The Ultimate Tone: A Book Review of the Best DIY Guitar Tube Amp Series

This article is a review of a series of six books that is the most comprehensive and lucid explanation of the architecture, circuitry, tone, components, and construction technique of tube guitar amplifiers for DIYers that I have come across. . The review treats each book separately and recommends purchasing them in a specific order to increase your knowledge at the pace of your building experience.

Kevin O’Connor of London Power has created a series of books under the main title of “The Ultimate Tone”. These books are truly unique and carefully designed for the DIY guitar tube amp hobbyist and boutique amp builder. The books have a homemade ‘feel’ too… all illustrations are done by hand and the books are photocopied on 8.5″x11″ paper and bound with plastic spines and clear plastic covers. There are six books in the series now and the most recent one was released in late spring 2008. You may want to buy the entire series in one go and get modest savings, but I think you should consider buying them one at a time. and digest as you go, building projects along the way. One key point though… you don’t necessarily want to buy them in numerical order. I recommend the following sequence:

1. The Ultimate Tone Volume 3 – Tone Generations
2. The Ultimate Tone Volume 5 – Catching Tone
3. The Ultimate Tone Volume 2 – Systems Approach To Stage Sound Nirvana
4. The Ultimate Tone Volume 4 – Advanced Techniques for Modern Guitar Amp Design
5. The Ultimate Tone: custom tube guitar amp modification and creation
6. The Ultimate Tone Volume 6 – Timeless tone built today for the future

The Ultimate Tone Volume 3 – Tone Generations

This is the most important book in the series for the beginning tube amp builder.

Chapters 2 through 4 lay the groundwork for good DIY tube amp building, giving you information on good electrical connections, grounding techniques, wiring and other wiring techniques, and mechanical design including assembly methods such as terminal strips, turret and grommet boards.

Each of the subsequent chapters selects a particular ‘iconic’ amplifier, each iconic amplifier being a prototypical example of amplifiers in its class, and is examined in detail as to the circuit topology, resulting peculiar tonal characteristics and flaws. fatal that the product is notorious. by. Kevin provides the original schematics, and then shows how he can apply the techniques detailed in the previous chapters to improve icon performance and reliability without harmonizing the tone. Schematics are redrawn, layouts provided, and mechanical solutions worked out to make each chapter a complete, self-contained, do-it-yourself amplifier project.

This process is repeated for several variations of the Champ in chapter 5 (this chapter heavily influenced my own single-ended amp project), then in quick succession: Bassman, Plexi, 800, Bull Dog, AC-30, Portaflex, SVT , Bass Master, Custom Special, Guitar Mate, Herzog and Laney amplifiers are handled.

If you can only buy one book for your DIY guitar amp hobby, I highly recommend this one.

The Ultimate Tone Volume 5 – Catching Tone

Volume 5 picks up where Volume 3 left off, with a project-oriented approach and some fancy DIY tube amp solutions for guitar and bass.

The book begins with a chapter describing the workings of the vacuum tube called “tube tone”, followed by a chapter on guitar electronics and pickup characteristics.

The next two chapters are small projects: Sigma for effects switching and Triple-X for amp switching.

Chapters 5 and 6 are about transformers… important components but it made me yawn, sorry.

Starting with chapter 7, all the stops are pulled out and you’re in project heaven… Major (200W), Soma 84 (EL84 amp), Standard (the 1995 London Power Standard preamp coupled to a 50W amp using four power tubes), Doppelsonde (mixture of power tube types), AX84 (discussion of the original goal of a very low output power amp), Kelly (50 W from 4 6V6), and several other smaller projects.

One of my favorite projects was based on Kevin’s reworking of the Matchless HotBox tube preamp pedal in chapter 16. I built this pedal in true “point to point style” (ie terminal strips) on a tube box. Doug’s valve pedal. Hoffman, substituting a Baxandall tone stack and reworking the preamp settings to be more Dumble-esqe (non-HRM type).

What would you do to combine an amp with the style of Yngwie Malmsteen? See chapter 18, ‘Swedish’.

The Ultimate Tone Volume 2 – Systems Approach To Stage Sound Nirvana

Volume 2 is not project oriented. The bulk of the book, chapters 2 through 5, is about power supply tricks and a comprehensive overview of power amps, including tube, solid-state, and hybrid power amps. Chapter 3, on tube power amps, has some very useful information on modifications and fixes for Marshall and Fender bias circuits.

I like the first and last chapters of Volume 2 best. The first chapter is a brief discussion of soundstages and how you can set up your onstage equipment for the best audience/band experience. The last one, Chapter 6, is called “Pillars of Tone” and in this chapter the main contributors to tone at the block level of a tube guitar amp system design are discussed one by one and Kevin provides invaluable insight. on the tone configuration throughout the process. preamplifier/amplifier

The Ultimate Tone Volume 4 – Advanced Techniques for Modern Guitar Amp Design

This is the book you’ll want to buy if you feel the need to get deeply involved with the power scaling technology that Kevin has developed. Power Scaling, coined and trademarked by Kevin, is the way you can get aspects of power amp distortion (as opposed to preamp distortion) into your tone at bedroom volume levels. Volume 4 is not geared towards DIY projects, but explores the issues, including attenuation, power scaling (both down and up), droop, and power management, tackled by modern tube amp designers. .

That said, the penultimate chapter of Volume 4 could be important to a broader group of enthusiastic builders… the philosophy of design. In this chapter, Kevin provides a hierarchical design process that could be used to make key decisions about how to approach his next project.

The Ultimate Tone: custom tube guitar amp modification and creation

There is no volume number in the title of this book, it was the first. Personally, I totally bought it. Specifically, I wanted to have the ‘perfect effects loop’ information, although the loop itself is built into a project in Volume 5. TUT also has excellent material on reverbs and signal shifting methods that is not explained in the other volumes. . The first half of TUT introduces/describes tube amp systems, power supplies and grounds, then focuses on preamp and power amp modifications to commercial amps (e.g. Marshall/Fender) …if you’re totally new to tube electronics, you can buy this. 1st volume at the same time as Volume 3.

The Ultimate Tone Volume 6 – Timeless tone built today for the future

In many ways, Volume 6 is a continuation and extension of the material in Volume 4, where Power Scaling is introduced. In Volume 6, a new ‘direct control’ version of Powerscaling is introduced which was introduced in Vol. 4 but removed with full circuitry and applied to ‘sag’ and sustain control in Vol. 6 as well. new scale circuits have many advantages for a DIY builder likes more noise and less sensitivity to layout etc.

I applied the new DC Power Scaling to a Trainwreck clone project and was really impressed with the improvement in “playability” at lower volumes…the unmodified Trainwreck Express circuit is too loud for home use, needs to be turned on to get the sweet tones for which it is famous.

One of the chapters in Volume 6 is dedicated to Dumble amps…something I was looking forward to as many of my hobby projects focus on those circuits. I found this short chapter to be a good introduction to the general architecture of Dumble amplifiers, written from the point of view of the evolution of the first modified standard amplifiers that Alexander Dumble started making, but felt the chapter fell short in discussing some of the most important subtleties of Dumble’s later models.

Volume 6 also contains a lot of other material, including a great tutorial on designing really high output power amplifiers and a great chapter on high gain amplifier designs with real world circuits referenced and detailed.

In summary…

Kevin’s books have a very empirical approach. He encourages him to cast convention aside in some cases or not be afraid to try tube combinations or even pull tubes and in all cases he clearly explains why he’s okay and points out reasons why he wouldn’t be. well. All the examples in the books are very practical and he certainly has the DIYer in mind as he writes.

Kevin’s body of work is truly encyclopedic in nature, and considering that, one feature sorely lacking in his books is any kind of indexing… this is compounded by the fact that Kevin constantly refers to writings rather than repeating itself in a new volume. , and it’s very hard to pinpoint the reference even with the other book in hand. Perhaps search engine technology, such as Google’s ability to search protected content, could be useful in this case and provide a kind of “automatic index” on the web of all of Kevin’s books without giving away the book itself. Or better yet, how about an eBook format of Kevin’s entire TUT book collection… I think all eBook readers include search capabilities… and Kevin’s hand drawn schematics would probably scale appropriately and would they be very readable? in the e-paper shows the characteristics of these devices.

Meanwhile, how do you get Kevin’s books today? The best way to get the books is to order them directly from London Power Press. They now have a shopping cart at http://www.londonpower.com.