Another Ton Geek Sunday ... Nautilus, Harmonic Trem, & more ... :)

[midwayfair]

There's a studio in Baltimore that has an open house every few months, and it's a small gathering of people who are pretty passionate about fancy and vintage gear. The place is also an amplifier museum -- they have pretty much every famous amp you can think of. They've also got a pretty substantial pedal cabinet that keeps surprising me with famous and rare pedals the more I dig through it ...

Here's what I got to play around with this time:

-The 1947 Fender tweed. This is one of my favorite amps in the whole world, and I talked with Dave (one of the studio owners) who told me a little bit about it and what might make it sound so unique. The circuit is different from the deluxe -- it's actually an RCA schematic that probably came with the tubes they bought, and not one of Leo Fender's designs at all, really. It preexists 12A__7s, and the preamp tubes are only 8 pins and lower gain than even something like a 12AY7. Before World War II, one of the most common types of tubes was a "Loctal", an 8-pin tube with a locking center pin. Tubes on the whole weren't standardized (kinda like now, but much worse), but during the war, everyone cooperated to make sure that components were compatible. There were also security concerns: If you're working in the field and you're about to get captured, the easiest way to dismantle your radio was to smash the tubes. This wouldn't work if the Germans had the same type of tube lying around, so they also developed a different type of tube (with out the locking pin). The Germans could have as much of the older tubes as they liked and they wouldn't fit in the radio. After the war, everyone was allowed to go back to using whatever they wanted, but in the interim Fender had produced some of these guitar amps that used what was becoming an obsolete tube.

What's it sound like? It's low gain, and pretty clean even on 12, but it compresses heavily even at low volumes. It has a big mid hump, and a very round top end with almost no bite to it at all.

-I got to compare the Cardinal with a 1960 Supro. The Supro has a little less phasing/chewy sounds at max depth, but when I back off the Cardinal's depth or use a darker pickup setting, they sound pretty much identical. Dave was really impressed, which was quite gratifying. I'm going to make him one as a thank-you for hosting all these things.

-I got to play with a Magnatone amp. I'd messed with this once before, after I'd made Bean's Quadrovibe and before I made the Blue Warbler. It sounds really cool. FWIW, I think the Magnavibe has more pitch shifting than the amp; to get that, you can just reduce the emitter resistor some. The amp clearly had more of a two-stage sound, though, rather than the simple blending mechanism of the Magnavibe, and the pedal misses some of the wateryness of the amp as well. I can't say that's terribly surprising. The Magnavibe is just Tim Escobedo's vibrato design repurposed to a vactrol instead of a FET ... I'm not entirely certain that they really intended to cop the amp's sound except as a sales tactic, because they certainly didn't make any attempt to analogize the amp's vibrato circuitry ...

-Compared my Nautilus (fishes artwork) side-by-side to a real Mutron III. I can't hear any difference in the same settings with the sweep at 0, and there's no additional noise with a clean power supply compared to the batteries in the original. So kudos to Brian!

They've got a Maestro Phaser in the pedal cabinet. Maybe next time I'll have a Stage Fright to take with me.