Clouston Amplifiers

If you try to put a guitar in my hands and make me play you something I will almost always say no. Unless you’re my Grandma Justine. She was the first person to put a guitar in my hands and start me down this path, and for that I will be forever grateful. ❤️

Happy New Year from me and my bench! I’d like to send my thanks and appreciation to everyone who trusted me with their busted gear, build ideas, and friendship in the year 2022. The music community (both players and repair people alike) is one of the most uplifting things i’ve ever been a part of.

One of my fourth quarter goals was to be less active on social media and more active in my tangible spaces. I joined a new band and I’ve been trying to make more art. I think it has greatly improved my world.

Anyway, here’s a selection of reference shots of things I’ve seen lately.

I hope you and yours are well!

Did you know I have a lifetime warranty on my pedals? A limited lifetime warranty on my amps?

This was the first clone pedal I sold and it recently came back across the bench for a blown zener diode. It was very nice to check in with it and get it back up and running.

I had a blast talking to the After School Music Program last week! We talked tone, tubes, transistors, and what it’s like to be a touring tech. I love sharing knowledge, especially with a room full of inquisitive young minds!

📸:

I like how this one turned out. Hope you’re all having a good weekend! 🌵

Recently celebrated the second anniversary of taking a chance on myself and leaving my full time job to start my own business.

A massive thank you to all who have trusted me to repair their gear, purchased some of my pedals, or sent words of encouragement. The biggest thanks of all goes to my incredible life partner . Self employment isn’t for the faint of heart and I literally could not do it without all of you.

Cheers!

Always happy when there’s a package inbound from !

Another killer strap from !!

This one was a very thoughtful anniversary gift from . I love how it looks with the aging finish on my LP.

Happy Birthday Leo ! Thanks for the inspiration hombre.

Happy wedding anniversary to and I!! I couldn’t imagine a more wonderful, down to earth relationship to help me through this twisted tale called life. I love you to the moon and back my dear! ❤️

This lil fella was a curious case. Came in with the not-out-of-the-ordinary report that something smoked and they shut it off immediately and called me.

Turns out, it was a freak accident caused by a design flaw. One of the pcb foils was very close to a chassis mounting post. Over the years the mask on the foil continued to degrade until one day it made enough contact to make fireworks. 🧨

I went in, cut out the charred up pcb, and ran the lead from the destroyed pcb pad to a neighboring pad. Now it’s running great!

I was going to post a picture of me with a grumpy caption about what a pain it is to run a small business and to have to report my first half of year sales tax to the suits. But the memory of this magical swimming hole we visited yesterday won’t let me get curmudgeony enough to get bent out of shape about something I gleefully signed up to do.

I encourage you to find somewhere to hang out in nature this week, preferably with no cell service, even for a few hours.

I love a good tear down and rebuild. I never could find any info on what this amp used to be. Soon it’s going to be something like a Tweed Princeton.

This guy was in for a shorted reverb transformer and a fading phase inverter preamp tube, along with a full service bath of course.

I’ve always been attracted to the drip edge fender aesthetic (drip edge not shown here) and one day many years ago told me that the earliest drip edges have these vertical black lines on the silver panels. It didn’t strike me until recently to ask the question why? why are these black lines that seemingly don’t mean anything printed on these panels? The best answer I have found so far is they were drafting line from the graphic design team and were never intended to be printed. Which explains why they are only on the very earliest silver panel amps.

Have you heard any other explanations for these lines?

The kind of fails that aren’t usually shown on social media. This replacement capacitor is 2mm too tall and will be pushing on the floor of the cabinet if installed this way. Bummer, back to the mouser website to find a more suitable replacement.

One of the million reasons why I love Music Man amps.

#1 shop dog extraordinaire, Louis the Dog, turns 12 today!!

I was working my last landscaping job of the summer twelve years ago when the bird dog breeder whose house i was working on asked if i would like one of the pups from his new litter as a tip for doing such fine work. I said that i knew how much those dogs cost and i couldn’t possibly take such an expensive dog off his hands for free. He said, “oh no i was going to give you the runt!” So 10 week old louis jumped in the car with me, peed all over me on the way home, and we’ve been best buds ever since.

⭐️1966 Fender Twin Reverb⭐️

This fella came in needing a pretty complete overhaul, but a client of mine got it for a steal. The circuit had never been touched, the baffle board was crumbling, every power tube tested bad, all of the tolex inside was peeling up.

We decided we would try to keep the same beat up aesthetic but fix the electronics so it’s a reliable amp. The first step was to give it a deep bath (“service the darn thing first” - Skip ) All pots, jacks, tube sockets, grounds, etc were cleaned. I thought about turning the amp on at this point but the electrolytics were bubbling and the power supply resistors were all way out of spec, so I changed all of those out. Then came the 470ohm screen resistors on the power tube sockets (some were more than 200% out of spec!). Most bias circuit components were out of spec too, so they got changed out.

Then it was time to fire up the amp! Everything played okay, but the reverb circuit presented a loud hum instead of reverb. After some more digging around I discovered that the filter choke was shorted (transformer looking thing in the pile of parts picture).

After replacing the choke, I could really start fine tuning things, and why did I find? very little else needed changed. We fitted the old grill cloth to the new baffle board, put the whole thing back together, and it sounds killer. I burned it in for a few hours and it still plays wonderfully. I’m very delighted by how cool the power transformer runs.

I guess my main point in this long winded post is that I always encourage folks to replace as few parts in these things as possible to get them to a reliable state. Service the thing first, clean up the power supply second, and then fine tune things after that. You’ll be amazed at the resiliency of the components in the signal path of these old amps.

Another boat anchor saved from the landfill!

Happy first day of summer! Let's hope it’s not nearly as hot as the last moments of this resistor’s life.

I’m still building new stuff too.

Here’s a bit of the circuitry of a rack mount vocal preamp design that has been bouncing around my head for the better part of the last year or so.

I’m getting closer and closer to the part where I get to hit the power switch for the first time and hope it doesn’t, quite literally, blow up in my face. It’s honestly my favorite moment of the amp tech experience. Nothing quite like it.

That time I got to hang out with Billy Gibbons Les Paul for a few seconds.

A view inside of a failed reverb tank.

I actually went ahead and replaced the whole tank, which is a bit backwards to my normal modus operandi. But once a transducer wire has failed twice I felt a total replacement for $25 was the most logical move for reliability.

(full disclosure the original repair is not mine. I would have heat shrinked that joint.)

A little bit on how reverb tanks work-

Audio signal travels in through the RCA jack at the bottom of the frame, to the transducer. The little white box to the left of the springs is the transducer. The transducer converts the audio signal from the amp into a magnetic field. That magnetic field moves magnets that are attached to the end of the spring. The spring then vibrates all the way down itself, and into another set of magnets and transducer on the other end. The second transducer converts the energy back into an audio signal for the amp. And Voila, your guitar sounds better.

I noticed this old guy red plating almost every power tube as we were setting up for band practice the other day. I wish I would have grabbed a picture of it, would have been fit for a textbook.

Anyway, it was just a cascading tube failure. Popped a new set of power tubes in, biased them up (this one has an aftermarket adjustable bias), and now this V4 is back in business and ready to rock at the / / .wav show at the this Friday!

Whenever i pull the tube retainer off and see an obviously shot tube like this one the lyric “you don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows” always pops into my head.

I’m a big fan of these old Laney AORs. This was my first dive inside of one. They’re very well built, reminiscent of Hiwatts. People often compare them to JCM800s but I think that’s a lazy comparison. The Laney has way more tonal depth to it than an 800, in my humble opinion.

This one came in with weak signal and a little more hum than I would prefer in an old amp such as this. It also had an intermittent volume drop issue. It received a new set of power tubes, bias adjustment, a full re-cap, and a deep deep scrub. But the intermittent volume drop was still there.

So, I played an album through it and cranked it up loud enough so I could hear it while so was eating lunch. About one bite into my lunch I heard the volume drop so I ran in and started poking around with a chopstick. Lo and behold it was the Line Out jack that developed a bad connection on the switch of the jack. I swapped that bad guy out, no more intermittent volume drop issues!

Back to the bench for real this week.

I had planned to take some time off to rest and recharge when I got back from tour, but that plan did not account for catching covid as soon as I got home. But I’m good now and ready to get back to it.

I’ll be picking up the t-shirts from the March preorder at the end of this week! I’ll start shipping them and dropping them off this coming weekend.

On the bench I’ve got this rack mount tube preamp build to finish off, a few semi-urgent repairs, and I’m trying to get the PCB design for the face/off wrapped up. I’ve also got a Plexi clone thats 99% done and will be up for sale soon.

I’m excited to get back into the flow of harmony and madness that comes with running a one man amp operation full time.

Thanks to everyone for their continued support and kindness. I couldn’t live this crazy dream without the love from all of you.

🖤Matt

What a dream come true. The dudes are unbelievable musicians and even better humans. It was an absolute pleasure to work with them on the recent North American tour.

Big shoutout to the dudes too. Awesome homies to roll around the continent with and their guitar riffs are still stuck in my head.

I’m gonna sleep for about a week then I’ll be back to the pile of projects i left behind five weeks ago.

If you’re unfamiliar with either of these bands i highly recommend giving them a spin!

We’re back in black!

For this t shirt run i’m offering white logo on black shirt and also super incognito black logo on black shirt.

This preorder will run through the end of the month and I’ll begin shipping/delivering them mid-April.

All shirts are soft as heck Next Level Apparel 60/40 cotton/poly blend tee.

Sizes are unisex.

Screen printing by in Cincinnati, OH

Hit the link in bio to order yours.

I’m having an absolute blast on the road with the dudes!

We’re heading up the left coast this week and i’m lookin forward to seeing some homies and seeing their reaction to this killer show.

It’s been a different kind of work bench for me lately. The tour is under way and i’m thoroughly enjoying my life as a road tech. A very stark contrast to spending my last two years never leaving my house!

I’ve resisted the optivisor for so long but I think it might be time.

You either die a crusty rocker or live long enough to need two sets of glasses and a ton of light to do fine soldering work.

And now for something completely different!

Of all the modern PCB amps, the Pro Junior has to be my favorite.

This one is in for some fresh electrolytic caps, a new 12AX7 in V1, and a slight resistor change in the bias circuit to cool things down a touch. (tube + bias resistor installed, caps yet to be installed in this photo)

Peep that 12AX7 brand. In some parallel dimension got into the tube game instead.

🎈Ampeg SVT-II for sale $900🎈

300 punishing watts of all-tube bass glory. This amp sat for years but recently came in for a deeep scrub, one new 12AX7, and a new standby switch. I brought it up slow on the variac and all the electrolytic caps are in great shape.

The owner is moving across the country and doesn’t want to haul it with them. Here’s your chance for a good deal on a great amp.

local (Ohio) sales only please.

In the last couple months of 2021 I listened to Jorma Kaukonen’s () autobiography on tape. A remarkable rock-n-roll tale about following the music in your heart and all of that.

The line that stuck with me the most was “musicians only complain about two things - having gigs and not having gigs” which i still laugh about because of how true it is. The other line that hit me was “if nothing changes then nothing changes.”

The first quote struck me as a surface level fact of life. The second quote still rings heavy in my heart every morning.

Running a business on your own can be very rough. The highs are very high because, hey i did all of this cool stuff look at me! The lows are very low because there’s nobody to point the finger at except the guy in the mirror.

So I took a step back from social media, started trying to reframe my thought processes to be more positive, started paying attention to my physical health again, spent more time trying to be present in my work and the lives of my loved ones… and something magic happened. A dream gig presented itself. I’ll be spending a good chunk of this spring as the guitar/amp tech for a badass band, living in a tour bus and seeing the guts of some of the coolest venues in the country.

So what I’m really trying to say is, if you’re in a rough moment keep going. There’s only one way to get through it and that’s by going through it. And a big thanks to Jorma. Although we’re only brief acquaintances I feel I owe a lot of this turn in my life to your sage words.

I’ll have to pause my business for most of spring. If I have some of your gear here, I’m hustling to get it out before I hit the road. If you’re in the Athens area and need something repaired soon, let me know and I can probably set you up with my mentor.

I intend to be more focused on amp and pedal production and less focused on repairs when I do get back to it, but I also have a very hard time saying no to my friends when their amps are in need of some love.

If you made it this far in this rambling text, thank you. Hope y’all are doin good and bein good.

🖤Matt

It’s a fine afternoon for some decibel therapy.

I’ve had this one for a while but never given it a proper shoutout. This 1960s Ampeg Reverberocket 2 is the perfect practice amp for me. 12W through a 12” speaker, killer reverb, great tube distortion. I’m excited to start experimenting with different speakers once my “weird drive bit” gets here from flip tops.net and I can pop open the back panel.

When my mentor Paul and I hang out we fix amps. Sometimes I make the mistake of saying “This one will be straight forward, I think it just needs a service” just before the amp sends us down a multiple hour rabbit hole. Those are the days I really learn something.

You’re right, you’re right, it was very rude of me to not post a gut shot of that gorgeous tweed vibrolux. so here ya go.

the circuit as it was made in 1961. after this i replaced all electrolytics and installed a grounded power cord. the fresh electrolytics really opened up the tremolo and dropped the noise floor.

“hey matt can you look over a 1961 Fender Vibrolux before I pull the trigger on it?”

I love my job.

Made in February 1961 it’s one of the very last vintage tweed amps ever made. It sounds great too.

I also picked up some at the store today so I thought it apropos to get a quick photo for