cephus
Slow Children Playing
ggunn said:
Awww, you guys are such downers.
I have an PV Classic VT, which is almost the same thing but with 2 tubes (50-watts). One thing. to remove the 6l6 tubes, there are metal reatining clips that you have to pulll out a little to get the tube out. The clips are silverish come out from the base at an angle.
Mine has "AutoMixer" input on the front (I think that's what it's called) which is like some kind of primitive channel switching. I never used the footswitch, because it didn;t really allow you to go from clean to dirty. It did go from dirty to dirtier. You turn up the pre gain all the way, and then set the volume with the master volume knob. Using the automixer footswitch, I think you could use the pregain stage from each channel (normal/bright) but you could indiscriminantly stomp on the switches to get it to go from regular, too-midrangey, nasty peavey distortion of lore to a more smooth, saturated, soupy distortion. Yours looks like it has 2 seperate channels, so it may be different. Mine only has 2 seperate pre gain knobs.
I used mine up until my last gig 2 weeks ago because I bought a new amp. I set it brutally clean (the master volume on 10, the pregain on like 5) and got my distortion from a rat box. I liked the amp for the bite that it has. It's a clang that other brands just can't duplicate. I use a strat-ish guitar, so i have to crank up the lows, mids about half, and keep the highs under control because it will absolutely shatter your fillings.
By the way, all of those Peaveys like that are 1/2 tube. they have solid state preamps. that's why there are only 4 big honking 6L6s in there and no little tubes.
As I said, I used that amp for every gig I played since I was about 14. The roadies threw it on the truck, I spilt beer in it, I plugged keyboards into it, had speakers hooked up wrong, dropped it and I used to do this thing where I'd turn up the reverb all the way and kick the cabinet to make it do that terrible CHING CHING CHING that spring reverbs do. I never took care of it at all and changed the tubes once in like 1990. Never let me down once. the only problems I ever had were once when i left it in the car over night when it was 10 below, I got no sound when I turned it on until I worked all the knobs back and forth a few times, and the constant grumbles that I never could detect in the noisey bar. If I turned it on at home, even with nothing plugged in, I can hear it go gnnnnnnnnrnrrrnnrrrrnnnrrrrrrrnnnnn. I don't know what caused that. It still works. It just makes that weird noise.
I replaced it with a new PV classic 50 212. Now THAT amp is brutally loud on about 4 (out of 12). After the gig, I couldn't hear very well for several days. Rock and roll baby!
If I already threw a buck fifty at it, I'd be inclined to let a trustworthy guy look at it, or maybe just score some el cheapie tubes to put in to see if I'd get lucky. If you take it to 80% of the guys who work on amps, he'll probably tell you it's the transformer bill you what you paid for it. You may also want to look through the discussion forums at peavey's website. the navigation of it sucks ass, but that's where people who don't think peavey stuff is garbage go to talk about peavey stuff.
Good luck.