tugboat1980
Tele-Holic
I recently ordered some tubes for my amp, a 5F1 champ clone with a 10” speaker in a Princeton sized cabinet, because I didn’t have a backup rectifier. Took the opportunity to order a few more NOS power tubes and a NOS JAN GE 5751 for kicks. I love the amp but it’s a little buzzbox with P90’s and humbuckers and was wondering if less gain would help. Holy cow. I’ve found a new go-to preamp tube for my Champ.
It cleaned up the gain, but there’s still plenty of gain since it’s a little Champ, but it gets fatter before it starts to distort. P90’s sound amazingly fat and sweet, and the amp handles humbuckers much better. The amp stays cleaner longer, even with Gibby style pickups. Generally it sounds to me like the power tubes work more before gain really starts to kick in, resulting in there being more “clean” (relatively speaking) headroom, it gets fatter, and THEN the gain kicks in. Just sounds bigger. Me likey. I never did care for the point where the gain starts picking up before the sound fattens up on this amp. I would always either run it clean or turn it up past that point. Now it’s much more usable and musical between this range.
It cleaned up the gain, but there’s still plenty of gain since it’s a little Champ, but it gets fatter before it starts to distort. P90’s sound amazingly fat and sweet, and the amp handles humbuckers much better. The amp stays cleaner longer, even with Gibby style pickups. Generally it sounds to me like the power tubes work more before gain really starts to kick in, resulting in there being more “clean” (relatively speaking) headroom, it gets fatter, and THEN the gain kicks in. Just sounds bigger. Me likey. I never did care for the point where the gain starts picking up before the sound fattens up on this amp. I would always either run it clean or turn it up past that point. Now it’s much more usable and musical between this range.
