Never occurred to me he designed his own circuit, I just figured he copied some schematic like sophomores like me do. I'm which case all is forgiven, a most valiant effort on all fronts. But if he copied a schematic then tough luck show-off boy, you got to know how to pick 'em before you put 5000hrs into building it. Or get on first TAG and ask usGainzilla wrote:He's got a couple things working against him. Single ended el84 are sort of asking for it. Playing aside, there were some clean tones that sounded reasonably good, and in skilled hands, would shine through. But then he turns it up, and the harshness shows up. It could also be blocking distortion. He doesn't have a tone control so he's getting a ton of signal that would normally be attenuated through a tone stack of some sort.
You know, as for getting good clean tones, that’s not really that tough, especially if it’s clean at a modest volume. IME if an amp sounds great cranked the clean is in the bag, but if an amp sounds good clean that might be all you have. This is for vintage styles, when it comes to amps w/ 24 knobs I’ve no idea.
I fully agree about the difficulty w/ little SEs especially w/ EL84s. I’ve decided EL84s aren’t all that special unless you have 4 of them. For me there’s only one little SE that plays in the tone big leagues and that’s the 5F1. I wouldn’t chase a BF/SF Champ out of the house either. And whenever I hear a killer little Chicago Valco type it's also always a Champ style circuit. But I haven’t heard everything. Otherwise, I think small cheap SS amps easily beat out tube bedroom amps.
