[pieterh]

Hi Dru, I'm coming to this one quite late but here goes.

When I moved to Sweden I took with me my trusty Marshall Valvestate, the stereo chorus version I'd had and toured with for some years. The thing is it's actually a bit thin with single coil pickups and I really wanted an all tube with warmer character. A friend of mine builds and services guitars and amps and mentioned he had an old amp as a repair project that the previous owner had willingly abandoned (i.e. He couldn't afford to pay for the work so he told my friend to keep it).

The amp is a Duncan Tube 84-40. For a very good price he finished the work, converted it to run at around 16 watts instead of 40w and did some rewiring etc so that it ran more efficiently. It is old so it isn't really going to stand up to the rigours of touring but for my needs now it is a super amp. The clean channel is gorgeous and the boost channel can give me bluesy overdrive or rock distortion. The spring reverb is quite decent too and the fx loop is parallel which means I can use the send as a direct out (and with a bit of eq at the desk post DI box it sounds pretty darn good that way too).

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to buy a Vox AC4tv for silly money (800 crowns Swedish, roughly $100 US). That is my go to amp for the moment as I live in an apartment now so anything more powerful has to wait for actual gigs or rehearsals! The Vox has an amazing tone though it has a fairly significant low frequency hum. I gather this is fairly normal but it would be good to try and find a mod for it to try and filter out the hum or shield the area that is causing it.

One day I would love to have a good Deluxe Reverb. We have one at work though so I get to use that from time to time!

Some of the jobs I get are at the local church where even the little amp can be a bit much so I am awaiting delivery of a Radial JDX amp simulator. I've used the JDX amp DI so I am confident that is going to be a great asset.

Pieter


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