Duncan Amplification

This beautiful 1961 Harmony H304 came in for a recap/tune up.

Definitely have a soft spot for other old Harmony amps.

This super old YBA-1 came in for some much needed restoration. Aside from the usual cap job, it needed the filament wiring redone and the three-prong power cable redone (note to anyone reading this: marettes and electrical tape is not the right way to do this).

This old girl was also kind of a weird one, as it’s sort of a transition model between the tube rectified models and the later solid state rectified ones. It had the hole drilled for the rectifier tube covered up and everything.

These are Carbon Composition resistors (or Carbon Comp for short), and they’re found in older electronics, including guitar amps.

While carbon comps sound very nice, they’re hilariously prone to failing, being noisy, or reading wildly out of spec.

If your old guitar amp is exceptionally noisy, there’s a decent chance one or more of these is partly to blame.

Back from the dead!

This 1965 Fender Bassman AB165 was gifted to me by a dear friend, and when it arrived, it was in very rough shape.

The previous owner had sent it off to be “modified,” and while my friend owned it, it worked briefly and then died.

Upon opening it up, I was flabbergasted at what I saw: the chassis had been “cut” (more like pried with a hammer) to tenuously fit a new power transformer (one way too big for this circuit), an old 7w output transformer (from an old radio speaker) siliconed to the PT, unused wires from the PT just floating around inside, resistors hooked together and fastened in place with more silicone, and so so much more.

Long story short, I replaced the power transformer, every capacitor in the amp, every resistor in the amp (easier to replace them all than play whack-a-mole finding faulty ones), both power tube sockets, and a preamp tube socket.

Anyway, she sings now.

Some holy grail came in for a servicing! 1971 Marshall JTM45 MKII 50 watt (Model 1987).

Do you want AC/DC tones? Because that’s how you get AC/DC tones.

Silverface Bandmaster Reverb that didn’t reverb too well. One new reverb pan later, this absolute gem also received a recap, retube, and a fix to the annoying tremolo tick.

I also have a silverface Bandmaster Reverb that I’ve gone through and worked on extensively. Love this circuit and it’s great to meet bandmaster buddies out there.

New build coming together!

Building an amp that hasn’t ever existed before (which is to say the preamp circuit hasn’t been married to a power amp in one unit) is a challenging thing, even when you have schematics of both the preamp and power section.

It has certainly been a learning experience, swaying from exciting and fun to “wtf - why am I even trying this.”

After months of schematic revision (thanks to a few wonderful people out there on the internet for feedback), parts sourcing, designing the front and rear panels, building and wrapping the headshell, and more, this project is nearly ready to move some air.

Quick little “repair” yesterday. The owner of this Crate V30 1x12 combo brought it my way saying it just stopped making sound one day.

Guitarists! If your combo amp suddenly cuts out (but still powers up just fine), check your speaker connection first. If that looks solid, try putting a cable into your effects loop, if you have one (plug one end into the send, the other into the return).

After those quick steps, check the tubes (even though they light up, they still might have an issue - try tube rolling, or systematically replacing one tube at a time with a known good one to see if anything improves).

Failing these quick troubleshooting steps, you may have a different issue.

Master volume installed.

This Type 2 post-phase inverter master volume (PPIMV) is a very simple and easily reversible (should you want to) modification that helps unlock a tube amp’s preamp grind without blowing the doors off.

Bonus points to Garnet for having a couple extra holes in the rear of the chassis.

Coming soon: master volume magic.

Talk to me for five minutes about gear, and my love for old, obscure gear will come out in full force.

This old girl game in needing a recap job. Now she sings.

New build is coming along! The details? It’s going to be a 50w (from a pair of EL34’s), single channel medium-to-high gain beast that will clean up well with rolling back the volume on your guitar. It will have three different tone shaping toggles with a standard bass, middle, treble EQ section (with presence and depth controls).

More parts are incoming, so stay tuned for progress photos!