VAUGHN SKOW's blog

From One Guitar Player to Another: MERRY CHRISTMAS!

In case you haven’t figured it out already, Warehouse Guitar Speakers isn’t your regular manufacturing company.  WGS truly is the fabled small-town family owned business of yester-year, and from the top to the bottom, it’s staffed with great folks who take pride in what they do and truly care about their customers.  Plus, the WGS staff is chocked plum full of guitar players and tone chasers … in other words, we’re just like you!

And so we say to you a heartfelt “Merry Christmas” as from one family member to another.  We hope Santa leaves something very cool under the tree for you … something guitar related, of course!  :-)

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What Is The Best Way To Sell Guitar Gear Online - eBay vs Reverb

I’ve been buying and selling gear on eBay since the last millennium … otherwise known as 1999, but hey, that’s still a LONG time!  Over the last decade eBay has become less and less advantageous for individuals like me as a place to sell gear.  The fees keep escalating and the deck is stacked more and more against the seller in as much as we actually CAN’T give a buyer who rips us off bad feedback … that’s plum insane, and a buyer can blackmail us using a threat of “bad feedback”.  Furthermore, the ONLY payment method we can accept is PayPal, and PayPal is terribly biased towards the BUYER getting whatever they want, and often the seller gets screwed by a buyer who CLAIMS the item was not as described or some such nonsense.   Even in a “for local pickup only” auction, we can’t accept anything but PayPal;  if you’re item description even hints to the fact that you will accept greenbacks, the eBay bots will catch it and cancel your item.  Why?  Because they want the PayPal percentage, of course!  (EBay may have “spun off” PayPal into its own company, but they are still corporate siblings.)  The end result:  unless you are a big company selling gazillions of cheap widgets, you are probably looking for an alternative place to sell your stuff.  If your stuff happens to be guitar and music gear, your best option is Reverb(.com). 

Let’s start our head-to-head comparison where the rubber really meets the road:  how much it COSTS to sell!

So, it’s quite clear that it just flat costs less to sell on Reverb.

let’s take a couple of hypothetical sales and compare the cost to sell the items.  First how about a sweet yet inexpensive old Sigma/Martin acoustic guitar that sells for $200.  EBay would take $26.40 out of that two hundred bucks; Reverb would take $12.65.   That cuts the cost of selling more than in half!  Put an even better way, the difference in fees would allow you to drop your price to $186, and still wind up with the same profit, and that motivates buyers!  But how about on a more top-end item, how about a mid-level vintage instrument worth $9,000?  Well, now it gets interesting indeed!  EBay would take $1,011.60 of your money, and Reverb would take $593.25.  Baby, that’s $418 bucks difference.  Now let’s just say over a year or so you sell a dozen or so of those $200-ish items, plus a couple of those 9-grand-ish items, plus a few in-between items and a good solid splattering of pedals and other sub $100 items (that’s fairly typical for a mid-level buyer/seller/collector/player).  Man, you’ll save WELL over a grand selling that on Reverb vs eBay.

But wait, there’s more, MUCH MORE! 

As I alluded to earlier, both eBay and their sister company PayPal are terribly biased towards the buyer and agents the seller.  This simply is not the case with Reverb; the Reverb selling and payment system offers EQUAL protection for both the buyer AND the seller.  If you are the seller, that’s important.

Okay, so given all this evidence, why on earth would anyone continue to sell gear on eBay?  Simple: they still have a larger user base than Reverb, especially world-wide.  And, speaking of world-wide selling, here eBay really shines with their proprietary world-wide shipping service, which actually costs the seller nothing to use, as the buyer pays for all shipping fees.  And so, if you have an item that you just KNOW will fetch a premium overseas, then the larger fees eBay leverages just might be worth it.  Also, arguably, the eBay selling system may be easier for a newbie to use, but to me that’s not an issue, and it probably isn’t to those of you reading here either.

So there ya have it.  Happy gear selling.

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Guitarist to Guitarist: Happy Thanksgiving!

We may all be different (some of us more than others :-) ... but every one of us here in the WGS circle of friends has something to be truly thankful for this year:  The fact that we have guitars in our lives.  No matter the level we play at or the style we play in, this love of guitars and making music reaches across the miles and even the ideologies that might distance us and brings us together as one.  I feel truly blessed to be a part of this family! 

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM ALL THE WGS GANG!

How to Power Up a Tube Amp After a Long Time In Storage

You’ve just dug an old Tube amp out of Grandpa’s attic; or maybe got a deal on eBay or Craigslist.  So, how do you safely turn it on to assess its health?  Well, there’s really NO way that’s guaranteed to be safe, but here is the best advice I can give ya.

Don’t Just Plug it in, turn it on and hope for the best.

Believe me, this is a proven recipe for smoking resistors and capacitors.  And oh how terrible the smoke smells!  It’s the reverse of the old Nike line:  JUST DON’T DO IT!

Never turn a tube amp on without a speaker load. 

On eBay I’ll often see amps listed as something like “turned on and all the glass bottles lit up”, and the accompanying pic will show the amp with the tubes glowing and NO SPEAKER connected.  The output transformer of a tube amp expects to see a certain impedance on the tube side of the tranny, and a reflected impedance on the speaker side.  Now, most old amps are forgiving of loads up to +/- 100% of the expected load (in other words an amp expecting an 8-ohm speaker impedance is generally safe at 4-16 ohms.  But, no speaker load at all, nope, that ain’t safe for even a few seconds!  Figure any tube amp ran without a speaker load has a pretty good chance of having bad output tubes, output transformer, or both.  Again, JUST DON’T DO IT!

This pic was taken directly from an eBay auction.  What's wrong?  Yep, the tubes are all aglow ... with no speaker load!  Don't do that!!!

So … what SHOULD you do? 

First visually inspect all of the innards.

Carefully look for fried resistors or blown out electrolytic capacitors.  Then, check all the filter caps and other big-value caps with an ESR meter and replace any bad ones prior to powering up.  Also check the important grid and coupling caps and resistors and replace ones that are way out of spec before powering up.

Next check all the tubes on a tube tester.

They don’t have to test “as new” … but if they are just flat shorted, gassing, or WAY below minimum spec, replace them before powering up.  In a push-pull amp with 2 or 4 power tubes (or more)  you will also want to make sure the output tube pairs are at least FAIRLY closely balanced.

Then remove all the tubes except the Rectifier tube.

And fire the old girl up on a variac starting at about 25 volts AC.  Note that you do NOT need to have her hooked up to a speaker load at this point because you have REMOVED the output tubes!  Increase the voltage about 20 volts every 20 minutes until you have reached full voltage.  If nothing is smoking and you haven’t blown a fuse, you are ready to continue.

Now load her up with tubes.

At this point, make sure she’s hooked up to an appropriate speaker load, and you might want to run her through a visual over-current protection device (light bulb); the bulb should be an old fashioned incandescent of about 150-300 watts (or multiples that add up to this).  For info on the “light bulb” current limiting device, click HERE.

With amps that have been dormant for a long time, I like to start with it on the variac at about 90 volts for a few minutes before slowly bringing the power up to full line voltage (provided nothing snaps, crackles, pops, or smokes).  Now listen for unusual noise as you turn the controls through their ranges.  A little “warm heater” smell is normal at this point, but keep your nose and eyes open, and if you smell ugly burning smells or see smoke, cut the power! 

If all is still well, give her some input signal.

I like to start with music from my mp3 player, etc.  Just turn her up and see what she sounds like.  If she sounds entirely happy, then it’s time to plug in a guitar and see how she sounds.  I won’t get into any mods you might want to make to an old amp as that is out of the scope of this blog.  I’ll say this:  if the amps happy, and you are happy, then you’re done!

Here's a peek inside my amp shop, where several old tube amps are curently being loved back to life!

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Upgrade Your Good Little Amp to GREAT (Pro Junior, Super Champ XD/X2, Blues Junior, etc.)

You may have noticed that over the last decade or so Fender has released some cool little tube amp designs, like the ever popular straight-up tube amps the Blues Junior and the Pro Junior as well as the tube hybrid Super Champ XD and X2.  All of these amps have a club friendly 15-20 watts through either a pair of EL84’s (The Blues and Pro Jr.) or 6V6’s (the Super Champs).  This is the exquisite power section of the famous AC-15 or Deluxe Reverb … a VERY good platform on which to build a club-sized tube amp, and on their own these little amps sound quite good, but to heck with good … we want GREAT, right?

So, what keeps these amps from sounding truly great? 

Is it their PC board construction, pre-amp stage, or poor component selection?  No; it’s the cabinets and speakers.  All of these otherwise excellent combos suffer from the same malady: they have cheap speakers crammed into cheap, too-small cabinets.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is a recipe for mediocracy at best.  The good news is that there IS a fix!  Let’s talk about that.

Every one of these is a GREAT sounding design, but it’s like having a great engine in a Yugo(click on the word if you don’t know what a Yugois).  The tiny cabinets Fender crams these things into are made of particle board so heavy that you would swear it’s part lead; there is absolutely no room for the speaker to breathe, and no cabinet resonance at all.  The end result: a box that sounds … well … boxy!  And so, I will present you with two great alternatives that I personally am intimately familiar with; both of these options will take your little amp from “meh”  to “YEA”!

First, I present the “Pro Senior”:

I owned a Pro Junior for a little while … and “meh” was a perfect way to describe it, I loved that cute LITTLE cabinet, and even made a 3/8” lightweight baffle and put a 12” speaker in it … but the fact is, that dense little cabinet just physically can’t sound great.  But wait!  Enter the 2x10” “Pro Senior”; this amp is owned by my buddy and HEAVY gigging player Brad Sample, and it’s been on hundreds of stages of all sizes all over the country.  The chassis is a plain old un-modified Pro Junior, but the cabinet is a healthy sized 2x10 made by JD Newell from Grade A knot-Free pine and has a lightweight floating baffle for 2 10” speakers.  Brad used the stock very bright Fender speaker and added the VERY bottom-heavy hemp-cone Eminence Lil Buddy, and the result is a GREAT sounding simple volume & Tone tube amp that can easily keep up with a heavy hitting drummer!  Awesome, right? (BTW: a WGS G10C and an ET10 would be the ULTIMATE speaker combo in this cabinet).

Now, I present the truly “SUPER” Super Champ XD:

As you all might remember, I LOVE my little Vibro-Champ XD for after-the-family-goes-to-bed living room playing.  So, I started looking into its big brother, the Super Champ XD as a club-gig amp.  Problem was, they just didn’t sound that great … too boxy … plus, not nearly enough clean volume to keep up with a live drummer.  So, when I spotted this ultra-cool Super Champ XD in a high-quality tweed covered 1x12 made by The Musician’s Hardware Store … I just HAD to own it!  As you might expect, I did an exhaustive bunch of speaker tests, and Ultimately chose a Reaper HP as the flat-out winner for this amp, it retains all the Fender sparkle and chime, plus adds a bunch of tight, solid bottom (I like my bottom tight and solid) … and it’s efficiency coupled with the quality lightweight and resonant cabinet means that this lil gal can EASILY keep up with a slammin’ live drummer.  Oh, and best of all for those of us who care about our backs, because the new cabinet is so much lighter than the original particle board cab, the final amp is only 2-pounds heavier than a stock Super Champ XD … even with the heavy-magnet Reaper.  Yea BABY!

Now, if ya wanta go whole-hog, contact my buddy Jimi Lundin and have him whip you up a one-of-a-kind cab for your lil gal. Jim is quite an artist and makes my cabs.

So, maybe you have some OTHER tiny tube amp that suffers from the same combo of a cheap speaker inside a too-small box.  Fear not!  Folks like Jimi, JD Newell and The Musician’s Hardware Store can make a superior quality cabinet for most any amp out there … oh, and of course WGS will always provide the best speaker at an unbelievable price.  Feel better?  Yep, I thought so :-)

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