Harvestone

My good friend James is a winemaker who's day job takes him to the heart of Victoria's Yarra Valley where he is responsible for some very fine and highly-regarded Pinot Noir. In his spare time he designs and makes guitar amplifiers - not the sort of kit or replica amps that seek to slavishly repeat history, but original designs using unusual valves and unique tone shaping controls. Can you tell why we get along so well ? ( & I'm not just referring to the wine ! )

We have a little barter system gong on, swapping guitar repairs for amp tweaks and ultimately of course trading a custom guitar for a custom amplifier.

James hand built the pine cabinet with it's 'brownface' tolex & employed his graphic designers who usually work on his wine labels and promotion to design a logo which was then laser cut into brushed stainless steel.

My request was for a single 12" combo with an output somewhere in 'vibrolux territory' and a bias-vary tremolo circuit in the vein of a great 1962 Fender Tremolux which I had played through many years ago.

We've worked through various iterations up to this point with a lot of time spent fine tuning the reverb and dreamy-tremolo controls, now it's time to get the control panel sorted ( with small N.O.S. bakelite knobs and a pulsing LED to indicate tremolo speed ) and remake the breadboarded amp in it's custom chassis.

Power stage consists of 2 X 7591A tubes. I don't know the necessary jargon to describe the rest of the circuit, but suffice to say it's unique and yet gives me access to traditional combo amp sounds, with a very firm bass response, no unnecessary features and just the right amount of all-usable ( to me ! ) preamp overdrive.

Stay tuned.

AP

Comments

[joe cook]

Any update on this fine looking amp, Anthony?