Sound Garage Tales

So you finally received your tube guitar amp, you spent a fortune for it, and you love its sweet tone and all, but. . . You live in a small apartment, with sonically transparent walls, and you want to have happy neighbors. Your dilemma was addressed actually by a lot of amp builders by building attenuators that act just like a speaker load and output just enough power to the speaker that you need. But there’s an easier and more effective way of taming your amp by using a Variable Voltage Regulator (VVR) that will let you turn your amp’s Volume to where you want it, but control the overall amp output to an optimal level.

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Guitar pedal board routing

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I couldn’t control myself. After seeing these cool demos of the Magick Eye tube, (a tube commonly used as a tuning indicator in old radios) I had to try them out in my amps. So I plopped together a quick video to see the dramatic and cool visual effect. I will probably tweak some values but overall I am very happy with the visual effect.

The circuit is nothing complicated. All you need is one of the many Magick Eye tubes existent out there, with many different beam patterns, that might need a slightly different pin-out connection, but all of them work in a main common way – it taps in the path of the signal level of roughly 10 to 25 Volts (depends on the type of tube used), and a high DC voltage of something between 200 to 250 (B+).

I used a Russian EM80/6BR5 I scored off Ebay. The EM80 tube has a “U” shaped fluorescent target and two rods connected to the anode, producing two angled shadows on the edge triggered by the control voltage (input signal).

The schematic I used is the one below, posted by Michael on the 18watt site.

I tapped the control voltage (signal) off one of the plates of the EL 84 tubes, and got the high voltage of about 250v off one of the filter caps.

Check this video out of how cool this can be!

With the price hike in boutique guitar tube amps, (and rightly so since, depending on the components quality that go into the construction the initial costs can add up very quickly), there seems to be a tone-void gap between solid-state easily accessible (cheap) and the high end tube amps out there.

So, what will you do, if you are a serious guitar player but have no cash to spend on one (two or three) of the big name tube guitar amp?

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