I love small tube amps but.....

[sledge57]

I traded recently for a '73 Silverface Super Reverb with 4 10's and now my Silverface Vibro-Champ sits and gathers dust.

I can get an awesome tone at low volume with some interesting settings. (I hadn't tried this yet when I took this pic)

First I plug into the Reverb channel, then I turn the bass, mid and treble pots completely down. Next I dime the volume.

With these settings there should be no sound coming from the amp, then I start slowly adding bass, middle and treble to get the tone and volume I want.

It works and sounds great, the tones are set to about 2 and the volume is barely above speaking levels with nice tone.

So now I'm re-thinking the need for small tube amps for "bedroom levels"

Not sure which Fender amps this works on but I believe it's the Super Reverbs, Bassman and Twin Reverbs, I was told this doesn't work on Deluxe Reverbs but don't discount those big old vintage amps for practicing.....

 

[yawny]

Sweet buy! HNAD

Cool trick with the volume though, never heard that one before.

Only disadvantage I can think of is that it would have to kill the life on your tubes, unless the circuit works very differently from how I think, which it probably does.

 

[eddy999]

Sweet buy! HNAD

Cool trick with the volume though, never heard that one before.

Only disadvantage I can think of is that it would have to kill the life on your tubes, unless the circuit works very differently from how I think, which it probably does.

Volume controls don't control how hard the tube works, they simply attenuate the signal before it gets to the tubes. It is the size of the signal coming in that determines how hard it will work (how much current is drawn, output voltage, power dissipation etc bla bla). No need to worry here.

 

[Lyle Caldwell]

To add to Eddy's post, in these amps the tone stack reduces gain when its controls are set very low so it is lowering the volume even if the Volume knob is turned up.

The reason this "trick" works better for ultra-low volume use than just using the Volume knob is because the Volume pot taper doesn't do a lot of fine-control in its lowest range - it goes from silence to a good bit of volume instantly, and at the lowest range of the Volume knob the bright cap is way too strident if it is engaged.

 

[yawny]

Ah, I see. That would have been the other way I suspected it.

Makes sense though, those pots, especially the older ones, have less than precise pots, especially on the volume. Goes from silent to loud in 0-.3

 

[BassPlayer1]

I had a similar year model super twin that sounded pretty terrible most of the time(almost no decent tones) until you got it up to about 7 - the tone really improved as you went from painful to permanent hearing loss zone. I finally gave up and traded it away. It could have been those huge diamond magnets on the Fender speakers.

 

[Iceman0124]

With my Eganter tweaker I love cranking the master volume and using the gain control and EQ for volume control, I can get a very clean but very mean, IE agressive, puchy dynamic tone...everything and I mean everything you put into the pups comes through 110% even at home friendly volume levels...tons of fun and a tone I've never really experienced before without blowing the roof off with a cranked blackface twin (not exactly the same but closest example I can come up with). Tons of fun and that tone alone is endearing me to this little head.