JakeAC5253
New member
I recently played with a 5150 mod to fill out the sound while keeping the original voicing and feel. It was supposed to be a single component mod that turned into a dual component mod just to balance it out. Funny story to it actually. I was having a look at the schematic for the original 5150 and I noticed one component value which made no sense to me. I thought it was a typo before I opened my amp and found that it was indeed correct. I started by wiring a 1M pot in series with R101 in order to use it as a feel knob to change the way the amp felt on the fly. A friend and I both thought that all the way up sounded like junk compared to the rest of the sweep, and I said ahh that's alright, that's the full up mod value, can't expect it to all sound good. After I disconnected the pot I realized that I had wired it backwards and full up was the "stock" amp value with the pot resistance set on 0Ω and the amp's stock resistor only!
The mod was born, but it needed tweaking. I raised the value of R101, values between 220k and 470k work, but any higher and the amp can tend to feedback pretty bad, noise gates still work, and so do the knobs on the front. I lowered the R9 value to somewhat balance this out, but I didn't go nearly as low as the suggested Cameron mods. 250k, 330k, 470k, 680k are good values for replacement for R9, any lower than a single 250k resistor there and you absolutely decimate the amps voicing and feel. This goes for impedances created by more than one resistor as well (the original mod said to put two resistors in parallel). If you did this, beware that you are creating an impedance value that may well be much lower than you think it is (applies to noob modders only) and I would recommend playing with values much higher than what Cameron suggested.
And here are the clips:
Preamble (details about mod and setup
Crunch Channel Demo:
Lead Channel Demo:
The clips are long but detailed. Hopefully I've shown the tone effectively, like I said it's not so much better as it is different but also useful, which is why I wired it up to a switch so I have both tones at my disposal. Thanks for listening.
The mod was born, but it needed tweaking. I raised the value of R101, values between 220k and 470k work, but any higher and the amp can tend to feedback pretty bad, noise gates still work, and so do the knobs on the front. I lowered the R9 value to somewhat balance this out, but I didn't go nearly as low as the suggested Cameron mods. 250k, 330k, 470k, 680k are good values for replacement for R9, any lower than a single 250k resistor there and you absolutely decimate the amps voicing and feel. This goes for impedances created by more than one resistor as well (the original mod said to put two resistors in parallel). If you did this, beware that you are creating an impedance value that may well be much lower than you think it is (applies to noob modders only) and I would recommend playing with values much higher than what Cameron suggested.
And here are the clips:
Preamble (details about mod and setup
Crunch Channel Demo:
Lead Channel Demo:
The clips are long but detailed. Hopefully I've shown the tone effectively, like I said it's not so much better as it is different but also useful, which is why I wired it up to a switch so I have both tones at my disposal. Thanks for listening.
