Having a good guitar tone at home is a great motivator to make you want to practice more. I play mostly rock, blues and some classic metal and for my tone I will only use tube amps. The problem is most tube amps are way too loud to play at home, even a 5 watt tube amp can be heard by the neighbors quite easily. We all know tube amps sound their best when cranked up, they are made to be pushed into sweet overdrive. A good tube amp will produce overtones and harmonics that really make a guitar sing.

For my home use I have a few small tube amps. I have an old Fender Vibro Champ and an old Kalamazoo Model Two. Both amps are Class A tube amps that are completly hand wired. Both amps sound amazing with good speakers, but they have different personalities. The Fender produces very sweet clean tones, very full with a singing quality. The Kalamazoo on the other hand is the dirty boy, it growls with overdrive very easily.

Blending the two amps together gives me my tone. I setup the Kalamazoo for my overdrive and distortion and blend in the fender to sweeten up the tone. Using the two amps this way really thickens up my tone and makes every note ring clear even when using heavy overdrive.

Another benefit is that I am using a stereo reverb made by Marshall that really sounds incredible. I use it to split my signal between the two amps with the stereo reverb. With the two amps a few feet apart the reverb sounds fantastic. The stereo on the reverb really makes your sound come alive and sounds more three dimensional.

I’ve been playing a few different guitars with a range of pickups through these amps and they all sound great. I just upgraded my fender telecaster with new pickups I bought from GFS. I installed a set of the Alnico Fatbodys with the huge pole pieces. So far I love these pickups, I even like the sound of using them both at the same time. Normally I never liked the sound of both pickups on at the same time on any of my guitars, but these GFS really sounds great together.

I also play a modified ‘51 Fender, it has a strat body with a tele neck. I upgraded the neck pickup to a GFS Alnico single coil for a nice blues tone. The bridge pickup was already nice and crunchy so I didn’t upgrade it yet. I have both guitars setup with the same gauge strings and since they both have tele necks they play very similar but with very different tones.

I also play a Fender Showmaster. A Showmaster is a 24 fret strat with a set neck and they come with Semour Duncan Pickups. This guitar plays like a dream and sings with sustain thanks to the set neck. It’s the only guitar I have that has two humbuckers, the rest all have single coils. This lets me get any type of strat, tele or Gibson tones I want with ease.

All my guitars are setup very similar with the same gauge of strings and the same action. It makes it very easy for me to switch from one guitar to another for different tones. Each one of these guitars really comes alive when plugged into my small tube amps. The key is to have good speakers so when you crank up the little tube amps they can sing with sweet tube tones.