I enjoyed your video, particularly your neutral stance and excellent audio demos. My take on the thin, shrillness is that it was intended to clean up the rather dark tone from period humbuckers, but it ended up sounding shrill with single-coils. I had one of these jewels and tried repeatedly to sell it locally, to no avail, until I eliminated the "tone sucking" portions of the circuit and altered some cap values to "warm up" the sound. It sold shortly thereafter.....thank heavens ;) Thanks for an excellent video.
I have one of these, too. I bought mine in 2020 for $450 Canadian and still think it's one of my best purchases. I have no idea why people hate these amps, but I want to keep it that way. This way, these amps remain affordable for the rest of us 😂
Just picked one up for $250 after tax. First thing I did was remove the cts 10" speaker and mod the particle board baffle to accept a 12" speaker. Plenty of room for it, not sure why gibson went with the smaller speaker. their are 2 versions of the white panel explorer ga15rvt, mine has a choke, the other version doesn't and has no capacitor immediately after the input resistor(68k?). Make sure your working with the correct schematic as the choke version requires some more searching. Also in the combo cabinet I saw the guitologist note that some aluminum tape along the under portion of the handle will help lower noise ,acting as shielding. Plan on removing out the reverb, reverb transformer, phase inverter transformer and circuit board. Just starting from here. great point that fenders of the same age are 5 to 10 times more money.
This is been my go-to amp since my tech finished working on it late last year. He ripped out the preamp and replaced it with a Princeton-y one; there’s still too much bass but I just leave that on 3 and let it rip. Doesn’t do everything, more Fender mids than Vox clarity, but it has attitude and presence. Decent pedal platform too, it plays nice with modulation effects and turns transparent overdrives truly crunchy.
Cool video! Thanks for sharing. I don’t get the hate when I hear this demo lol. Sounds great for that funky lo fi overdrive that sounds so cool in a recording.
i have a ga-17rvt (scout) from the same period, and it was super thin and shrill, until i changed the coupling cap (and bypassed the "t-filter"). the t-filter is a mid scoop circuit. i think the .001 coupling cap was the main culprit however. i put in like a .047 i think. anywayz i agree this explorer amp sounds very good as it is. I should mention mine had a very cheap seeming "gibson" cts 10 in it, and i just added mounting holes to put a 12' texas heat in there which is a great speaker, and it made it loud and proud.
On a crunch aspect I kinda agree though I think fender does sound better overdriven too and I'm not even a big fan of blackface overdrive yet i think that's better than this. The overdrive had a somewhat solid state ish tone almost. The clean just sounded God awful. Thin, not deep or rounded at all. Hell even most Marshall's do clean better by a huge margin vs this. I'd say good platform to get some good parts like vintage speakers and trannies maybe. But I'd say the majority of its value comes from gutting it to use with other circuits than anything else. I've heard many solid state amps perform arguably as well as this and in some cases much better. And that's coming from an amp tech and designer who deals mostly with tube driven circuits. A poorly designed tube amp will still sound like a poorly designed amp regardless of tubes or not. If not going at it from a modding stand point I'd take an orange crush 35rt over this in a second.
I had one and made a few pretty decent demos with it back in the '80s. The separately controlled reverb was a very good effect, especially with volume swells. Good luck finding a replacement for the little transformer they used instead of a phase inverter tube!
I'll be watching this a 2nd time to hear again what you had to change to get it to sound like this. A cheap ($200?!) vintage amp, that will only appreciate, makes me want to start searching for one
I have one (epiphone comet version) and after some tweaking and minor upgrades its fantastic,,I did upgrade the speaker to a more celestion like type ,,,much like people do with fender combos
Sounds alright to me. Ok it's ewtube (so not hifi) but while it won't set the world on fire it's not awful. Reminds me of an AC15 but rounder. I have been building valve amps since the 90's, maybe longer, out of old radios and stereos and whatever. The board is a bother but as you say not as terrible as a lot of them. Remember those passives are really old now and the quality back then was poor. They will be very ordinary. Replacement with new good quality components is time consuming but dirt cheap and it could be worthwhile. Hell if I found one cheap here in Australia I'd buy it and have a fiddle....
I've been looking into this app and I've been watching online so I've been listening to a lot of refusing demos of this model and yours is the first one to have a 12-inch speaker and I'm not understanding why yours has a 12-inch speaker and the Jensen and one of the others are a couple of the others seem to have had 10 inch CTS so go figure if you could someone who could address this question and answer me in a reply I'd appreciate it sincerely Bob the blind bedroom
its funny I recently read an interviewthat Ted Nugent used one of these (re-branded)one his early albums including cat scratch fever album,,,many people claim he was using fender amps but he debunked this myth you can find phtos of his rvt-15 (made by Bell I believe) in studio photos
Dude, seriously... This amp sounds great. Gibsons amps from this era are sleepers. This amp sounds excellent. It's got good grit and mid-range. It would cut through the mix. I have a GA-20RVT, a GA-80T, a GA-5T and have owned about 6-8 other models of Gibson amps from their tweed era to the Norlin era vertical panel type. Whiteface Tolex models are great.
I enjoyed your video, particularly your neutral stance and excellent audio demos. My take on the thin, shrillness is that it was intended to clean up the rather dark tone from period humbuckers, but it ended up sounding shrill with single-coils. I had one of these jewels and tried repeatedly to sell it locally, to no avail, until I eliminated the "tone sucking" portions of the circuit and altered some cap values to "warm up" the sound. It sold shortly thereafter.....thank heavens ;) Thanks for an excellent video.
I have one of these, too. I bought mine in 2020 for $450 Canadian and still think it's one of my best purchases.
I have no idea why people hate these amps, but I want to keep it that way. This way, these amps remain affordable for the rest of us 😂
Just picked one up for $250 after tax. First thing I did was remove the cts 10" speaker and mod the particle board baffle to accept a 12" speaker. Plenty of room for it, not sure why gibson went with the smaller speaker. their are 2 versions of the white panel explorer ga15rvt, mine has a choke, the other version doesn't and has no capacitor immediately after the input resistor(68k?). Make sure your working with the correct schematic as the choke version requires some more searching. Also in the combo cabinet I saw the guitologist note that some aluminum tape along the under portion of the handle will help lower noise ,acting as shielding. Plan on removing out the reverb, reverb transformer, phase inverter transformer and circuit board. Just starting from here. great point that fenders of the same age are 5 to 10 times more money.
This is been my go-to amp since my tech finished working on it late last year. He ripped out the preamp and replaced it with a Princeton-y one; there’s still too much bass but I just leave that on 3 and let it rip. Doesn’t do everything, more Fender mids than Vox clarity, but it has attitude and presence. Decent pedal platform too, it plays nice with modulation effects and turns transparent overdrives truly crunchy.
Cool video! Thanks for sharing. I don’t get the hate when I hear this demo lol. Sounds great for that funky lo fi overdrive that sounds so cool in a recording.
I don't get it, it sounds pretty great to me. Do people just get mad because they want everything to sound like a Fender?
i have a ga-17rvt (scout) from the same period, and it was super thin and shrill, until i changed the coupling cap (and bypassed the "t-filter"). the t-filter is a mid scoop circuit. i think the .001 coupling cap was the main culprit however. i put in like a .047 i think. anywayz i agree this explorer amp sounds very good as it is. I should mention mine had a very cheap seeming "gibson" cts 10 in it, and i just added mounting holes to put a 12' texas heat in there which is a great speaker, and it made it loud and proud.
On a crunch aspect I kinda agree though I think fender does sound better overdriven too and I'm not even a big fan of blackface overdrive yet i think that's better than this. The overdrive had a somewhat solid state ish tone almost. The clean just sounded God awful. Thin, not deep or rounded at all. Hell even most Marshall's do clean better by a huge margin vs this. I'd say good platform to get some good parts like vintage speakers and trannies maybe. But I'd say the majority of its value comes from gutting it to use with other circuits than anything else. I've heard many solid state amps perform arguably as well as this and in some cases much better. And that's coming from an amp tech and designer who deals mostly with tube driven circuits. A poorly designed tube amp will still sound like a poorly designed amp regardless of tubes or not. If not going at it from a modding stand point I'd take an orange crush 35rt over this in a second.
Sounds great! Gibson amps are grossly underrated. Yes, some more than others.
I had one and made a few pretty decent demos with it back in the '80s. The separately controlled reverb was a very good effect, especially with volume swells. Good luck finding a replacement for the little transformer they used instead of a phase inverter tube!
I'll be watching this a 2nd time to hear again what you had to change to get it to sound like this. A cheap ($200?!) vintage amp, that will only appreciate, makes me want to start searching for one
Sounds really good.
I have one (epiphone comet version) and after some tweaking and minor upgrades its fantastic,,I did upgrade the speaker to a more celestion like type ,,,much like people do with fender combos
Sounds alright to me. Ok it's ewtube (so not hifi) but while it won't set the world on fire it's not awful. Reminds me of an AC15 but rounder. I have been building valve amps since the 90's, maybe longer, out of old radios and stereos and whatever. The board is a bother but as you say not as terrible as a lot of them. Remember those passives are really old now and the quality back then was poor. They will be very ordinary. Replacement with new good quality components is time consuming but dirt cheap and it could be worthwhile. Hell if I found one cheap here in Australia I'd buy it and have a fiddle....
Are you from the same state as Bob Odenkirk? Your voices have something similar going on.
I've been looking into this app and I've been watching online so I've been listening to a lot of refusing demos of this model and yours is the first one to have a 12-inch speaker and I'm not understanding why yours has a 12-inch speaker and the Jensen and one of the others are a couple of the others seem to have had 10 inch CTS so go figure if you could someone who could address this question and answer me in a reply I'd appreciate it sincerely Bob the blind bedroom
It was probably modded with a 12” speaker.
Has to be a mod. These were 1x10” combos. Though Gibson did jump around with speaker sizes on amps like the GA-8…
It sounds great! Good job!
Go and watch uncle Doug, the mods are so easy and they sound great and full.
its funny I recently read an interviewthat Ted Nugent used one of these (re-branded)one his early albums including cat scratch fever album,,,many people claim he was using fender amps but he debunked this myth
you can find phtos of his rvt-15 (made by Bell I believe) in studio photos
What ohms is the speaker?
Dude, seriously... This amp sounds great. Gibsons amps from this era are sleepers. This amp sounds excellent. It's got good grit and mid-range. It would cut through the mix.
I have a GA-20RVT, a GA-80T, a GA-5T and have owned about 6-8 other models of Gibson amps from their tweed era to the Norlin era vertical panel type. Whiteface Tolex models are great.
Yes the Gibson amp sounds bad ! But not the worst....The Worst Guitar amp is the Teneyck by Mid-Eastern ...
CHECKMATE !