The Workhorse Ax

Many great guitarists are known by the guitar they played. When one thinks of Hendrix, it's hard to see him without his flipped over Fender Stratocaster. Johnny Winter was the man who made the Gibson Firebird famous. Robbie Krieger would use the same Gibson Solid Guitar up to this day that he used with James and the Doors. You can picture these men with these instruments and you know this is the essence of who they are as an artist.

One of the very first blues records I ever listened to featured one of those iconic images. It showed the silhouette of a man on a rooftop at twilight, too dark to see his face. You can see the outline of a water tower in the background, in the foreground you see a guitar in his hands, it is lighted perfectly well however. In his hands is a Fender Telecaster it is plugged into a glowing block of ice.

The album is of course Albert Collins: "Ice Pickin'."

Albert was often known as "The Iceman," a name earned by having the absolute coolest tone in all of Texas Blues, if not blues in general. He cashed in on this persona with such songs as "Meltdown," "Deep Freeze," "Cold Tremors," "Thaw Out," and his most famous "Frosty."

But on "Ice Pickin'" he goes for broke and really cashes in with tracks like "Ice Pick," "Cold, Cold Feeling," and "Avalanche." Certainly a cool assembly of songs on one heck of a frosty album (this is still my favorite blues album cover of all time).

Collins was often referred to as "The Master of the Telecaster." Here is Collins playing "Mastercharge," one of his most humorous works:

This track was also standard fair of another man who's own mastery of this guitar is legendary to those who've heard him. He may of surpassed even Collins from the standpoint of technique. This man will never be known as "The Master of the Telecaster" but is actually known as "The Greatest Guitarist Never Known," a name taken directly from the title of a PBS documentary about him in the late 1980's with the same title.

This man is Roy Buchanan, from near Bakersfield, CA.

 

Buchanan is absolutely staggering to listen to, using a huge variety of tones. What becomes more impressive about Buchanan is that he gets all these tones from a small Fender Blackface amplifier and his Telecaster in most instances.

Seeing film of him playing really is the only way to demonstrate his prowess as a guitar player.

Unfortunately Roy left us early in an apparent suicide at a young age, we will never really know the full scope of his abilities.

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The Fender Telecaster is such a unique and primitive instrument. It is as simple as it outwardly appears. The classic bolt-on neck that has graced most every Fender Guitar. A slab-sided body with a cut-out (and a half). The strings are drawn through the body, by first passing through a steel plate that also houses a bridge pick-up and over three saddles usually made of brass or steel.

This configuration lends the guitar a very twangy and an almost steel guitar sound when using the bridge pick-up. This sound has been so synonymous with blues and country players since the Telecaster's inception in 1949. A favorite of the great cowboy bands of the time, who were some of the guitar's first adopters.

There is something gravitational about these guitars, when played, you can feel the warmth of the soil from which the trees came forth to create this ax. You can feel the roots from which this guitar came when you play one.

Simple curves combine, simple simplicity, and to quote a great banjo man, Pete Seeger, "Any darn fool can make something complex, it takes a genius to make something simple."

Leo Fender certainly hit on something good.

Quickie Post: Building A Cheap Extension Cab

This is just up for kicks, I neglected to take pictures for most of this project, but I am very proud of it.

I had replaced two of the four speakers in my Fender '59 Bassman, one had "opened up" and was no longer functioning. Put two new ones in the relieve the problem and balance it out. This left me with one good functioning 10" speaker laying around.

It is a good speaker, a 20-year-old Eminence Blueback.

My buddy Tony suggested I make an extension cab with it.

So I did.

My father and built it using some photo's in my "Fender: The Golden Years" book as a reference. What we did is pretty well copy the Fender Wide Panel Tweed cabs almost to a T.

We used cheap scrap plywood and some OSB.

Here is how it looked after fabrication and before my piss-poor tweed job:

You can see I used burlap from Walmart as a grillecloth, the speaker is on top of the naked cab.

I next covered it in this tweed-like fabric, also from Walmart. I eff''ed this part up good as I did not use contact cement to apply the fabric covering. The cement is used because it brushes on and adheres to the whole surface of the cloth and amp. I just kinda squirted some Tacky-Glue around and it looked fine at first.

But then I used polyurethane to serve as a lacquer, which caused the fabric to bubble-up anywhere the glue wasn't applied, so yeah, use the contact cement and don't do what I did.

Here is the finished product, I made the cable for it out of some components from Radioshack attached to some 14ga speaker wire, looks like hell but works fine.

That's all folks, thanks!

Modding The Champ "600" Pt 2

Had to wait a few weeks to work on this one.

Read on the Telecaster board that the speakers in the "600" re-issues are utter crap. Enough people had said this so I took it as Gospel and decided to replace it.

Many guys had crammed a 8" speaker in the thing and I thought about this, but decided that was not the easiest route. I ordered a Jim Weber 6" instead.

Hmm... What could this be?

P.S. Don't order music crap on the internet when you're kinda drunk or the label may turn out that way!

Well, it naturally was the speaker, which was very impressive at first glance:

It was hand signed and numbered by Jim on the side. The mag on this thing is huge, this will be important to note for later.

First, one must remove the old speaker, simply unscrew the unit and remove:

Be careful to align the thing with the screws, you will have ruined a perfectly good speaker if you tear the paper around the screw holes.

I tried to put the head back in the cab and discovered the 6V6 power tube was being pushed out of the socket by the new speaker, it's a deeper speaker and the mag in it takes up more space.

I tried this fix on Weber's website:

"Mounting this speaker in a Gretsch G5222 and Fender Champ 600.   From J.P. Glavey Jr. 

Some 6V6's might be about 3/16" to 1/4" inches taller than the Chinese tube these amps come with. To fit this speaker with the factory tube in place, loosen the two screws that hold the chassis in place. There are two machine screws on the
side and two wood screws on the faceplate.

Pivot the face plate out at the bottom. Cut a hard rubber hose washer to about 3/8' in length and place two of these spacers under the chassis faceplate at the bottom. That will cause the chassis to tilt slightly out to make the proper clearance."

Well, I did that but it didn't give me enough clearance, so I ended up using a pair of channel-locks to bend the faceplate of the amp chassis to give me even more clearance. I broke one of my switches that I installed earlier when modding the amp in the process of bending the chassis.

Oops!!

Note to self: don't bend the crap out of a perfectly good amp head while being kinda drunk!

I noticed at this time that another reason the head would not get clear of the speaker was the fact that the switch I had just broke also was hanging up on the top of the cab and not allowing it bend any further up and away from the speaker.

I spent the next hour carving out a notch for this switch in the amp with my hobby knife and a beer.

Looks like hell I know, but I painted the exposed wood black and the chassis covers the hole when in place.

And done, that funky looking cable coming out of the amp will be the topic of another post in the future. The new speaker does sound much better and does not fart-out like the old one did, well worth the $50.00 I say.

Modding The Fender 600 Champion

Sometimes you find something you like but you learn it can be something much, much, more.

Enter the Fender Champion 600 guitar amplifier.

This is Fender's cheap little "reissue" of the original Fender Champion that was first issued in 1948 as a cheap student model using an 6" speaker driven by 3 watts of electrical power.

The current "reissue" looks outwardly the same but uses a modified circuit with a tone stack from the Fender Blackface Princeton amps. This tone stack robs a lot of power from the original Tweed circuit that the original Champion 600 featured.

I had recently joined a board that focuses on the Fender Telecaster guitar-fiddle. Lots of cool information can be found there including as I would find, modifications to the new Champion 600 amp.

The mods can be gleaned from here, I picked and choosed from the many posts contained here within: http://www.tdpri.com/forum/amp-central-station/95897-champion-600-upgrades.html

I learned from this thread that if you lifted a resister annotated on the breadboard as "R19" that it would essentially ground-out the Princeton tone stack (this deal that sets the equalization of the treble, middle, and bass to a set value and takes away A LOT of volume from the circuit). Grounding out this circuit allows the amp to sound like an original Tweed amplifier that the Champ 600 was originally designed. Clean American tones and when cranked would turn into this fuzzy American beast.

Reading this I knew it had to be done. I own a Fender '59 Bassman reissue amp and love the Tweed tone and knew I needed my new little amp to be able to achieve the same thing in it's own way.

Another mod I read about was lifting the "R7" resister that would give it a more "ragged" tone, I didn't know what that meant at the time, but it did sound really bad ass. I had some of the know-how so why not? (A note here, I still don't know what the "R7" serves in the circuit so I can't really define it or give it a name at this time).

I really wanted the amp to sound like the way I bought it, but reading into the modifications thread, I learned you could simply add a switch or switches that would ground out the resister/s or keep the circuits alive in the "on" position. Knowing a small thing or two about doing this, I know I could do this mod myself in a small amount of time.

One other mod was changing the grille cloth that came on the amp to a thinner material that allowed more sound through and didn't muffle the speaker. The cloth that comes on the amp as-is is a velvet like material that is very thick, many New Champ 600 owners call this "The Grille Blanket."

The following is a short photo essay on what I did on the amp.

First, the amp as it first was as I bought it (note the grille cloth, it was very nice looking I will admit):

After removing the backplate:

You can see the inner workings here, the tubes that came with the unit need to go too, more on that later.

Pulling the head, the part of the amp that contains the circuitry:

The shitty "Noname" 6V6 power tube had to go, here it is if'n you want to look at it:

Clearly it was made in Chiner in Dec Twenty-Ought-Seven, but it looks as crappy as it sounds, the 12AX7 that served as the pre-amp tube in the model was marked similarly, but in red print. It was pulled as well. the 6V6 power tube was replaced with a JJ 6V6 made in The Former Yugoslovia or sumshit like that. The 12AX7 was replaced with an extra Sovtech that I had on hand.

Here is what the baffle looks like after I pulled it from the amp cabinet:

You can see the "grille blanket" that enshrouded it, I pulled the staples and replaced it with this sexy diamond print thing that I got at Hobby Lobby:

JJ 6V6 in place as a test, the new grille cloth helped a lot with letting the sound out of the cab and speaker:

Next came the really heavy duty mods, lifting resisters "R19" and "R7." This was done here at this point by pulling on the resister bodies with a pair of needlenose and applying a soldering iron to one end of the resister:

You can see "R19" lifted to the upper left of the green wires and the "R7" lifted to the bottom right of the same.

The two resisters are at this point grounded-out and their respective circuits they serve are no longer part of the whole Champ 600 circuit.

I wired the ends of these to kill switches and these switches in turn went back to where the resisters used to hook into the breadboard, in this way I could go turn these two mods on and off.

Holes drilled into the chasis to for the kill switches that I bought at Radioshack for like $8.00 I think:

Here are the switches and the wires leading to the resisters and breadboard (I made sure the wires went to the same parts in relation to the switch so they'd both be "off" in the same position):

Finally, labeled the switches to illustrate what the do, this was done with my right hand and a Sharpie marker:

The top switch is the one that grounds the "R19" resister, labeled "Standard" and "Tweed" throwing this to "Tweed" grounds out the tone stack and makes the amp sound like a vintage Fender Tweed amplifier. Throwing this switch gives the amp about 1/3 more volume.

The bottom switch grounds out the "R7" resister and gives the amp a more ragged tone, it is somewhat more subtle but very cool. This is especially true with a Telecaster bridge pick-up setting.

Final photo, mods done and a victory brew on the bench:

Keep classy folks, keep playing American music.