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“Und rings 1 Herrlichkeit vong Welt…”

-- Johann Wolfgang vong Goethe (Tagebücher, 1. Juni 1775)

Just hacked and relic'ed an old vintage childrens guitar that was given to me for free.

Added Gibson-style tuners (kept the old bridge and tailpiece), Pyramid low tension strings, a single coil pickup, VT-controls and a switchable true-bypass overdrive.

LM386-based guitar amps like the Ruby or the Noisy Cricket are excellent home use amps but sometimes leave you wanting something a little more flexible: 1st, they can be earpiercingly loud if the circuit gets pushed into the tube-like saturation it is famous for; 2nd, they lack an option for a decent tone stack (the one on the Cricket is just a high blend).

But, Lo! and Behold! There is an awesome variant by Jody aka MylkStuff, who came up with a stripboard design for his mylk[386] amp that is compact and nice sounding (with a power attenuator to control the output volume, yeh!) and also well documented with attention to detail. This means that you can very easily modify and adapt it to your needs (Jody also sells beautiful and handbuilt etched-aluminium special editions).

I had already converted an old Fender Frontman B-15 into an 8″ speaker cabinet for my Bass Cricket, so when I got a crappy Squier SP-10 guitar combo for free, I thought: well, let’s turn that one into a matching head and make use of Jody’s fine design.

I used a 100k pot/10uf cap combination with 1N4148/1N4448 clipping diodes for the input stage (for a range from clean to nice crunch, no hi-gain here!), added a 2-knob Baxandall tone stack w. mid-boost (à la Ampeg Portaflex) and put a gain trimpot on the power amp IC. Two boost variants (100nf and 47nf) can be toggled via a three way switch on the front and a second switch on the back selects input caps for guitar (47nf) and bass (1uf). The amp can be operated on battery (9V block, 6-8 AAs or 6 D-cells) or by power adapter. An external speaker out deactivates the internal speaker when used and there is also a headphones jack (I also made a nice fabric covered speaker chord from an old lamp cable).

“What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.“