Joe Perkins's video: Cornell Romany Plus: Cranked Low-Powered Tweed Tones

Today, I wanted to showcase an amplifier that's been one of my favourites for a good few years now: the Cornell Romany Plus. Nowadays it's known as the Romany 12 instead, but aside from a front logo tweak and a slightly different power scaling setup, it's basically the same amp. So what is it? Well, it's based on the old 1950s Fender Tweed Champ - but it has a good amount of medications that make it a lot more useful. Firstly, a 12" speaker - which gives a much fuller and less nasal sound than the original 8" cones Fender used; an all-analog spring reverb tank; and also, the 5W output of the original has been beefed up to 10W. It's still a single-ended 6L6 design, but that extra beef makes it great for practicing, recording & gigging alike. Famously, the Champ had just one knob - you could turn it up and make it crunch, but that was it. The Romany has a two-band EQ, giving a cleaner, more scooped "American" sound - much like the bigger-bucks Fender amps of the day. But if you like that raspy, nasal Champ sound, you can defeat the EQ tone stack and get that too. Cool, eh? I have made some small changes - as well as a NOS power amp tube and swapping the V1 preamp tube to a 12AT7 for a little less gain overall, I've also changed out the stock Jensen Ceramic speaker for an Alnico equivalent - the P12R. Personally, I much prefer the tone (more high end, less mids, nicer compression) and I really do think it's a change that took an already-great amp and made it extra special. What do you think? Amazing low-powered Tweed tones? Or not for you? Comment below! Guitars: - Fender MIJ Tele w/ Monty's '53 bridge & Bare Knuckle Flat '50 neck - Danelectro MIK U2 '56 Reissue w/ Curtis Novak Lipsticks - Fender Partscaster Strat w/ Fralin Real '54s - Bailey Curve Special w/ Wizz Premium Clone PAFs - Heritage H535 w/ Monty's PAFs - Gibson Les Paul Standard w/ ThroBak SLE-101 PAFs - Gibson Les Paul Junior w/ Monty's '54 P90 Amp recorded with Aston Spirit Condenser, '70s Sennheiser MD441 and sE RNR1 ribbon mics, with a Schoeps CMC6 room mic. 0:00 Intro 6:12 Playing 11:19 With Fuzz 12:17 With Distortion 13:09 Outro www.facebook.com/joeperkinsmusic jp@joeperkins.co.uk Vector images by freepik.com