trinityamps.com

I'm a teenager who is serious about guitar and got the 18 watt sIII head Kit and Transformer set from Trinity Amps for my birthday.
I barely know anything about tube amps I want to learn how tube amps work more so than just having a amp that I have built. My grandfather (an electrical engineer) does not recommend this seeing how if I don't have much experience past grade 8 DT class I could really mess a lot up. Seeing the life jazz musicians and how I'm not Kurt Rosenwinkel but am going to New York to study with analog avant-garde jazz trio Medeski Martin and Wood I feel I should understand and maybe fix amps, or if I go into something along the lines of electrical engineering.

SO BASICALY

I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT AMPS BUT I WANT TO UNDERSTAND THEM AT LEAST A BIT.

What do you recommend?
Make a pedal first?
Build it with somebody more experienced?
Read a certain book?
All the above?

thank you in advance

http://www.freewebs.com/valvewizard/index.html

There are several good sites and books. Build your understanding before you play with high voltage. They can be lethal with no second chance.

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1834
Some stuff there.

Pedals other than being low voltage can be harder to build just because of complexity and small pcb's high parts count.. You get good pratice soldering to a pcb, but not to turrets or eyelets.

An amplifier build on its own is not dangerous. Dannger comes when you apply power. Even unplugged after being energized, there may be some unpleasant surprises in that chassis.
Thats why you learn to work with one hand and eliminate any second point of contact.
If you have ever got a painful static shock when touching a grounded item(doorknob, car handle ),you have experienced a high voltage shock. The difference is the supply behind each. It only takes about 100ma through the heart to kill by causing the heart to go into defibrillation. Without outside aid, you are dead at that point. Thats why you learn to work with one hand and eliminate any second point of contact

Pester your Grandfather for all the help an EE can give.

Read the manual back to front, go through the layout, learn how to read the schematic.

Do the build and get help with the power up. And having a concerned EE in the back pocket is a nice resource to have.

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Fantasy Noise is what my shop of dreams is called and was the only way to beat my addiction, like many here I suffer from G.A.S.


Tele's make the best noise

Check out the Resource section in the forum and look at 'Learn about tube amps '
Great present btw.

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Stephen
Web: www.trinityamps.com. Facebook: facebook.com/trinityamps. Twitter: @trinityamps

+1 to all of the above.

Start by avoiding anything written by Torres, Gerald Webber, Aspen Pittman or Kevin OConner. They all have various amounts of misinformation mixed in with the facts, which will end up confusing or misleading you.

The taste of tubes is a nice background introduction into tube amplification technology - http://home.comcast.net/~enghenry/diy/taste.pdf

This US Navy NEETS course, is an excellent course in vaccum tube electronics - http://www.tpub.com/neets/book6/index.htm It will give you all of the basic principles,

IMO some of the best guitar amp design information currently available is on http://www.aikenamps.com/TechInfo_2.htm and http://www.valvewizard.co.uk In the latter case, you will also see that Merlin has published a book on preamp design, and will soon also have books on power amps and power supplies, etc. But everything is pretty much already there on his web site. I do take some of what Merlin says with a pinch of salt, but by and large his site is very good. Randall Aiken is a rock star in the amp design and building world. He keeps saying he's going to put it all into a book, but it never seems to happen.

Jack Darr's Guitar Amp Handbook is also a good introduction into how guitar amps work, although some of the material is about solid state amps - http://www.pacificrecone.com/JackDarrBook.html

There is an excellent set of in-depth tube amplifier design tutorials by Norman Crowhurst on http://www.audioxpress.com/resource/audioclass , although they are hi-fi and not guitar oriented. But the basic principles are the same.

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Great tones come in small glass jars!

I've been looking through a lot of the stuff and its been very useful
Thank you everyone

This link seems to be dead.

Try using a serach engine to find other copies. There should be several kicking around on the net.

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Great tones come in small glass jars!

Here it is :

http://www.anthemav.com/products/anthem ... e-of-tubes

Zaphod, thanks for all the great info.