1962 Gibson Tweed Falcon GA-19RVT Teardown, Service & Demo 

Thanks, buddy. Yeah, not too bad for a hack making stuff up on the spot, eh? :D The reverb on this is really worth the price of admission. Super nice reverb. I don't know if it's that pentode on the back end of the reverb, but this is LUSH. It's also the type of circuit where you can turn the channel volume all the way down and turn the reverb up and have total saturation. Cool effect.

Yep, this channel is your spiritual home. I go out on heavy trash days and search for stuff. Never know what you'll see.

Thanks, Jimi.

Thanks Carl. I appreciate that. A Tele through this thing would cut through a band mix, which is what you want.

Thanks, Squizzy. You have to take this video with a small grain of salt. The camera I'm using is distorting even with just my voice, so I need to do something about that for future vids. There is some distortion present in the demo of the amp at the end, due to the camera. Thanks for watching!

The Guitologist Yes I was allowing for some reduction in sound quality. It must sound magic in real life.

One of these days I may make a dedicated video for that, but for now, I touch on that briefly here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iA78SKOKHHQ.htmlm8s

Thanks, Robert. Appreciate you watching. Glad you enjoyed it.

Still have it? Interested in selling it?

I see it. You're right. I can't remember whether I replaced that cap or not now. Sounded great nonetheless, but if I get it back in for service, that'll go.

You won't find that exact grill cloth, but you can get close. Last time I ordered some, I had to search around and don't remember where I got it.

Sure, you have a signal generator. Those are used by techs to inject a signal into a piece of equipment for diagnostic purposes.

Thomas, if you can read and follow instructions, try the book route first. Find you a broken amp or two and start fixin'. I don't think there are any tech schools or community colleges anymore that teach this sort of thing. We are in a throwaway society.

cool! yea i work on guitars re finishing doing electronics and i learned how to bias . I'm gonna look for some books and some amps that aren't working and just try . i am retired and my music keeps me busy thank you!! for getting back to me. do you go out and buy amps and repair them? i was looking on craigslist but haven't found any yet

Here are the two books I suggest. They are worth the price. amzn.to/2nMC9ZC amzn.to/2p33DtZ

thank you for taking time out of your day to help me

Sadly, no. This one belongs to a customer. I'm just giving it a service.

No problems with any of the signal caps, amazingly. There are some mods one can undertake to squeeze more bass out for sure, but if I were you, I'd probably first look for bad components. Yours should sound at least this punchy with a Tele. If it doesn't, there's a problem.

On your advice, I checked the (original) bias resistor...it was supposed to be 270 ohm. BUT it was 321 ohm. Swapped for a 270 I had, and presto-changeo, both tubes biased at around 11 watts. MUCH better sound. Thanks!

Cool. Glad it turned out to be something simple. A higher value resistor will decrease volume and headroom.

Good question. There were a few reasons for that, I think. First, Gibson treated their amps as second class products from a marketing perspective. They were ancillary to the guitars themselves. I don't think they made a great effort to get them into the hands of stars or capitalize effectively whenever stars did use them. Second, they changed their models too much. A GA-40 from the mid 50s is a different animal from a GA-40 of the early 60s. It's easy to say "go get a Blackface Deluxe Reverb" and be confident it'll be a good amp. Not so with Gibson. I can't say "go get a Gibson Falcon" or even "go get a Crestline Gibson Falcon" and be assured the wiring will follow any published schematic or be consistently good without some work or modification. Third, Gibson amps are more difficult to work on generally. Their layouts internally don't always lend to ease of service. Fourth, they had features which weren't capitalized upon, such as the exceptional cabinet materials (in most cases actual SOLID REDWOOD). I have not seen a single vintage piece of marketing material touting this virtue, which goes back to marketing. Fifth, Gibson seems to have designed their amps in such a way in the 1960s as to limit tube overdrive and maximize cleans, even in the face of a rock and roll mainstream which was clearly trending the opposite direction, and they made amps that were virtually useless if you already owned a guitar with single coil pickups. Gibson amps is a perfect example how a company can do so much right and yet still fail because of a few glaring mistakes.

Point #5 about breakup was education to me. I never knew this about Gibson Amps.. given the time frame (1960's) that was probably the straw that broke the camels back.. Rock players (I guess the majority at the height of the british invasion) were all trying to get that tube breakup so if the Gibson wasn't capable, that left the Gibson amp market to whom jazz players? County pickers had settled on Fender since the 50's, so the only clean players were Jazz I guess?? My first job during my freshman year of high school was 3 hours after school at a music shop- started at age 14 in 1978. I remember back then you couldn't give Gibson Amps away.. The shop I worked at was a Sunn amp dealer.. There's another brand the failed pretty badly....

Failure isn't always the fault of those who put in their best effort. Sometimes the world just isn't ready for you. In the case of Gibson, they were clearly banking on the longevity of the country, jazz, easy listening set and viewing rock and roll and the British Invasion as a flash in the pan to be weathered. Well, they didn't weather it, clearly.

Re: lack of breakup. Maybe they were trying to sell more maestro fuzztones. lol

Correct. I thought I read somewhere once that Gibson had bought a downed railroad bridge made from redwood.

If you get this upset because someone pulls a tube out of a socket "one-handed", I would not accept your amp for repair anyway.

For the record, I get a lot of know-it-alls and trolls trying to score points in the comments of my videos, but this is the first time I've ever been berated for taking a tube out of an amp "one-handed". That's a new one on me. Very amusing.

John L you're obviously some kind of expert, why don't you post a video showing everyone what you think the correct method is? Don't forget to hire a cameraman though...

Are you freakin kidding me John L...