best hotroding for normal channel of TR Silverface ?

[rocascope]

Hi,
I'd like to add some crunch on the normal channel of my silverface Twin (100w), and also add the reverb to this channel.
I must say that I did a cap job myself, installed a bias pot and put it close back to blackface specs.
I have seen different schematics from blueguitar, dave's funk mod and so on, but I would like to have the opinion of persons who performed different things themselves before doing one thing or the other.
I don't need a real overdrive thing but just a little bit more gain and the reverb on the clean channel, leaving the vibrato channel as it is.
Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences

[selloutrr]

check out

Great Tube Amp and Guitar Mods by Mike Thompson page 36-38

search amazon if you don't have the book you can browse pages,

[Bear]

How much more crunch? For a bit more without going JCM-800, the two basic ideas that occur are bypassing the tone stack or putting the second gain stage before the tone stack.

Allen Amps does a control that, IIRC, adds resistance between the tone stack and ground, making the stack less effective and less lossy the more resistance is added. If eliminating insertion loss is one of your techniques to increase crunch, that may be worth playing with.

There are much more extreme things available to do if you need more gain. Chaining the normal channel into the vibrato channel, for example, or using the gain stages as an insertable gain block like in a Dumble or Boogie. For the chaining approach, the problem would be that the lead input would be significantly louder than the clean input, just as occurs with the JCM-800s. There are tricks, but they add complexity. With the insertable gain block, you would want to do a lot of tuning of the gain stages to keep the tone together, especially with coupling cap and cathode bypass cap values to keep from having too much gain in the bass frequencies swamp the sound.

[ampdoc1]

Attached is a schematic of the Mender, a device I used to make and sell to retrofit Fender dual channel amps. Pretty much as Bear suggests, it allows the 4 gain stages to be utilized as overdrive, and puts the reverb in both channels.

The 1 meg pot is the OD gain. This was outboard on the Mender, but could be located on the front or rear panels.

For some sound bytes, check http://www.mo-toyz.com/

a'doc1

[rocascope]

very interesting,
I've been looking the book on amazon, could find some things like swaping tubes for 12AX7 and decreasing the 68K resistor on the input.
Chaining the gain stages, I think I need more practice of the tubes amps.
And thx for the Mender though I need to read it very carefully because the drawing isn't very readable to me.
Maybe I'll first go with the 12AX7 thing and also the cool mod for normal channel that I found in blueguitar.
Anyone tried dave's funk mod on the reverb channel ?

thanks for all your replies !