Brett takes delivery of his custom Blue Mood 30W EL34 head

Blue Mood EL34 head in rough blonde tolex

This blog showcases a customised “Blue Mood” series amplifier designed & built by the Richards Amplifier Company – Australia, for our good customer Brett Lowe. Brett has been playing guitar & bass on the local Central Coast (N.S.W.) scene for many years and was a pupil of the late, great Don Andrews, so he knows his stuff. When Brett was looking for specific voicing for his next amplifier acquisition, he came to us and we recommended a custom design based on our successful Blue Mood series amps.

Blue Mood 30W EL34 head

Brett was looking for a hybrid Brit/USA voicing, so we kept the layout and gain structure of the Blue Mood amps, but substituted a pair of EL34 output valves (tubes) in lieu of the 6V6 & 6L6 family of output valves we would normally employ in this series of amps.

Blue Mood EL34 amp head

We rejigged the choice of output transformer and its primary impedance & also revoiced the 3-band passive EQ for a more Brit tonality, all of which contributed to the final result. The amp retains the Blue Mood features of a bypassable master-volume, and a pull-shift on the bass control for fine tuning of the bottom end, plus a “bold/vintage” switch on the rear panel to reconfigure the EL34’s to cathode-bias operation for a nominal half-power output.

Blue Mood 30W EL34 head

Brett chose “rough blonde” tolex & “wheat” grille cloth to match one of his speaker cabs. Brett has acquired (and sometimes moved on) many amps over the years, including DR-Z, Swart, Bad Cat, Budda & so on, ie many of the top boutique names in the business – but his band mates are of the opinion that this is the best sounding amp he’s ever owned. We love to hear that !

rear panel – Blue Mood

You can see in the photo opposite, we have employed an output transformer by Mercury Magnetics – we are one of their recommended installers, by the way. The choice of output transformer was a key ingredient in the design of this amp. Our next project for Brett will be a replica of the “Brownface” 2×10 Vibroverb amp of 1963, once again employing transformers & choke by Mercury. We will report on this success of this project in a few weeks. Regards – Ivan.

rear panel – Blue Mood

burn-in test @ the Rock God Music School Wyoming

This entry was posted on December 1, 2013 at 4:58 am and is filed under Amps, Friends of Ivan Richards Audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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