Guitar Gear Forum

Hello, my name is Kevin Brush and I have been playing guitar off and on for a long time. Over the last year I have been on a search for a tube amp that fits my needs. I have tried many and have built up a little bit of a collection in the process because I like different amps for different reasons. I would like to learn more about what makes a tube amp work and what components have what effects on tone, touch sensitivity, etc. I have started by making some mods listed on this board to my Jet City JCA100H. I figured it would be a good one to work on since there are some things I like about it and can hear the potential there and also my least expensive amp. In the long run I would like to gain enough knowledge to design and build my own amp. I am a total newb when it comes to electronics but I have picked up some books and am trying to learn everything that I can and apply it. I hope to be able to learn a lot from the forums on thi board and to also contribute as much as I can.

Welcome aboard! There's a bunch of guys on here knowledgeable about mods and amp design.

I'm not one of them that's for sure. That's quite a collection you put together there!

Make sure you stop by the JCA thread - just see my signature for directions

That's one helluva clip you got there. Great guitar sound and the drum programming is excellent!

What do you think of the Gary Rossington Penta?

ovid9 wrote:Welcome aboard! There's a bunch of guys on here knowledgeable about mods and amp design.

I'm not one of them that's for sure. That's quite a collection you put together there!

Thank you very much for warm welcome!

GRIMESPACE wrote:Make sure you stop by the JCA thread - just see my signature for directions

I have checked out the JCA thread. I have been lurking for a little over a week and have done the depth mod and the SLO mod to my JCA100H with the exception of the 500K Log pots. I did order the pots yesterday and plan on installing them next weekend. It is a killer thread and I really appreciate all of the work that has gone into it!! I dig your avatar, it is one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes, EL DIABLO!!!

David Lee Broth wrote:That's one helluva clip you got there. Great guitar sound and the drum programming is excellent!

What do you think of the Gary Rossington Penta?

Thank you! I just recently bought the Gary Rossington as a project amp off of eBay. It was being sold as not working, as is, looks like it had been damaged in shipping at one time. I fixed the damage to the amp and replaced the tubes. I really love the sound of this amp with the exception of the last setting. I tried some different tubes in it, JJ E34L, JJ EL34, Tung-Sol EL34B, and SED Winged =C= EL34 and the SED won hands down in this amp. They really made the amp sing and come to life! I really love the tone that comes out of this amp. I plan on trying out the SED EL34 tubes in my Marshall as well. That being said there are some things that I do not like about it. The 5th setting is unusable as it just sounds like a swarm of bees. All of the other settings sound great. Since it is just a single channel amp and I am guessing that the different settings just impact the way the signal hits the preamp, there is a huge difference in volume between the clean settings and the overdrive settings. The amp is set up so that the you can use a footswitch to toggle between two settings but if you are trying to go between a clean setting and an OD setting it is unusable because of the huge difference in volume. I think that this amp the way it is would be great for recording but not so much in a live situation if you need two channels. I would love to be able to add a volume pot to boost the clean and crunch settings to match the volume of the two usable OD channels. Another thing that I don't like about it is that both the power transformer and output transformer are mounted on the same side of the chassis. This is a really big and heavy head to begin with and having both transformers on the same side makes the amp awkward to handle since the weight is not distributed properly. I am guessing that this is how it was damaged in the first place. So overall I love the sound of the amp but the design not so much.