1.17.2016

Useful Guitar Amplifier Repair Tips

By Richard Martin


To ensure that guitar amplifiers produce the desired tone, they should be maintained regularly by experienced and qualified technicians. Consistent maintenance enables your amplifier to have a long life and high resell value. Repairing and preventive maintenance will cost less than purchasing a new one. Some of the tips on guitar amplifier repair one can use are discussed below.

Examine the filter caps frequently to ensure that they are in the correct state. When you notice any abnormality with them, immediately seek technical advice from a technician and let him/her replace the caps with new ones. The amplifier might fail to work as required if the caps are not maintained well. On the same, pay key attention to the big caps for they get faulty easily than the others.

Tube sockets must be tightened all the time. As you continually use the amplifier, the tube sockets loosen up over some time and start causing your amplifier to produce hissing and sizzling sounds. To curb this, you can either hire a technician to tighten them or do it for yourself by keenly using screwdrivers. Kindly take care because there is high voltage present which can make you encounter electric shock inadvertently.

Scratchy pots should be cleaned thoroughly. Clean the access holes in all the potentiometers from inside the chassis and rotate them to clean up their tracks. Failure to this, you are forced to replace the pot entirely. You can use air blower to remove any dust, cobwebs or dodgy wires in the chassis.

All the bolts, nuts and screws appearing at the back panel, power transformers and mounts on the chassis should be tightened. When these bolts, nuts and screws are left loose, they make the amplifier vibrate intensely hence lowering the quality of tone produced by the instrument. This task can be achieved by using a toolkit with screwdrivers.

Besides, resistors must be replaced occasionally since they wear out in the life time of the amp. When not replaced in time, they make the equipment to produce hissing and sizzling sound. This is a serious distraction in the band and none would enjoy this during the music. In fact this interferes with the sounds of other instruments. The most vulnerable resistor is the 100 ohms because of the voltage present at the preamp stages of vintage fender amps.

Also, large resistors on the power stage wear out frequently because of the high voltage and heat which they have to deal with. They also have to be checked regularly and replaced with new ones to avoid any anomalies. The replacement of the resistors should be done by experienced technician to avoid more damage.

More importantly, determine the state of the tone circuit and coupling capacitors. To avoid short circuiting the entire equipment, please inquire from an expert about capacitors. It may be necessary to replace the faulty capacitors with the new ones. Make sure these match the ratings of the circuit.




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