Guitar Gear

A few days ago, I got a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, and as I mentioned, I was just blown away by the sound. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s nothing like the tube sound, and according to articles I read and people that I’ve spoken to about this amp, it’s a great entry-level tube amp that you can a lot of mileage out of. Since I’ve gotten it, I’ve been playing it at least a couple of hours a day – it’s that good!

After a few days of playing it though, I started feeling that there was just something not completely right about the sound. Mind you, compared to my modeling amps, the sound from this amp could be compared to swimming in hazy waters, then coming into a crystal clear patch of water. But still, the clean channel felt just a little “flat,” and in the drive stage – even with my TS-808 adding heavy overdrive – the distortion was choppy.

Before I bought the Hot Rod, I had read a bunch of articles and talked to a few very knowledgeable amp technicians about how the stock tubes that come with the amp are biased pretty low – in other words they run at a lower output level so they last longer, but this has an effect on the sound. So, armed with that input, I took my amp to King Amplification in San Jose, and none other than Val King (the owner and designer of King Amps) took a look at the tubes. My intent all along was to swap out the stock Groove Tube 6L6GC’s and run up the biasing just a bit higher based upon my reading, but Val did a thorough check of all the tubes and various voltages in the circuits, and I actually ended up not only swapping out the power tubes, I replaced the pre-amp tubes as well because they were just slightly distorting at low volumes. According to Val, that was probably causing the “flatness” in tone I was experiencing. So he replaced both pre-amp tubes and also replaced the phase inverter tube. Now, the sound that the amp produces is crystal clean, and has a lot of ringing overtones! I’m very happy.

I’m scheduling to have another mod made to the amp, and that is to tighten up the distortion even more in the boost channel. The new tubes helped a lot toward this, but I want a subtler, creamier distortion – it’s still a tad choppy for my tastes – so I’m going to have it adjusted. I’m also going to have the volume pot changed from a logarithmic-style volume pot to a linear one – it’ll make it much better for controlling the amp’s volume.