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Guitar amplifier technology is where my nerdiness really shows and for the most part I stick with my own designs. The first piece of equipment
I ever tried to build in 6th or 7th grade was supposed to
be a tube distortion device so I could get some overdrive on my
clean-as-a-whistle Kustom 150 amp (and, God bless them, my parents
refused to buy me a distortion pedal – at 11 years old,
I thought my life would be over if I couldn’t get an Arion
Metal Master from Sheets & Sons Music in Newark, Ohio). I
made it on an old tube AM radio chassis. Well, besides shocking
the living crap out of myself a few times and getting my fair
share of soldering-iron burns, I did technically get the thing to work…but
it didn’t exactly sound like a wall of Marshalls. The first
device I attempted to build completely from scratch was a spring
reverb unit when I was about 14 (my Aunt Nancy and Uncle Cliff
still talk about buying me an aluminum chassis from Hughes Peters
for Christmas that year instead of a pair of slacks or a football
or something). That thing produced more hum than reverb; but by
the end of high school, I could build a guitar amp that actually sounded
halfway decent.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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