Hot Rodding The Hot Rod Deluxe
In a previous post I mentioned that I intended to make some improvements to one of my guitar amps. I have had my Fender Hot Rod Deluxe for years and it’s been a great workhorse amp. Among my general observations of this amp:
The stock speaker is fairly flat sounding. It lacks dimensionality and punch.
I only use the clean and “yellow” lead channels. The “red” lead channel is useless to me. It has far too much gain and makes the amp sound fizzy and over-distorted.
The amp breaks up into distortion far too early in the gain stage. I want it to be louder and cleaner.
The amp has been retubed and rebiased ever few years, but it never seemed to address my gripes. I’ve discussed my wish list with a number of shop technicians and came to the conclusion that I needed to make some changes to the amp in order to tailor it more closely to my needs. I decided to switch brands of tubes from the stock Groove Tubes to JJ Tubes. Their sales tech was very helpful in tailoring the tubes to my needs. Here is what we decided to go with:
- ECC81 ( 12AT7 ) in V1.
- ECC832S in V2. This is a hybrid tube that is an ECC83S ( 12AX7 ) on one side and an ECC82 ( 12AU7 ) on the other side. Essentially this will drop the gain in both the clean and drive channels and increase the headroom.
- ECC83S for the phase splitter.
The next big improvement was installing a Weber Ceramic Chicago 12 speaker in place of the stock Eminence 12. This process was actually pretty involved. I had to remove the back panel of the amp, pull the amp chassis, remove the stock speaker, install the new speaker and re-assemble the entire amp. It took about an hour to do all this, but fortunately I had a great hockey game on TV to watch while I was doing the work. The Chicago 12 speaker is pretty stiff and dark sounding until it’s broken in. I had Weber perform about a week of initial break-in, and I expect that it’ll take a few months of regular gigging / rehearsing to really bring out the full tone of the speaker.
So, after those modifications… the amp sounds MUCH better. First off: the tubes made a huge difference in the overall tone. It seems bigger, warmer and cleaner. That pesky “red” lead channel is actually usable and great sounding; it has the nice bluesy grit I associate with vintage Fender amps. With the addition of the new speaker, the amp’s voice seems bolder and cleaner. I think it’s delivering higher volume due to the speaker’s efficiency. Definitely a big improvement across the board. I’m really looking forward to hearing how this amp performs at upcoming gigs.