Fender Amp Sound Modification

I’ve been playing with my Fender Blues Deleux amp for a few weeks now, and I love the sound, it’s great, however I’m finding that it breaks up a little easier than I would like, and only really works with the guitars with the low gain pickups, specifically the strat with the MD spec custom wound bare knuckle pick ups in. I wanted to keep the sound but just give my self a little more headroom and also allow the guitars without the super low gain pick ups in a chance to play through it, so I’ve followed the following updated.

First, I’ve started playing through input 2 – not using input 1, this makes a good difference but doesn’t really effect the head room.

Following some advice I’ve decided to change one of the pre amp valves.

hot fender pre-amps

Upon looking I found out that my amp has the Fender “Red” or “4″ spec premp valves in, which from reading are the most agressive Fender spec valves for break up.( From what I’ve read they are also just re-baged Groove Tubes). The plan is to pop out valve one on the far right of this picture and replace it with a valve that will maintain the same sound but give a little more head room before break up.

For replacement valves I was advised to get 12AY7′s

12AY7 options

I found a few 12AY7′s in terms of makes and models and of course costs, ranging from £40 to £9. I found electro-harmonix and groove tubes to have the best sounds and also value for money, however the Groove Tubes where out of stock in pretty much every shop I wanted so I decided to get a pair of electro-harmonix (always good to have a spare if you pop one) but I also found two different models of 12AY7′s a black “stock” version, or a gold smoother version. I bought 2 black stock valves for spair and one gold spec, just to try.

Gold - is it special, I think not

I decided just to give both a shot just for interests sake. Both where excellent and did the job fine and to be %100 honest I couldn’t really pick up a sound difference between black and gold spec, with the low gain guitar pick up’s the gold one did seem to maintain the clean sound better than the black ones, however I’m also half wondering if I’m looking for that in my ear rather than actually hearing it. I’ve tried both and stuck the gold valve in, and put the pair of blacks to one side as spares, as removing one of the Red Fenders gives me a spare for the Fender pre-amps and now I’ve got a spare for the one off elctro-harmonix valve.  This modification has really added to the sound I was looking for, it’s made the amp much better, kept the clean tone but also made it easier to maintain the clean tone. I told you I was going to work for this sound and I think it’s there now for the moment. I’m still playing with amps, but this is a really good update to make and can really recommend it if you’re looking for a little more headroom in your amp. (this will probably work on the Fender HotRod amps too).

The amp opened.