Geek » Fender Deluxe Amp Project
An interesting beginning...
It all started with a Swiss guy named Enrico. Enrico is the representive for TOSI (Trade Office of Swiss Industries) in Taiwan, and he also likes audio equipment.
He told me about a little speaker shop he discovered walking near the Taipei Main Station. He couldn't believe the quality at such low prices. He even called a friend in Germany who owned a hi-fi shop to ask about these speakers, and apparently they are five times the price in Germany, and the friend said "But them!" This sort of piqued my interest, and I put it in the back of my mind for the next time I was walking around near Taipei Main Station.
A few weeks later, I'm looking for a parking spot and remember the speaker story. I'm in the neighborhood so decide to find the shop. They are called Usher Audio. I peek around their small modest storefront, and see that they have several nicely tuned speaker rooms on the second and third floors, and a bunch of testing gear against the walls. Looked like more than a generic audio store. Then I saw a photo of Dr. Joseph D'Appolito (a renown authority on louspeaker design) with the owner, and I asked what the relationship was. They said that he designed their new line of speakers for them. That's when I got really interested, and sat for an hour and listened to about 10 speakers.
What a sound! I ended up choosing the S-520 which are a small mini monitor perfect for desktop mixing and editing. I liked them because they were very nuetral and clean, didn't force the mids or pretty up the sound, and had decent bass down to about 50-60 Khz. Then they showed me the different Class-A and integrated amps they built as well. It was a well spent hour or so of geek listening.
Anyway, back to Enrico. If it wasn't for Enrico, I woudn't have gone known about Usher and bought their speakers, and I wouldn't have this sort of interesting story to relate - which I did to a lot of people. "Man, I got these super killer cheap monitors for NT$3900!! You can't believe it! Best deal in Taipei." I sent over more than a few customers to Usher. One of the people I was relating this story to was Mas, a guitar player friend who is also a studio engineer. We had been lamenting the price of decent small monitors for months, and here I had found a good cheap solution totally out of the blue! When I told Mas about their factory, their testing equipment and their Class-A amps, he asked, "Do you think they could also make a guitar amp?"
And this is how the amp project got started. I was actually in the market for a new amp for the Living Room.
"Dunno. Let me find out. Seems easy enough."
I spent a few hours catching up on the mechanics of traditional Class-A amps, researched how old Fender guitar amps were made, and started getting sucked into the geek world of audio tubes and circuits. My few hours turned into a few weeks, until my next trip to Usher to ask them if they could hybrid one of their amps into a guitar amp.
By the looks on their blank faces, it became apparent that they weren't interested in any weird projects, but my fire was fueled, so I walked over to the local circuits and transformer shops in a nearby alley, and started going through rows and rows of electronics parts to see if this was actually do-able. This was overly confusing, incredibly geeky, and a challenge I couldn't refuse.
So I spent a few more weeks just understanding the fundamentals of what made a tube amp tick. I had spent my whole musical career around guitar players, but never really got way into the whole guitar gear thing, even though I spent 15 years in studios, and lugged enough amps around to know a Mesa Boogie from a Fender, but it wasn't my gear, so I didn't really care too much other than if it would fit in the back of my car.
This time though was different. I needed an amp for my club that suited the different music styles played there, and I would have to hear it every night, and I couldn't spend a lot of cash on it either, so I decided to dive in and build one myself.
I posted "Tube Quest - Part 1" and realized I might have found an interesting hobby which could actually fulfill my interest in music and technology, and could possibly kill me as well because of the high voltages. Beats eating raw Puffer Fish though.
Originally I intended to build a Fender Bandmaster, but I dropped that idea after Stevie from Black Sheep brought in his own 40W amp one night which was just too damned loud. He wanted a little crunch, but had to turn up to 4 to get it, and that was just killing us even at the bar in the other room (and I like loud music). So I decided to keep the amps in the room under 20W which meant I would be looking at a Fender Deluxe instead for my first project.
I've never figured out whether it's pronounced "Moe's (like owned by one of three stooges) or Moss (like that guy out of Bonanza), but the one down the hill from me is open until 2am most days, which means that if I get out of the club early enough, I can catch the best burger in town, the muo si la bao or the Spicy Mos Burger. They have lots of jalapenos and 
