Champ and 5F2H Amps

Last night I went over to RoadHouse Joe’s bass player’s house to jam and work on some material. He plays killer slide guitar. Anyway, I took along my trusty old 1970 Fender Champ since I hadn’t played it much in the last few months because of the acquisition of the snakeskin 5F2H amp.

Holy Shit! I’d forgotten how really outstanding that amp sounds. After the tubes were nicely warmed up I cranked it up to 8 (which still ain’t very loud) and jammed on a long, greasy vamp with Rob playing slide. Mercy, but that little Champ was singin’!

I was playing a Low F harp into a bullet mic with a Shure CM element. The Champ, as you may recall, has been modified a bit: Weber 10-inch 10A125-O speaker, NOS RCA 6V6 power tube, 5751 preamp tube, Weber Copper Cap 5Y3 rectifier, and the negative feedback loop defeated.

It has a little less dirt than the 5F2H, with a beautiful tearing on the edges of the notes. With the alnico speaker it compresses a bit more than the 5F2H. The snakeskin amp sounds big, mean and edgy (kinda like me) while the Champ is more sedate. The snakeskin amp has more colors in its tone, but the Champ has a gorgeous unity of sound.

I understand why people pay big bucks for boutique amps, but these two little guys are the best-sounding small harp amps I’ve ever heard. They’re not exactly cheap, as I’ve probably spent about $600 getting the Champ right, and a little more on the 5F2H. But they are way cheaper than most boutique amps.

I’m looking into producing and marketing the 5F2H harp amp, with a selling price around $700, assembled and tweaked by the guy who originally designed it. More on that later…

Roadhouse Joe

My new band, Roadhouse Joe, has a couple of new websites up and we've recorded a Demo CD. Check it out:

www.RoadhouseJoe.com

MySpace site

From the initial press release:

Roadhouse Joe is made up of some of Denver’s finest veteran blues players who have joined together to produce a powerful and compelling sound; a burst of roadhouse energy from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta.

Scott Mishoe – guitar. Scott is known for his technical brilliance on guitar, with slashing leads and soulful chops straight out of a juke joint.

Scott “Hunt” Huntington – singer. Hunt is a unique and extremely talented singer, steeped in jazz and blues. His voice is perfect for our music; powerful and nuanced.

Stuart Aron – drums. Stuart is a monster drummer who brings complex rhythms and musical ideas to our band. He thickens our sound with his intricate, in-the-pocket patterns.

Rob Leavitt – bass. Rob is fresh from his stint with an Acid Blues band. He lays down a solid bottom end with outstanding touch and dynamics. He gives our band its punch.

Rick Davis – harp. Rick is a veteran of more than three decades of blues harp work. His style is old-school Chicago, with a soulful howl you will not soon forget.

The result is a smoky, rowdy blues vibe; an honest blues sound that pays homage to the greats like Albert King, BB King, Muddy Waters, and Paul Butterfield.

Al Chesis' Custom Harp Amp

Last week I played at a blues jam hosted by blues harp heavyweight Al Chesis and the Delta Sonics. Al is a monster harp guy, the best in Denver by far, and his harp rig is very cool.

He plays what looks to be an old tweed Bassman clone, but it sounds way better than any Bassman I’ve ever heard. It is actually a custom amp tweaked mostly by my buddy Bruce Collins of Mission Amps.

It’s a Mojo bassman cab with a custom 3x10 baffle. Speakers are two old Weber VST P10Rs on the bottom and a Jensen reissue P10R on top. This amp has some BIG tranny iron: A low-voltage 50-watt PT and 45-watt Super Reverb-sized OT. We are talking HONK, Baby!

Here’s the cool part: Al can run the amp with two 6V6, 6L6, or KT66 power tubes. The night I played it Al was using two 6V6s and a 5Y3 rectifier, making about 14 watts. The tone was warm and dark and fat, like the biggest fucking blackface Fender Princeton you’ve ever hear. It was not gritty, but SMOOOOTH…..

Al plays an old JT-30 crystal mic. He gets incredible tone with this rig, and I liked the way I sounded too. It had plenty of punch to carry the small rowdy club. Feedback was never an issue. But bar fights were. It was a very fun night.

Sorry I don’t have any sound clips; I’ll record the amp later and add links here.

Epiphone Valve Junior Combo Amp

Hi Rick,

My name is Louis, a harp player from Singapore. I've recently made a few sound clips of my valve junior combo on my soundclick site to share with you.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=815743

My valve junior is my everyday practice amp. I've changed the preamp tube to a 12DW7 and the power tube to a lower grade EL84. Both tubes were ordered from eurotubes. The 12DW7's lower gain factor faces the mic side while the 100 factor faces the el84. This effectively reduces the mic input gain while maintaining full power at the output. The result was much better clean headroom but still manages to distort nicely when stressed. The recordings were made with a Zoom H2 on low mic gain placed 2 ft away from the amp. On some samples I used an artec parametric eq. I find this quite useful since the valve junior has no built in volume control. I like to use it like a tone control, chopping off the offensive feedback causing high freq then boosting it. I think it sounds pretty good for the chromatic harp.

Please tell me what you think.

Happy New Year,
Louis

Great playing, Louis! The Epi Valve Jr Combo sounds great with that 545 mic. Good playing too; nice tone. I particularly like these two:

Seydel 1847 with Shure 545SD

Hohner Marine Band with Shure 545SD

Soldano 44

My bandmate in Roadhouse Joe, guitarist Scott Mishoe, bought a very cool little amp from Soldano sold only through Blues City Music near Memphis. The Soldano 44 is a 50-watt 1x12 amp, driven by two Sovtek 5881 power tubes and five (!) 12AX7 preamp tubes. Needless to say, this is one high-gain puppy.

He opted for the matching extension cab, so this rig is a neat little stack. The tone is Marshall-ish to my ear, and very musical and colorful. The dynamics are exceptional.

I was helping Scott dial the amp in when I recorded these short clips:

Soldano 44 Rock. Scott is feeling his inner head-banger.

Soldano 44 Blues. Scott noodles around with some blues licks, trying various guitar settings. Nice tone; no effects.

Soldano 44 Harp. I plugged in without changing any settings, and the result was nasty. I do not mean that in a good way. Great guitar amps don’t always make good harp amps.

The Voodoo 5F2H Amp at Work

Here is a short clip of the 5F2H amp at band practice. The drummer took a break and the guitarist started jamming on some slow blues. You can hear me asking what key.

Click here for the sound clip.

In this configuration the 5F2H amp has the Mojotone speaker and a TAD 6L6WGC STR power tube. It's not mic'ed and I'm not using any effects. The recording was made with the Zoom H4 field recorder in the corner of the room.

The most important tube in your amp? The Phase Inverter!

Everything you ever wanted to know about the phase inverter tube in your amp. A very good article on tube amps.

Joe's Blues Blog

My buddy Joe Lempkowski from the East Bay has spiffed up his blues blog and posted some great new stuff. In this post Joe does a killer set at the Redwood City Blues Jam at the Little Fox Theater, showing off his good chops on a Sonny Jr. Cruncher amp. His regular gig rig is a HarpGear Double Trouble amp. Joe also posts a review of a Skip Simmons-modded Masco MA-17 harp amp. Go check it out.

Review: Harmonica for Dummies

Winslow Yerxa, a player well-known on the Harp-L online board, has authored a very good primer on all things harmonica. In the tightly controlled style of the For Dummies genre, this book is a great reference. The writing is concise and clean and the indexes are easy to follow. It is an encyclopedia, not something you need to read from cover to cover. Pick the topics that interest you and save the rest for another day.

The topic that interests me, of course, is harp amps. Yerxa gives rather scanty coverage to this fascinating and important topic that bears so much on tone. To his credit, he steered away from moldy old canards spouted by crusty harp curmudgeons: 1) You must never consider amping your harp until after you have achieved acoustic tone perfection, and 2) Tone comes only from the player, never from the amp. Instead, Yerxa presents the thinnest of harp amp gruel, as if tip-toeing past the topic while not wishing to offend.

The only reference I could find to tubes in his entire section on amps was this, in a paragraph about dealing with feedback:

"Swap the tubes, which are internal plug-in parts that look like tiny science fiction light bulbs"

Good grief!

While Yerxa named a list of microphones that might be suitable for harp (Shure SM57, SM58, 545, and Green Bullet; EV RE10; Audix Fireball; Astatic JT-30; Hohner Blues Blaster) he was mysteriously unable to name a single specific amplifier that might suit harp playing. Why could he not even utter the word “Champ?”

At the end of the chapter on amps Yerxa advised the reader to consult online harmonica sites for more information. If you have arrived here in search of actual useful information about harp amps, you’ve come to the right place.

First, if you are new at this and you know you are interested in a blues or rock tone, get yourself a small tube amp, such as a Fender Champ from the 1970s or a Kalamazoo Model 2. Both are readily available on eBay and elsewhere, and they are inexpensive at $200 to $300.

An even better choice might be a new Epiphone Valve Junior Half Stack, at about $250. All these amps sound great for blues harp with no modifications. Get your microphone (Yerxa’s list is good) and PLAY! You’ll be a harp amp “expert” in no time.

If, on the other hand, you are interested in the cleaner sound associated with country music (or jazz, folk, gospel, bluegrass, Irish, etc), I suggest you don’t buy an amp at all. Instead, buy a small PA system. Start with a 200-watt, eight channel powered mixer and add speakers, stands, and monitors. Shop Craigslist for deals on used products from Peavey, Behringer, Samson, Mackie, Yamaha, etc. Experiment with effects and pedals. Work on your mic technique. As a big added bonus, you’ll be a much more attractive candidate when you start looking around for bands to join if you own a PA system.

There. You now have good advice on how to get started amping your harp. You will inevitably learn more as you go along and make changes. But every blues player needs a small tube amp, and every country/bluegrass/jazz player needs a basic PA.

Harmonica for Dummies by Winslow Yerxa is excellent. I love the sections about harp customizing, positions, overblows and overbends. I’ll refer back to the book often. But the harp newbies who buy the book in search of advice about amps (a very hot topic among new players) will find little useful specific information beyond the suggestion to look elsewhere.

I give this book a IV on the I – IV – V scale of blues harp excellence. Like a small tube amp, every harp player should own this book.


UPDATE: Winslow Yerxa sent a very nice response to this review:

As to your criticisms of the amp chapter in the full review on your blog, guilty as charged. To the "espresso fiend" end of the gear spectrum, the chapter may seem like cold decaf, but to the general reader who may or may not be interested in amplified blues playing, I hope that it will serve as a decent general introduction to the subject.

Some background: I had to fight to include a chapter on such an "advanced" subject, and then had to make huge cuts to fit page counts. Also, I was writing for people who had potentially never picked up a harmonica or seen a vacuum tube or even knew what an amplifier was (part of the Dummies philosophy - assume nothing about what your reader might know). Hence the "tiny science fiction light bulbs" description of tubes (remember, there are people who have grown up in a solid-state microprocessor world who may have no idea what a tube is). Also, I was not writing with a main focus on amplified blues playing, but rather just on the general subject of playing with some kind of amplification, with a nod in the general direction of blues. It was these circumstances that informed the general and conservative nature of the advice in that chapter.

Many thanks to Winslow for his fine book and his willingness to respond. It is much appreciated.

Kenny Blue Ray

I bought a pair of used speakers from Kenny Blue Ray, a premier blues guitar guy from the Bay Area. The speakers are 10A125-O Webers (lightly gigged), which I will use in my 2x10 cab with my Masco amp. I have the same speaker in my project Champ, and the tone is outstanding.

Kenny Blue Ray played and/or recorded with Little Charlie & the Nightcats, SRV, William Clarke, James Cotton, Mark Hummel, Gary Smith, Kim Wilson, Paul Delay and others. These speakers are gonna have some serious mojo.

Thanks, Kenny!