Fender Deluxe Reverb Mod's

[yoslate]

Thanks, do you know if the Weber 12F150s have spade lugs?

 

 

Matt, the Webers have spade lugs, yes....

[Gitfiddler]

The cool thing about Deluxe Reverb amps (originals and reissues) is that they CAN be upgraded so easily...and with increasing benefits, depending on which mod you select.

 

For example, I noticed an immediate positive difference in tone, power and overall sensitivity after I had my Silverface DR's tone stack upgraded to Blackface specs, including a fresh set of JJ's. Next I had the tech disable the push/pull Boost circuit and wire it to be an 'on/off' for the vibrato/reverb. As noted in another thread, the original speaker was sounding flubby, so I swapped it out and put in a fresh Emminence speaker out of a Hot Rod Deluxe. That sounded pretty good, but I wanted more headroom so I just ordered a new speaker.

 

The speaker arrived this week, but I'm out of town. I can't wait to install it for the (hopefully) final upgrade/mod of this sweet sounding amp.

 

Tone Tubby 40/40. Yea, baby!!

 

 

Tone Tubby

 

 

[kbp810]

One quick mod you can make to a DR is to swap out the GZ34 rectifier with a GZ32/5U4 (followed by checking bias and/or re-biasing as needed). This drops the plate voltage on the power tubes which will help them distort a little earlier, as well as ease up on them a little bit (the stock DR pushes the 6V6's very hard).

[DetroitBlues]

One quick mod you can make to a DR is to swap out the GZ34 rectifier with a GZ32/5U4 (followed by checking bias and/or re-biasing as needed). This drops the plate voltage on the power tubes which will help them distort a little earlier, as well as ease up on them a little bit (the stock DR pushes the 6V6's very hard).

 

It does push the tubes, but I LIKE IT!!!!

[JeffB]

Graphic or parametric eq in the front or in the loop can make a lot of mods redundant.

I think the result of every mod I tried on my Concert could be replicated with a bit of tweaking on some kind of external eq. Except speaker and cab swaps.

[SteveKrell]

I would agree that the Deluxe Reverb Re- issue is not the amp to do the job as I said above the amps made by Fender to do it right are... the twin / or / the Cocert, trust me I know whats up... Steve

[zdzislaw]

I have a deluxe reverb. The simplest and easiest mod is to upgrade the internal speaker cables. The amp uses clips for the cabling, so switching out is easy. The best site I found is www.lavacable.com. Switched to KimberKable - the result: a whole new amp. Better mids, high end not as shrill. Other brands may be 'better' such as VanDenHul - all to taste, and each of us hears a little different.

[nuke]

The Deluxe Reverb is truly one of nature's most perfect amps. Interestingly, from the blackface to the silverface era, there were very few substantial changes. While some other Fender amps took some misguided turns of the worse in the design department.

 

The re-issue is a bit of a dumbed-down version of the originals. It's not bad, but it suffers from some price-point engineering and some "modernization".

 

The trick with the Deluxe Reverb is to get it working as perfectly as you can. The filter caps are small, the output transformer is small and doesn't have much iron in the core. There's not a lot of power there and it will get flabby if it isn't really up to snuff.

 

First tricks on the vintage amps: cap job, which is swapping out *all* those 40 year old electrolytic capacitors with brand new ones of the same value. Electrolytics get old and lose their ability to work properly. Just a fact of life. This will significantly tighten up the amp and smooth out the frequency response. Fresh caps with low ESR and leakage will really wake the amp up.

 

Second is to put a good, very tightly matched pair of 6V6's in it. The output transformer is puny the core is small and the lack of iron means any DC imbalance on the core will significantly cut into the bass response. A very tightly matched pair of output tubes will operate in a symmetrical fashion and make the most of what's there. Tightly matched pairs will also reduce hum in the amp quite a lot.

 

The blackface amps use a GZ34/5AR4 rectifier tube, the silverface amps use a 5U4GB. The 5U4 has higher internal resistance which results in lower plate supply voltage, but the silverface amps boosted the transformer voltage a bit to make up for it. So that's kind of a wash. However, subbing a GZ34 in a silverface amp will allow you to squeeze a tiny bit more power and headroom out of the amp - if the output tubes are up to snuff and can handle it. Later silverface amps had a "pull for boost" switch on the volume knob. This features was always awful. Fortunately if you don't pull the switch, it doesn't do anything. The rest of the evolution of the silver panel Deluxe Reverbs was inconsequential. Minor changes here and there, mostly for longevity.

 

The re-issue is kind of a sad puppy. It is much like the originals, but at the time it was produced, the only new production 6V6's you could get were russian and they were absolutely awful. They designed the amp to work with these tubes, limiting the power and voltage. Like most of Fender's reissue amps, it was built with lowest-price components on a circuit board. They can be tweeked, but at some point, you might as well start over.

 

Speakers make a lot of difference. It is a matter of taste what you might like, but my favorite of all time was the Naylor 12" speaker. These went out of production when Naylor amps folded up. Naylor resurfaced as Reverend Amps and the "Reverend Alltone 1250" speakers were available for a while and pretty much like the original Naylor speaker. My Deluxe Reverb has one of these in it. It is a very balanced, smooth and fairly sensitive speaker with a ceramic magnet. Not sure what's on the market today that's close.

 

I've been playing a Silverface Deluxe Reverb for over a couple of decades. It's not really tweeked at all. It's in perfect electronic shape and the only real mod I've done to it is to convert the "pull-for-boost" into a bright switch. The amp just sings and it gigs great. Plus it doesn't break your back loading out at the end of the night.

[schundog]

Nice write up, nuke. Please stick around this place and chime in on things!

[DetroitBlues]

That is quite a write up. But since my KBP810 Reverb Deluxe amp is more in line of the original spec instead of the re-issue version, I'd bet Brian really stepped up on mine. The only thing I wish mine had is a master volume so I could push the preamp gain instead of using an overdrive pedal. I love the tremolo effect and found myself using the reverb less and less. The speaker on mine is a Greenback 12H (I think). One thing about Brian's amps is he does not use cheap parts. He doesn't skimp on parts to save money, but rather makes sure everything is built to last.

[Gitfiddler]

Nuke~ You are right on point with your analysis of DR's.

[nuke]

That is quite a write up. But since my KBP810 Reverb Deluxe amp is more in line of the original spec instead of the re-issue version, I'd bet Brian really stepped up on mine. The only thing I wish mine had is a master volume so I could push the preamp gain instead of using an overdrive pedal. I love the tremolo effect and found myself using the reverb less and less. The speaker on mine is a Greenback 12H (I think). One thing about Brian's amps is he does not use cheap parts. He doesn't skimp on parts to save money, but rather makes sure everything is built to last.

 

 

I haven't seen the inside of one, but I saw your picture and that's a nice looking amp. Anyone going through the trouble build something like that I would guess would use the good parts on the inside too.

 

I know what you mean with the master-volume, but through the years, I've just come to accept that the amp is what it is and it just doesn't have the right gain-staging to do the master-volume thing. Fender tried with the half-hearted, "pull for boost" nonsense. This truly bizarre mod tapped some of the reverb driver signal and fed it back into the amp. The result was a not-quite satisfactory, weird kind of distortion. That's why mine got morphed into a bright switch. The DR reverb channel has a fixed brightness cap installed, except it is half the value of the amps with bright switches, 47pf instead of 120pf. So it gives a kind of in-between bright on and off. I like the regular bright switch, especially when switching between humbuckers and single-coil guitars. I either want it bright or not, rather than in-between.

 

I also have a 5G9 tweed tremolux, also a 2x 6V6 amp, with perhaps slightly less power than a Deluxe Reverb. To my ear, the 6V6 is the sweetest of the output tubes. They just make a nice harmonic structure, even when they aren't driven hard. Curiously, the old alnico Jensen 12" in the tweed has quite a good solid bass to it. The tweed character is very mid-rangey and breaks up a bit earlier, versus the wider tone and punchy dynamics of the BF and SF Deluxe Reverbs.