That was great seeing and explaining the layout and schematic at the same time. Wish I had had a teacher like you way back at tech, things might have turned out a bit different. :)
Good tutorial on the slo lead circuit. You missed a pretty important part. There is a .001uf treble bleed capacitor that is strapped in parallel with the plate resistor on the cold clipper circuit. This really helps with the soft clipping of the cold clipper circuit.
Pretty cool tutorial, Bro. I have to ask though do you really dislike the sound of the Direct-Coupled Cathode-Follower or just kind of resent that it is Unity Gain and assume it is wasteful? It's not. It's actually extremely important for some kinds of players. Because it is unity gain when driven hard it starts acting like a soft compressor/limiter. Because that drives the tone stack, again when driven into limiting, it starts to "squeeze" the bandwidth and sharpen the Q of each tone section behaving a bit like a cocked wah, adding a very dynamic vocal quality to tonality. It was an integral part of Tweed Bassman amps that spawned both Marshall Plexi and Vox AC30 design and dynamic timbre. It is a large part of why they "sing". That the tone stack comes AFTER the Volume/Gain control just adds to it. The main reason Fender drifted away from this topology for Blackface amps is that placing the tone stack BEFORE the Volume/Gain control made the amps sound more similar at a wider range of gain settings so one amp could cover a wider range of venue sizes. This was extremely important back when PA systems were for voice only but at the sacrifice of the "vocality" of Tweed/Vox/Marshall design. Once PA systems starting reinforcing everything including mic'd up amps, the only attribute that had to be considered for amplifier power was headroom. Today you can play with a 5 watt Champ provided you have a solid PA with a decent monitor system.
For me, it just has a sound and does a thing that I am not a fan of. No debate that it does do what it is supposed to, but what it does to teh sound and feel I am not a fan of. No more, no less.
@@atech9020 That's cool. One man's meat is another man's poison. Since it appears you're fond of cold cathode clipping you are prolly more of a high gain player that prefers hard compression over soft limiting. That does facilitate speed playing a bit more, just less vocal.