Guitar Gear Forum

Hello all. I recently got my old first amp back from a friend... a crap-tastic Fender SP-10! So, I figured now is as good a time as any to get a bit handier with a soldering iron, and to start messing around with modding.

So, I was wondering if any of you could help me by telling me some simple modifications that could be done. No, I'm not putting a new speaker on this thing... don't quite have the funds to do so if I wanted to... I'm just looking at getting a bit more experience with this type of stuff.

Anything like snipping a diode here, or adding one there... small stuff like that. I have an abundance of random old and broken electronics around, so I can salvage parts from those. I've tried looking for mods for the SP-10 online, but no luck.

So, I just decided to go in with a cold one, a soldering iron, and my lack of knowledge on the subject. I snipped R7, and that improved the clean channel a bit, and made the OD channel cut out almost completely, and then soldered it back on (by the end of this, I may just snip R7 again and leave it). I also tried snipping R12, which seemed to have no effect, and "soldered" that back on (yeah... I definitely need more practice with the iron ).



Back to what I was saying! My main goal initially was to get a smoother distortion out of it, but all ideas are welcome. I care not if it winds up worse than before, or completely dead. Thanks in advance for your ideas, in the meantime, I will continue to randomly snip/add things to mess around with it.

I don't think we have too many solid state guys post over this way. Perhaps have a read over on www.ssguitar.com - They're all about this kind of thing.

Thanks man, I'll check that site out.

Also, I added another resistor on top of R7, which made the "OD" channel almost clean sounding, and it begins to distort with heavier picking. Sounds much better than before (of course, that's not really saying much ). I'll continue to mess around with stuff and post my findings here.


Side note: You look exactly like one of my old friends (... if that's you in the picture). I was going to message you thinking you were him, but then I realized you live in the UK... and he doesn't

'teemuk' is the solid state guru, and I believe he is actually the moderator at ssguitar.com. He posts here but not very often; the dude is a total wealth of knowledge

Yeah, Teemuk knows his onions that's for sure. He wrote a book too which is crammed full of cool stuff:
http://www.thatraymond.com/downloads/so ... a_v1.0.pdf

Put rulers on the sides so you can make a bug. If it can get loud enough to dance