Why did I decide to build this amp?

well it all started in January 2023 when I talked to Andy Marshall from THD amps on the phone. I got in touch with him because I was doing service on a friends THD amp. When I told him my story, he said the next thing that I need to build is a brownface Vibrolux. I told him that I am a reverb fanatic, but he said that amps with reverb sound completely different compared to amps without reverb.

Why is this?

He explained that the reverb transformer creates sag on the power transformer, causing the amp to be much slower and less quick to respond to your notes played on the guitar. After I got off the phone with him, I thought "I'd love to have an amp with no reverb, but still be able to have reverb in it." This brings us to today's topic.

The Amp

The amp itself that I am building is a brownface Fender Vibrolux. this is a 40 watt amplifier with tremolo and no reverb. Built from 1959-1963, Brownface amps sound extremely unique compared to blackface and silverface amps. This is because of a unique 70K tap on the treble pot, which creates a flatter frequency response.

I plan to put this amp in a bandmaster combo and wrap it in wine tolex because wine tolex is sexy.

The Reverb

I don't know what it is about my John Mayer Two Rock Signature, but it has some of the best sounding reverb I have ever heard. Because I know it is based off of a dumble reverb circuit, I decided to combine the 4 dumble reverb circuits that I knew existed and are pretty close to verified: ODR # 60, SSS#002, SSS#004, and a JM Two Rock Sig. The only problem is, no schematics exist for most of these amps. Because of this, I had to trace out the layout of these amps as provided on the amp garage and draw schematics based off of the layout. This lead me to this:

I plan to put this in a princeton reverb headshell in a custom chassis.