Some people say that Dumble would take a long time to build his amps because he was looking for seasoned iron. I have my doubts.
I've never met the man, so I can only infer what he's like from the anecdotes of others. I also can't be certain how much is true, as it's all been re-repeated for so long.
The stories are there of demanding down payments for amps that don't get delivered for years. Yet his gift seemed to be to tweak and shape an amp for a specific customer. This sounds to me like a very smart person who is a talented amp builder but has strange personality quirks. Getting caught up in the voodoo (which may in part have been offered to justify the long waiting times) is probably descending into another's eccentricities.
Dave Funk wrote in his book that amp designing/building is an empirical science. That is, there is no absolute formula, everything is about balance. I think celebrated builders like Dumble and Ken Fischer took largely ordinary parts and understood how to jigger the balance of all parts to get a superior result.
I don't see this as much different than what Tubenit does with what look like wacky circuit elements; when he tries something new, I think he often find he has to rebalance other parts of the amp to work in concert with the new element.
The 1960 Gibson catalog has a list price of $265 for the Les Paul Standard ($2100 in today's money). The production totals for Les Paul Standards between 1958-1960 are low enough (around 1400-1800, I think) that others suggested the switch to the SG body shape was because the sunburst Standard wasn't selling. Of course, now they're crazy expensive due to collectors.
Dumbles and Trainwrecks sell for 5-to-6 figures due to limited supply and collectibility. They're not inherently worth that much (though they were expensive new because of the individual attention given to each customer). As you mentioned, when you look in a Trainwreck or Dumble, thee don't seem to be any magic-tweak parts inside. I am of the opinion that too often we turn to "magic parts" when we're trying to improve an amp's performance and we've exhausted our knowledge of the inner functioning of the circuit. Maybe we should strip away the magic...
I've got a Tele that, for the second time, I've taken a wood rasp to in order to carve the armrest and ribcage relieving found on a Strat. Basically, I'm doing something like Jeff Beck's old Esquire. I seemed like a big act of courage to do something that drastic to the guitar the first time. But I figured I built the thing, so I shouldn't be afraid to alter it how I see fit. And the new curves make the guitar much more comfortable to play. Again, sometimes we have to not be so precious about our musical tools.
Sorry for the extended thread-hijack.
Topic: Has anyone built a Plexi with a PPIMV and Dumbleator type fx loop (Read 9106 times)