a surprisingly decent guitar amp (with one curlicue), you might consider the 1970-1982 Fender MusicMaster as a place to start schematic here (at Schematic Heaven which is a little herky-jerky these days) and some LTG MusicMaster chit-chat here.

The curlicue is the fact that the MM uses a small audio transformer instead of a second preamp tube. Otherwise, it's about as straightforward as it gets and would be a simple and satisfactory design to work off of. I wouldn't know how to spec the 'extra transformer' that acts as phase inverter but otherwise, it's a single 12AX7, the curlicue transformer, two 6V6s, and a 5Y3 rectifier which is the universal recipe for low/mid tube power tone goodness.

The 'extra transformer' doesn't use any power, bolts in, has 4 solder connections, and anybody like Mercury Magnetics, Hammond, or other web sources will ID/supply ... it wouldn't add much cost. Anyway ... just a thought