An Amp Stand!
Ha!
I made a stand… for my new micro amp, which I hope will perform as well as I envisage to lift my guitar geekery to another level entirely! I made it from scrap pieces of wood and a couple of cutoffs of aluminium for a finishing touch. It’s not very pretty, but it performs it’s duty superbly.
The idea for the tiny Orange PPC108 1×8 cabinet came from a user on the “Quilter Amp Users” Facebook group. Somebody with a Quilter 101 mini head had paired it up with one of these cabs and upgraded the speaker to the same one as used in the Quilter Micro Pro mach2 combo amps (Celestion TF0818).
I will be upgrading my speaker too, but, due to the desire to reduce weight at every opportunity to the “nth” degree – I am going to try out a different Celestion 8″, high-powered speaker to the one Quilter uses.
After being inspired by other users successfully employing this cab on stage it re-ignited an idea I had some time ago for a specific placement of my amp onstage, which at the time always proved impractical due to stage space. What I want to try is my amp in front of me, facing up towards my face like a monitor, which will now be easier to implement with such a tiny cab.
This way I’ll be able to turn my amp down a little, whilst still hearing it clearly. I often get complaints from other band members that I’m too loud (of course it’s always the bass player 😉 and I’ve never had the Toneblock up above 10 watts!). Still I am nothing if not accommodating, so if I can appease everybody with a more comfortable stage volume without suffering the horrible situation of not being able to hear myself properly on stage then I will try it.
The cab is intended solely for this purpose. it’s a sound source predominantly for me. If I know we only have a vocal PA to play through at a gig I’ll bring my 1×12 cab as well and have that serve the sound out to the audience and rest of the band. If my guitar is going through the PA then I can use my DI (from the trusty Palmer PDI-09) for the audience and a little in the monitors for the band. I get my cab right in my face and hopefully we’re all happy.
The added bonus of having my amp positioned in such a way is that I’ll have the controls at my feet, so I can easily dial in the settings on the fly. The amp controls will sit just below knee height!
The speaker I’m going to try seems like it’ll be quite a dark-sounding one. It’s a PA type speaker, much like the TF0818 in the Quilter Micro Pro, but it has a fair bit less treble response (Celestion TN0820). It uses a neodinium magnet and has 50% more power handling, it’s lighter and if the cab is directed at my face then I think it’ll be a blessing that it’s dark-sounding! The out-front sound will be the same as always – the DI from the PDI-09.
I can’t wait to try it out. I have a good feeling it’s going to work really well. The good thing is that I know it’ll work well enough for it to be a worthwhile setup. I have my 1×12, which, considering it’s cheap price I love the sound of and I’ve got my Tonetubby Alnico 10″ permanently setup now in a newly-constructed ISO box (more on that in the next post).
Looks like I am almost there to getting all my tone requirements in place. I will be posting video when the new speaker arrives. The stock speaker in the PPC108, to be honest sounds terrible. I’m sure it sounds much better with the Micro Terror for which it was voiced. However I bought this cab knowing I was going to change the speaker anyway, so I have no problem with that and it looks so cool!
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