Jim Gaustad Brown Sound Rig Recorded Tonex Pack With Tubes 5 & 6 Pulled ? School Me Up !

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SmashingAtom

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I've heard VHaholic record with one tube pulled on his 50w and they sounded pretty dang good, in line with alot of his tones. But this is the first time I've heard of Pulling tubes 5 & 6 while running tubes 7 & 8 in a Superlead. Let alone By Jim for the first time after his IK Multimedia pack was complete and him on the Media Tour for it.

I'd like to know what is actually occuring from a technical stand point, the way you set it up for bias and impedence and what kind of volume do you get out of this scenario /RMS ?

Throw in Dangers as well, we don't want to get electrocuted, burn up Transformers or the house for that matter !

But in the name of tone, really curious if this is a literal option. Either in a 50w, or now a 100w.

I'd like to try the experiment, but I will do so with some spare parts and a purpose built expendable rig to be safe about it.

Any insight here would be cool ! Just really suprised Jim went this route after all those videos he did with his other rigs. Thanks in advance !
 
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There was a guy on the Metro forum back in the day that pulled tubes on a reissue Super Lead and had some pretty convincing early EVH tone. I think he was running on one power tube but I'm not sure?
 
chumbucket said:
There was a guy on the Metro forum back in the day that pulled tubes on a reissue Super Lead and had some pretty convincing early EVH tone. I think he was running on one power tube but I'm not sure?
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I remember that as well...there used to be a couple of vids with one power tube but I looked and couldn't find any but I remember people doing that about 20 years ago.

There are too many great vids showing a well tuned Plexi/Superlead with all it's tubes getting the tone.........If you feel pulling V4 V5 out of your amp gets you closer to the tone have at it.....I won't be doing that to my amp to get that so called last 1% of the tone.

I thought Jim's first brown sound vid where he pulled two tube properly got the tone just fine. Jim does seem to feel doing this got him the last 1% and it will make your amp unstable and not operate correctly in the push/pull configuration as it was designed for.
 
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And what is the actual discernable difference either in the room - or more importantly at the mic - between pulling tubes vs. running the full compliment of tubes and just winding the variac down to the 'sweet-spot' with or without re-biasing to match the lower incoming voltage.
 
It was VHaholic, not VHjunkie like I mis quoted, sorry about that. Yeah , he had alot of clips backing the 1 tube deal with his SLReissue. Just clips supporting his actions and I totally forgot about it until Jim brought it up. Two tubes, throws my own memory way off, so that was new for me and catching us off gaurd.
We get into another set of variables with this. So I don't mean to go off into the weeds. But I was back in the Metro Science projects back in the day, and nobody was brave enough to do the one tube test. So Jim completely caught me off gaurd with par on one side.
 
PDC said:
And what is the actual discernable difference either in the room - or more importantly at the mic - between pulling tubes vs. running the full compliment of tubes and just winding the variac down to the 'sweet-spot' with or without re-biasing to match the lower incoming voltage.
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I would imagine that pulling V4 V5 power tubes in a Marshall 100 watter it would set up something similar to allowing clipping the sine wave being clipped to a type of sqaure wave like a diode does by only allowing the pull side of the push pull circuit in a normal fully tubed 100 watter. I can't see it not harming the output transformer somehow.

Running a Marshall like this could account for all the foklore that Ed was replacing alot of output transformers. Since Ed didn't like the tone of VH1 and him now playing bigger stages in 78/79 where he could run the Marshall at full volume he left whatever he did on VH1 to the dustbin of history??? We will never know.....I do agree with Gaustad at a certain point you have to use your own ears and determine what sounds right to you and what makes you happy as a player.

Deraps gettting great VH1 tone with a brand new 2024/25 Marshall unmodded plexi shows pulling the tubes as Gasutad has done is not needed. But I guess if one wants to try one more theory.... have at it...lord knows alot of us have tried just about all of them. Maybe it will give you the tones that Jim is hearing and used for the 78/79 Tonex captures.
 
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This isolation clip illustrates the conjecture of Jim Gaustad, Dave Friedman and Ossie Ahsen saying the amp didn't sound like it was operating properly and Jim believes V4 V5 were pulled to attain this strange fuzzy, ratty, jagged clipping heard on VH1 on certain tracks.
 
Yeah, thats a good example of the tight mic tone. The RWTD tone, where the notes ring out is another character. You get that with big volume in the room, however, Eds tone has this characteristic combined with a mid bloom. The Jamies Crying Room track gives you a feel for the balance of the guitar , bass and drums together. Very odd to hear the Guitar so 'managable' compared to AL. Donn Landee said in an interview 'Eds Marshall was the quitest he ever heard' . Thats another odd one. My 68' by comparison, is so loud even variaced down to 70 volts, it can't be considered a volume knob. Would over take AL.

So, if this thing is essentially a single ended deal, has anybody played a single ended amp ? I've never played one or can even reference one for tone. But another odd thing to me is that Ken Fischer from Trainwreck built his first amp, the first Trainwreck, a single ended unit. That tells me alot. Never heard it, but I think his brother has it, Dirty little monster. He seemed to first mod Fender Champs, which I'm pretty sure are a sigle ended deal. They say the Fender Champ is the most recorded toured amp of all time, before the 2000's. Joe Walsh recorded alot with it. Love the guy.

How would you set up the plexi regarding bias here? just variac it down, two tubes and measure it out to say -45 or -50. And then the impedence, 8 maybe for the 16 ohm 4x12 ? I don't think its gonna hurt anything. Thats my main concern. Just want to hear it. Maybe just build the Champ dealio ;-) , that would be awesome if it sounded that good.
 
It's not single ended. Half of the sine wave is cut off. SE amplifies both sides of the sine wave.

A friend of mine ran a 50 watter with one tube for years. I always thought he was bullshiiting me.

I have a Champ and a Bassman with Marshall preamps and extra output transformers and am working on trying this out.
 
So it’s sounds like your better off with a 50 watt vs 100,if you pull two tubes from a 100 watt you have a 50 watt
 
SmashingAtom said:
It was VHaholic, not VHjunkie like I mis quoted, sorry about that. Yeah , he had alot of clips backing the 1 tube deal with his SLReissue. Just clips supporting his actions and I totally forgot about it until Jim brought it up. Two tubes, throws my own memory way off, so that was new for me and catching us off gaurd.
We get into another set of variables with this. So I don't mean to go off into the weeds. But I was back in the Metro Science projects back in the day, and nobody was brave enough to do the one tube test. So Jim completely caught me off gaurd with par on one side.
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yes i agree with you man.
 
Dave Friedman confirms Ed was slaving on the 78 tour with Musicman HD130 and HD65's just as seen int he Selland arena video. Comments start at the timestamp.
 
To me it sounds like Jim Gausted and Ossie Ahsen have experimented and know more then Dave when it comes to this subject
 
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