Whats free? this is…

Last night we had the end of year bash for vitamin S and it was kinda equal amounts frustration and fun, not at all because I took along an old friends sixteen year old son who aspires to be a drummer, but thats beside the point because at the end Ivan told me there was a monitor in the bin. Well two monitors but only one was working. So this morning I was dropping the young lad at his Dads workplace, but he hadn’t arrived at 6.45 when we got there, so off we went into town to troll through a bin. The bin was full but I’d been told where it was so it was actually really easy to get out. Man it was a really badly packed bin and shame on the people there for such inefficient use of resources… even if they are chucking them out.

Took it home and plugged a mic in and powered it up and it went but not well. Took it apart and popped the hidden switch from line to mic and found a 4 Ohm piezo tweeter on the bench then carved it up to fit. The one in there was an 8 Ohm magnet and winding type and was mounted like the guy was a farmer and using tools from the landrover. Actually it wasn’t too bad but one needs an incredibly long phillips head screwdriver to get the back off and the tweeter replacing had been done without taking the back off and so what could have been quite a nice job wasn’t so good… and the tweeter was the wrong impedance anyways. So I chucked some foam in there, should have found some dacron but was too lazy, and put it together and it was suddenly much, much better. Looked it up on the net and this stuff, active speakers, have all sorts of circuit protection and other stuff but they’re basically just a couple amplifier chips on a heatsink with two speakers…thank God for car stereos and the surfeit of low voltage chips for their use. The most expensive bit on it though would be the power supply and the toroidal transformer… even more expensive than the speaker. I’m tempted to keep it but it’s ugly as sin, like an unfit fat girl in stretchy lycra, so I think I’ll just flick it off to the highest bidder on trade me… though maybe I should take it and see if Ivan the Terrible wants it.

Ivan impressed me the other day by playing a sink… a stainless kitchen one with two springs bolted accross it… beautiful sounds it made too!

To the side of the monster in smooth black injection (ABS) molded plastic is a 15″ jensen picked up years ago at cash coverters and mounted in a barbecue body. I was going to put it on stands but on trying it out as it is, and having some holes in the back, it’s really easy to move it about and get lots of different feedback tones. I’ve gotten four different notes so far and it’s quite easy to play them. I originally planned to use springs but the ones I had weren’t strong enough, as I was going to mount the front face vertically, and it sagged so I replaced them with taunt welding wire but seeing that I’m using it horizontal maybe I’ll go back to the springs as they were fine in that orientation and I’m kinda wondering what it’d sound like with the speaker bouncing up and down.

So I used it last night and my little moonlight just doesn’t cut it and I think it’s time to get the big amp out of hiding. I built a tube amp years ago with lotsa 12AX7’s and 6V6 or 6L6 output valves in push pull but I’ve never fired it up. The case didn’t come out like I wanted and I needed some switches to fire the different channels so into the waiting list option it went. So maybe it’s time to get 15 watts of tube power into my arsenal. What I’m kind of afraid of is that’ll lead into needing to haul around the quad with 4 x 12 but that’d just be silly having to load the car up with that lot every monday just to get the sounds I end up getting used to… what I really need is to build a champ type single ended amp with minimal parts and about 5 watts of power and use my one great 12″ alnico magnet’d ribbed paper cone speaker.

Oh my God, this amp is packed with features and thats gonna be the case at the end of my three year obsession learning how to do it. It’s kind of a super hot rodded fender of the soldano, mesa boogie variety. Black plate unmatched Jan 6V6’s that can be switched btween fixed and cathode bias, switchable Negative feedback or none and then two channels with separate tone and volumes and an effects loop and a balanced/ unbalanced line out off the speaker output. Thats just from memory so I think theres actually more going on but I just can’t remember.

I had it sorted to switch channels using relays so I could footswitch on the fly but my dreams of being a stage centre shreiking solo guitar hero are long gone so I think I’ll change it round to normal everyday switches on the front and rewire the little relay power transformer as a 9V DC out for FX. I look at this and it’s like about 400 -500 bucks worth of parts and maybe 60-100 hours of assembly and design but I suppose a hand wired boutique amp is worth many thousands of dollars, if it does what its supposed to do, and hopefully this will.

So the Vogue badge goes on a aluminium grill and I should get my brother to Tiger skin some bark tan leather and upholster it and then do some beaten copper corner pieces with little bronze or brass screws. Talk about doing Rich on a budget!

Then the reason all of this has even come about is that I had two other people playing my stuff last monday, after I’d had a go, and realised the speaker on the floor wasn’t cutting through so I planned to build a stand for the speaker so it was off the ground at least 600mm and while I was at it I was going to mount the moonlight amp below it because I’ve never gotten around to putting it in a case and I bent one of the valves pins a week or two ago because everythings exposed on the top… so I thought it would be a good idea to bolt it up into a framework of a speaker stand. While I was going over these ideas and how to do it all I got to thinking of, firstly, cutting away most of the body of the amp so the wiring underneath was exposed while also cutting great big holes in what was left to make it even more interesting looking and from there realising the flatness and squareness of it all wasn’t really to my liking so I went to the idea of taking a piece of aluminium sheet and biffing the hell out of it to make a body more in line with the organic forms I use in my welding.

I know it’s bad form, as the aluminium (or steel, copper silver etc) body on all electronics is so for the reason of being a condusive earth plane while also being a cage of sorts to stop the internals acting like antenna to other signals in the ether, but I’d love to do a tube amp almost inside out where the low impedance circuit could be a tracery of jewels strung around the glass bottles and in a hand beaten body that uses a combination of metals, bloody dangerous of course because we’re talking at least 250 Volts DC (hmm, maybe a safety cage around it all) … maybe if I get some money from overseas (Pollock Krasner trust)… or maybe I’ll just fuckin’ do it anyways!

My new saying… If you can’t beat ’em… get weirder!