Thanks, I thought about putting on an old Bigsby tremolo at one time but couldn’t bring myself to alter it from original. Sent from my iPhone using H.A.M.B.
Have G&l basses and all are to new for here my son also has G&L guitars and yes we are building guitars for him and his buddies to play and it is great fun
this is my REAL go to favorite . not a fancy model ,but it plays grt and its a 47 , i think , so has a sound all its own !
I just added another one to my collection. This is a Paramount, which I've never heard of before, so I had to go on an internet search, and it appears that the brand name was used by a company out of New Jersey in the 40's - 50's, the parent company was possibly United, or maybe Code, the details are very murky. I've read the company also made body's for D'Angelica guitars in New York. Then again, Gretsch also produced series of guitars they branded as Paramount, and Fender also has a Paramount series of acoustic guitars. Like I said, the details are murky. This guitar does not appear to be a re-branded Gretsch, and definitely not a Fender acoustic. So I believe it is a Paramount from United, and I'd date it sometime from the 50's. There is no tag inside, or serial number that I can see, so this is all an educated guess. In any case, it's a very well made guitar, it's 17 1/2" across the lower bout, so it's a really big guitar, with a 25" scale length. The back, sides and neck are maple (solid I believe) with some nice flame, and the top I believe is spruce. The pickups are vintage Gibson P90's. The neck joint is solid and the neck is straight with the right amount of relief, and the action is very nice with great playability. It has one of those baseball bat type necks that were common on Kay and Harmony guitars in the 40's - 50's, which I really like. I have a couple of guitars with big fat necks like this, and once you adapt to them it's feels great to have the neck fill your hand up. It's probably not best if you're into shredding, but I'm a blues guy, I'm more into choosing the right note and milking it than I am into speed. I'll leave that for the younger guys. (I used to be into Johnny Winter and Alvin Lee when I was younger, and I thought speed was everything. In my older yeas I've learned to appreciate note selection over speed). The finish is excellent for such an old guitar, I think this thing lived in a case for most of it's life. There is come slight lacquer checking/cracking, but it doesn't even show in these photos. My old 57 Harmony has a lot more lacquer checking than this. I've only had a short time to play it through an amp, but it has that great, warm early jazz guitar tone, and the pickups will push the amp into breaking up very easily. Which can be both bad and good, depending on what you're trying to do. I think it should work good both with the band and with the duo act I have. Anyway, check out the pics, this thing is gorgeous.
I have some nice guitars I have acquired over the years, but I especially love amps. British amps in particular.. I've had a couple of health scares, and I've paired this down a bit.
Sweet! Some really great amps there. I've been thinking of whether to post my HAMB era amps here, or in another threads just for vintage electrical gear. I suppose this thread is as good as any other, right?
Here's my Gibson GA20. It dates to around 1954. When I bought it it was covered in flat brown oil base house paint, painted with a brush. I took it all apart to remove the paint, and found about 2 - 3 layers of other colors underneath, I think black was the first coat. This is as good as I could get it, I'm afraid any more work removing the paint will do too much damage to the material that is left. 2 x 6V6 power tubes, 12" Jensen P12R alnico mag speaker. This is a great sounding amp, similar to a tweed Fender 5E3 Deluxe. Beautiful clean tone, but it breaks up real early, and when it does it rawks. I traded an old Crate solid state head and 4 x 12 speaker cabinet for it, hahah! This is what it looked like when I got it.
Thanks for posting that. I have a uncle that has a Gibson very similar to that one. Its been passed around the family for 50 years. Maybe its my turn. It seems like it had reverb on it, is that possible?
Some of the early Gibsons did have reverb, very nice reverb. I had a customer bring me his GA30RV to shellac the tweed for him. Somewhere along the line the tweed had been replaced, but they didn't apply any shellac or lacquer, so I took it apart and did that for him. This has beautiful reverb, it sounds like Fender's outboard reverb tanks, if you've ever heard one (which you have, even if you didn't know it. Thats the reverb heard on countless surf records). Gibson models that had reverb usually had the letters RV at the end of the model name. It looked like this when it came to me:
That's nice! The amp my uncle has looks more like the one of yours you posted first. He said he wanted to sell it and called a music store and they told him it wasn't worth much. It does work. Its not in as good of shape as yours. I would like to buy it and offer a fair price. Do you have a ballpark figure without seeing it. He would probably give it to me. He's 77 years old and only has social security for income. I just want to be fair.
Gibson amps are far more reasonable than comparable Fender amps from the same period, they just aren't as collectible. That GA20 I have, I think the price marked on it when I found it at a Guitar Center was ~$400. For a similar aged Fender Deluxe that is 1/3 the price of one in similar condition. The one you're talking about would be worth more because of the reverb, and it's probably a higher power amp. If it doesn't work, you'll have money tied into fixing it. It could be something simple, like tubes; it could be something expensive, like a transformer. Hard to say.
I got that Gibson amp today. It is a little rough but it works good. Its a ga-30 with a 12 and a 8 inch speaker. And no reverb. With the number that is stamped on the speaker it appears to be a 1950 model.
Let's keep going with the amps. How about this Alamo Jet? a single ended single 6V6 power tube amp, with Reverb & Tremelo, which are extremely rare in a single ended amp like this. This was one of the first amps I experimented on many years ago as I was learning about the theory and operation of tube amps. I've had it since about 1975 or so, and it was an old amp then. It originally came with a 12" speaker in it, and had a speaker out of a Fender Bassman in it when I got it. But that speaker had a tear in it, so when I rebuilt the amp I changed the baffle out and installed a 15" speaker, just because the cabinet was big enough. I also did a lot of tweaking with the preamp circuit, it has a lot of gain available, and can easily overdrive the power tube into full saturated distortion when cranked up (think Fender Champ with a blower). Or keep everything rolled back and it's pretty mello if you prefer. Tube rectifier, single 6V6 power tube, single 12AX7 preamp tube, and a 6AU6 for the tremelo. The reverb is transistor driven, with a spring tank mounted on the bottom of the cabinet. Since this photo was taken I've since upgraded the output transformer and swapped out the 6V6 power tube to a 6L6GC for about 10 watts of power. That 15" speaker has also been changed out to an old Jensen C15N I picked up sometime after the photo was taken. A very basic circuit, all point to point wired. Plenty of room so that everything is spread out wide (most amps are packed in a lot tighter than this). This was a good amp to experiment on and learn how different resistors and capacitors shape the tone. Easy to work on for a newbie, kind of like hot rodding a Model T.
Speaking of Alamo amps, here is my Alamo Paragon Bass amp. It's an OK bass amp, but a great guitar amp, as many of these old tube bass amps are. This has a very unique circuit that uses a 6AU6 pentode in the preamp to recover the signal after the tone stack and boost it prior to the phase inverter stage. Very unique, not just a copy of a Fender (and lets face it folks, everybody is standing on Leo's shoulders, particularly Jim Marshall) and it sounds awesome. It also has a bass reflex cabinet to enhance the low end output, with a great sounding vintage Jensen C15N speaker. One evening I had a guitar playing buddy over to the house and we were hanging out in the shop making noise; and I set up this amp and my old Fender Super Reverb using an A/B pedal to quickly switch back and forth between them, and we both took turns playing them and switching between them, and we both agreed the Paragon Bass was the better sounding amp. No onboard reverb though, have to use pedals for that. Amperex Bugle Boy tubes, highly sought after by tube aficionados.
This one here has been one of my most successful projects. It started out life as an RCA public address amp, it was probably installed in a business somewhere and served as the PA for several decades, before I got it off the bay. There was a time when you could pick these up pretty cheap, not anymore. I stripped the chassis of everything but the transformers and tube sockets, and rebuilt is completely, all new filter caps, all new tubes, and a completely new circuit I designed myself inspired by the Matchless Clubman. Like the Alamo above, this one uses a 6AU6 in the pre-amp. When trying to decide what to do with it, I was scouring various guitar amp schematics and when I came across the Clubman schematic I decided that was the one to go with. It's not a direct match, because the Clubman uses different tubes, and has Reverb and an FX loop, but it's not far off. This turned out so bitchin, I would put this amp up against pretty much any classic amp for tone quality, for playability and ease of use. More gain than a Marshall, with a tonal character kind of Voxish, but not really. It's the cathode biased power tubes, that gives it that awesome class A sound. But it's also the 6AU6 pentode in the pre-amp. If you haven't played an amp with a pentode pre-amp you don't know what you're missing. Far more gain than the typical triode pre-amp tubes, and a wider bandwidth. Excellent low end, plus extended high end. It's a pretty magical sound. It's why Vox amps with the EF86 pentode pre-amps are loved so much. Maybe some day when I quit the day job I will build and sell a few amps using this circuit. I've been stocking up on 6AU6 tubes (I use them in different amps too). I had the face plate etched at a trophy shop. I brought them the design, I think they supplied the plastic IIRC, blue on white. Cream chicken head knobs fit the bill nicely. True point to point wiring The only amp I've built using a buss bar ground, it works very well, the amp is very quiet at idle.
haven't picked mine up lately . my grandson wants to learn so i decided to teach him a few chords . will tell him about youtube for lessons . are PRS sunburst u.s. made worth the price to enjoy & pass on ?
Man you are all in! You have some really nice and very cool stuff. Thanks for posting, and post more if you will!
It depends on if you like them or not. They're really not my style, but they are very good quality guitars. Note, as far as I know PRS usually uses an odd scale size, 25", which is kind of in between the standard Gibson scale length of 24.75" and the standard Fender scale length of 25.5", and the scale really does effect the tone of the guitar, and the string tension. Some people love them, they have a very big following, just not my cup of tea. And not what I would recommend for a new player, mainly because of the cost, and you never know if a new player is going to stick with it or not. I don't know how well they hold their value. But for a seasoned player that plans on keeping it, it's a quality instrument that will last the life of the owner and be passed down to the following generation.
Continuing on, here's an old Silvertone 1482 I rebuilt for my brother. These were cheap when I picked it up, I think it was <$150.00, now they're going for close to $400 I think. Maybe more, people are crazy. But the word got out on them and they became one of those things people collect. The stock amps sound freakin' great, but of course I had to tweak it even further than stock. I replaced all the electrolytic caps (had a cap can custom made for the specs I needed), measured all the resistors and replaced all that had drifted out of spec, then I rewired the preamp more along the lines of a Fender 5E3 tweed Delux, but using my modifications on that circuit. I gave 1 channel a very bassy voice, and the other a very bright voice (kind of like the tweed Bassman), then when you plug in, you plug into 1 channel and jump the channels so both are active, and you can mix & match the volume controls for more control over the eq of the amp. It works sweet. Killer little amp! Not much headroom, it breaks up really early, it's super easy to get rolling feedback, and it will sustain a compressed note for ever when it's cranked up all the way. Great fun! The amp came without a speaker, and without a back panel. I pulled a speaker out of my collection, and decided it was too heavy to attach to the stock particle board baffle, so I cut a new baffle out of 1/4" birch plywood. The speaker is from an old church organ, w/ alnico magnet. The blue can on the chassis is the custom filter cap can I had made. Those 6V6 power tubes are some NOS GE's I had in my stash. I tried to polish up the chassis as nice as I could without stripping it. It came out pretty nice. I cut a new back panel out of some 3/8" plywood, had to cut an opening for the speaker magnet, and sprayed it with one of those textured spray paints in an attempt to get somewhat close to the original covering, I think it's close enough for rock & roll.
Thanks for all the cool amps and info! I changed the thread title in hopes of drawing more interest to all the awesome information you are posting! Thanks again.
Thanks, I've got more, it's kind of a sickness. G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome), not all is HAMB era friendly, if that matters a whole lot here.
The Jalopy Journal
