This article has nothing to do with Line6 or their Spider Jam. It's about a little amp that Fender never made – but I did!
Fender have made some wonderful amplifiers over the years. I've had several myself. I had a Blackface Twin Reverb during the '80s and '90s and I loved the sound of that amp. Unfortunately, it was a bit heavy for me to carry around gigs, and not having a road crew, I sadly parted with it and got a more manageable Peavey Classic.
I subsequently bought a Fender HotRod DeVille which felt a bit 'stiff' to me. I like an amp that pulls the notes from my fingers – just the way that older valve amps seem to do. Old amps are hard to find and tend to be expensive to buy and not very reliable. Modern reissues are more reliable but also cost 'rock star' prices.
I decided to build my own amp based upon vintage Fender schematics, which are readily available on the Web. If you dig a little, all the part are available too – or close equivalents.
I started off copying the infamous 'Champ' amplifier. It only had a singe output valve (a 6V6) and a couple of 12AX7s in the preamp. This gives a very loud 5 Watts output. Although it is a very simple amplifier, it still manages to produce some killer blues tones.
Like any home project, I wanted to take the idea a bit further. The Champ had a very simple single tone control and I like the idea of having a treble, middle and bass tone stack. The problem with this is that inserting such tone controls in a simple little amp just drains all the gain away. I compensated for this by adding an extra gain stage and was able to get those lovely 'scooped' tones that my old Twin Reverb provided.
I used a 12" Celestion Greenback instead of the smaller unit used in the original which gives considerable more omph on the bottom end.
Reverb, did I say reverb? The sound of an old Fender spring reverb has never been bettered. It is deep and luscious and I just had to have it so, two more valves, a small transformer and a long Accutronics reverb tank were added. Wonderful!
Then, there was the tremolo from the Vibrolux. I couldn't really manage without it for all those Bo Diddley numbers. Another valve and a Fender opto-coupler gave me just the sound I wanted.
So, the project morphed form a very simple 'Champ' clone to add an extra gain stage, three way tone control, tremolo and a few more tone bending switches thrown in for good measure. Then there are optional 6V6 or EL84 output valves for even more variation.
What an amp!
If you are handy with a soldering iron and want to try yourself, drop me a line and I'll let you have the full schematics.