www.pedalsteelamp.com

thanks for the good times!

- Tim

The best part of having this great amp is using it! I did a video shoot with Elliot Randall yesterday and the band was impressed with the amp. Not only does it sound great, but it also looks pretty good under the big lights!

I am still waiting for the front and rear panel to be done, but the last round of modifications to the circuit were definitely exactly what this amp needed. Electronically, this amp is ready to take on the world – however, I still have the paper mock up on the front of my prototype. The place where I am getting the panels fabbed ran out of material… sigh. I am not thrilled with the wait, but I am sure they are doing good work. I get to see the prototype tomorrow and I should get the final plates by the end of the week. I’ll keep the blog up to date!

First off – putting the new mock up of the panel on was very easy – it’s perfect! Everything is in its right place – now I can send the design out to get manufactured!

Second thing I did was tackle the gain and tone stack. I needed just a little more low end, and a little more output from the amp. I was able to make that happen today. Now I really love how this amp sounds! After playing with it at home for a while I got a wave of weird sadness… is it done? Maybe its done!

So I guess my next update will be when the final panels come in. I will post some final pictures of the amp and eventually some recordings and videos.

Now comes the fun part – building more of them!

I have been doing some more adjusting to the gain stages. With the 12AX7 biased to Fender spec, the amp was really really loud, but also broke up at about 75% on the dial. I am willing to sacrifice a little volume overall in order to have the volume control be clean 100% of the way. Preamp distortion is not a very exciting sound, in my opinion, and is certainly unwelcome for a pedal steel. That said, a little distortion is actually really nice sounding on the steel – there are pleasing and musical harmonics in there. This is what solid state amps lack, in my opinion.

Ok, I am rambling again.

Even though its just a paper mock up, and its still not perfect, this is basically what the final version of the amp will look like. I am very excited about this!!! So excited that I am leaving the paper on for a gig this weekend with Or, the Whale.

I am not sure if the above is going to be a standard feature on the amp – but I really like the idea of having a quad box mounted to the cabinet. We steel players always have a bunch of accessories that need plugging in – why carry around a separate power strip when you have an amp with one built in? Fender always had a convenience outlet on the back panel of their Twin Reverb amplifiers – but it was usually the first thing to break. On my 70′s Twin the utility outlet is trashed, and its riveted on! This quad box idea is a lot more user friendly. If you need to repair it, parts can be found at any local hardware store.

More soon – the finish line is in sight!

When I first “completed” the amp, it was love at first sight. I loved everything about how it sounded with pedal steel, and so did the various other steel players that I let use it on the road. However, give it 6 weeks and the honeymoon phase gives way to good old fashioned realism. Yes, I had to admit it: there were a few small issues with the amp that I wanted to change when I got home!

So I spent the last couple of nights really focusing on a few of the details, and I am pleased to say that now this amp has really come to life! I think its official: the prototype is done, and its time to think about the artwork and readying it for production.

I am really excited about the way this amplifier sounds, and I think the steel community is going to be as well. What we have here is a boutique quality amplifier that has been built specifically with the pedal steel in mind. Its a product thats going to sound great and last a very long time even with heavy use – and like all other tube based amplifiers, it will just get better with age!

So far so good. I’ve been using the amp for over a week now and the general consensus is that it sounds killer. I let 2 other steel players play through it and it’s a hit!

In other news, I’m really pleased with how the amp handled a 30 mile ride in a trailer with no tire. Last night we had a blow out and I didn’t even notice it while driving – the amp was stored right above the wheel well and when I took it out today I was nervous that it would have rattled apart, but it was solid! I used it tonight and it was as creamy as ever.

Why spend good money on a shake table?!

I credit the turret board construction and the ruggedness of the mercury iron for this success. Solid as a rock. But let’s not get too cocky – I still have almost 30 more shows between now and April 8th.

If you’re in Austin for SXSW drop me a line and I’ll show you the amp! All of my shows are listed on my bands website: or the whale.com

More soon!

This is a custom job from Mojotone and I have to admit they did a fantastic job. The tolex and grill cloth work is very beautiful, and they did a wonderful job of cutting the baffle to fit the 15″ speaker.

The first thing I did after liberating the cabinet from its enormous box was to install the speaker and reverb tank in its various tolex bags. Everything was very easy to install, and then it was time to put the chassis in…

Whats that old saying about measuring twice and cutting once? Well, turns out that is really hard to do when everything arrives at different times! The chassis did not fit into the cabinet as is, because the giant output transformer I decided to use hit the speaker basket. Not good. So I decided to rotate the speaker one spot because the holes are not symmetrical to the bars on the basket. This looked promising, however, the transformer still did not clear it. I needed the output transformer to slide over by about 1/4″.

Unfortunately that meant completely dismantling the entire amp! I had to remove the circuit board (I removed connections from the front side and flipped it back) and then remove the output transformer and find a spot to drill 4 new holes. This took about 2 hours to do, including some mistakes I made when putting it back together. What an ordeal!

Once the transformer was moved over, the amp fit together perfectly:

I made a custom cloth speaker cable and we are good to go! I have really learned a lot building the first prototype – the next amp will be a lot easier to build, because I will make sure to get the speaker cut a bit further over, and because I have already found all of the design mistakes and layout errors.

I am going to be taking the amp with me on my spring tour with my band Or, the Whale. We will be playing a few shows at SXSW so if you are going to be in Austin drop me a line and you can come hear it for yourself!

The day started with my finishing up the wiring from the day before. I had only done the output – it took a while to get the reverb and input section wired. Again, the turret board made cosmetic changes and decisions easier than eyelet board construction. If I didn’t like something, it only took a minute to change.

The panel controls were a snap, because there are so few of them! Notice the domino mica capacitors – I chose those for their smooth tone. Ceramic caps are really nasty sounding in tone circuits, in my opinion. There is one (bottom right corner) that is part of the reverb circuit. I am not happy about it, but its in an insignificant part of the circuit and there are not really any other options at that value.

The next step was wiring up the heaters. I used to really dread this process – especially in Tweed style amps where it can be a pain to get fingers in. This went smoothly. Doing the heaters neatly makes or breaks the aesthetic of the amp, if you ask me. I think I did ok!

Once the heaters were in it was time to bring the amp up – slowly. I discovered a few mistakes and had to correct them. I was not getting high voltage above 230VDC at first and found a mistake in my layout. When I fixed that I had another big problem. I decided to sleep on it and resume testing in the morning. A good move – sometimes after working for so long you become blind to your own work. I needed a reset.

In the morning I realized that I had drawn and laid out the bias supply improperly. Once I fixed that the amp came to life! And boy does it sound amazing!

My cabinet is still on its way from Mojotone – so I used another amp with a 15″ speaker to house the SICA speaker. The amp is blowing me away with how smooth and detailed it sounds! Its still in a prototype phase – I will need to tweak the reverb and inverter until its absolutely perfect – but the amp is certainly good enough to play with!

This will be my last post for a few weeks. My band Or, the Whale will be flying out to the UK early next week. When I return, my cabinet will be here and I will complete the amp – then comes the fun part: road testing!

The night started off with a quick visit from McKenna. She was really curious to see what I was up to with all of the cloth covered wire – but I think she was more interested in eating and going to sleep.

After she took off I started wiring up the board.

I like to place all of the jumpers up on top of the board. I know it looks a little cleaner to wire it underneath, but its a real pain in the ass to service. This layout eliminates a lot of guesswork. One of my goals with the amp is to make it be extremely simple to service, modify, and repair. When you take the chassis out, everything will be right there up top – no cap can, no hidden wires, no surprises!

Even though this is just a prototype, I want it to be as neat as possible! So far so good on that front.

This photo makes my desk look more cluttered than it actually is. I had some good tunes cranking when I was working. Max from Liberty amps stopped by again, and we checked out Pacific Dust by the Mother Hips because Tim uses a Creston guitar and Max had never heard them. Great record!

Fitting in those 3 Watt 470 ohm resistors was no easy task! My supplier was out of the 2 Watters – what can you do? When tracking down new old stock you do the best you can – so in this case, I had to get creative with the resistor bending. We got ‘em!

I am really close to turning this sucker on. If all goes to plan, I will be cranking some pedal steel through this sucker before I head off to the UK next week.