Using an old fender amp as an external effect

Hey everyone, I hope you are all well.

I have a Fender Champion110 guitar amp which I think has a spring reverb in it. I rarely use the amp but have dug it out from storage and intend to send some mixes through it/use the spring reverb.

What are people's experiences of doing this with electronic music?

Is it possible to remove the spring reverb tank and have it available as a desktop effect stomp box? I like the idea of that as then I don't have to lug the amp around.

Cheers

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Having a shitty connection? This is the 4th thread about your wonderful old fender amp!

Hahahaha sorry!!!

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Not a bad idea.

Ah cool is that your set up yeah? Sounds cool to me. I like the idea of removing the spring reverb part of the amp but I have no idea how or if that is a possible thing to do. I like trying to make the most of what I have

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IIRC almost all the synths on almost all the Devo albums were recorded through guitar amps. It can be a good sound depending on the amp and mic (and neither has to be anything special).

Looking at the manual, the Champion 110 has a headphone output and it specifically says that it can also be used as an unbalanced line out, so you could just plug that straight into an input on your mixer or interface. This is by far the easiest way to do what youu're trying to do.

Since it's a solid state amp from, what, the mid 80s I think, you probably don't need to worry about impedance matching much between the input and your interface output or mixer aux send or whatever. Also, because it's solid state, it's harmless to run it without a speaker attached so you could even pull the amp chassis out of the cabinet and use it as kind of a bulky channel strip with distortion, EQ and spring reverb. Put the reverb thank on top of it with the springs up so hat you can (carefully) tap on them with pencils or something and get those great, horrible clanging sounds without having to kick the amp hard or pick it up and drop it or something.

If you want something more portable it's definitely possible and not too expensive, but it's going to probably mean either DIY or getting in to modular.

Probably the most easy way to do it would be to just get a used Danelectro Spring King pedal (or even new, they've gotten quite cheap compared to when they first came out), open it up, pull out the little reverb tank inside, drill a couple holes in the chassis, and wire up the input and output that you disconnected from the little tank to a pair of RCA jacks that you can use to drive whatever reverb tank you want. Because it's a guitar pedal, you might need to also modify it so that you can switch the dry signal out completely if you want to use it as a send effect, but the amp you have can't do 100% wet reverb signal either so maybe that's not an issue. It should be easy to mod the Spring King for wet-only, though, and it would make it more useful. In fact, this has got me pricing second hand Spring King pedals myself since I already have a couple salvaged tanks sitting around and this would definitely be the easiest, cheapest way to get some use out of them (if the Spring King is used, if it's new then DIY from scratch would be cheaper).

Spring reverb tanks are so cheap it's probably not worth taking it out of your amp, you could get another one for $10-$30 depending on size and number of springs. You'd need a circuit to drive it - basically two preamps to get the gain going in to it right and the gain coming out of it right. Thre are a few of these around but they're all Eurorack or 500 series modules or DIY as far as I know. I've tried using the aux send on a mixer straight into the reverb tank in a pinch and it works but the noise floor is really high that way.

This is pretty much what you want, but you'd need a 500 series rack system to use it so it wouldn't be worth it. If you or anyone you know can build stuff, a reverb driver isn't too tough, although I've never built one myself.

I think the easiest (if not cheapest but still not terribly expensive, around the cost of a Volca or typical Eurorack spring reverb module kit at most) way to do it would be to start with one of these kits:

https://buildyourownclone.com/products/reverb2

These are based around a Belton/Accutronics discrete digital reverb module (i.e. it's not SP, it's multiple digital delay lines with their own, deliberately unstable clocks, to simulate physical springs) that is designed as a drop in replacement for spring reverb tanks in amplifiers (and sounds really good in its own right, I built one a few years ago and it's the closest thing I've ever head to a real spring reverb - a lot of expensive, boutique pedals are based around it). The module itself has 6 pins - audio input is on pin 3, audio ground is on pin 4, and there are two identical audio outputs (for pseudo-stereo designs) on pins 5 and 6, but this pedal only uses one of them (6 I think). So what you could do is either leave out the Belton module altogether and just wire the three solder pads for the audio i/o and audio ground to a pair of RCA jacks (I think the space left where the Belton went would be enough to fit the jacks so you'd just have to drill two holes for them) and then attach those to the spring tank from your amp - you could just ignore pins 1 and 2, since they're only for supplying power to the Belton module. You'll also need to cut a trace and wire an SPST switch to kill the dry signal if you're using it as a send effect - I did this and it was really easy to figure out where the wet and dry are blended together and put the dry-kill switch in at that point, but I don't have it in front of me to say exactly where I cut the trace. If you wanted to still use it as a pedal you could also rehouse the whole thing in a bigger case and use a switch to select between the internal Belton module and an external tank hooked up to the RCA jacks. One of the nice things about this kit - other than being a really nice sounding, simple build - is that it has the reverb module in a feedback loop for getting a deeper reverb sound, and it works well with everything from a guitar up to a line level signal for me. If you can build something from scratch you could save a bit of money, but not enough to make it worth the hassle IMO.

The trouble with existing DIY designs is all the synth folks are building for Eurorack and all the guitar folks want a tube driven design, and neither's really that useful for your situation.

If you want to just take the reverb tank itself out of the amp to mess with it, that's easy.  They connect with standard RCA cables so you just need to swap out the stock cables for longer ones and put the tank on a table or something, that way you have easy access to it for messing with the springs themselves.

I run synths thru my fender blues jr(5 watt tube) because it's blaringly loud enough to play along on the drums to.  It has a built in reverb that sounds pretty nice.  I've never tried running thru directly into a mixer for recording but I'd imagine it's unique and that would always help with layering during production.

Direct vs. a miced speaker will definitely be totally different sounds, and both could be useful.  Amps are great. MY first band back in high schol and college recorded all of our vocals through guitar amps for years, sometimes with a wah wah pedal on them.

i had a hit track in 2015 where the main hook was a volca keys thru a marshall combo amp.

Sounds wicked! Care to share the track? Yes, it seems silly not to use the amps If I have them

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