Double Cross Early Prototype

by James Brown

Since day one of working for Kustom, I’ve been working on this idea of making a 3 channel heavy sounding tube head that ‘does it all’.  I’ve noticed for years that it seemed like the more gain I added to amps, the less articulate they became and the more compressed.  I also noticed that attempts to clean this up by making the attack more chunky always were at the sacrifice of the heavier sounding distortion.

 

In the summer of 06, one of my friends brought in his Triple Rectifier to compare it to the Hardtop.  Immediately we noticed that the 72 Coupe Hardtop was much more articulate and you could hear the guitar’s tone better….but the Rectifier had a lot more of a heavy thick distortion.  It was at the consequence of the tighter chunky more aggressive attack, though, so I wondered if there was a way to get around this problem.

 

One thing that help a lot is to increase the power….so most heavier sounding heads are higher power than bluesier or more tradional ones.  So starting with a 72 Coupe Hardtop head, I wired in 2 more power amp tubes for a total of 6 output tubes and got some new higher power transformers to increase the power out to about 100W.  Remember these amps have the ‘AutoKruze’ bias system which gives you a little bit of self-bias along with some fixed bias…so you get a little less power than a fixed bias amp, but it sounds a bit smoother.

 

I also knew that heavier tones would require a presence control, so I wired this into the amp as well.  After playing this hand-wired prototype, some of our endorsers requested that I modify their Hardtops to add this and they’ve been using them this way ever since…..while patiently awaiting the Double Cross.

 

Later that year I came up with an idea that maybe I could mix different types of tube distortion together in the same preamp, and dial it up so you could get the thicker sounding heavy distortion AND the chunkier tighter sounding attack.  So I added another 12AX7 to a Hardtop head, and mixed the tubes in a new way……most all of us ‘amp guys’ have always kind of done the same basic thing of adding more tubes in series or tweaking the gain, or tweaking the tone between stages.  But this idea was completely different since the amp’s ‘normal’ sound was still intact.  All this did was add other tones in addition to that.

 

In the process of wiring this in, I put switches to allow me to compare the different choices, and afterwards I realized that this was too powerful to simply select 1 choice and give it the public that way.  So we developed the concept of putting these switches into a matrix on the front to allow you to dial up these various types of tube distortion and mix and match them at will.  At this time there was a Bright switch, a Tight Stage switch and a Thick Stage switch.  The combinations you could get were really nice since you could dial it in for different styles and guitars.  With all switches engaged, you could hear the effects of each tube distorting different ways, and depending on how you hit the strings, you could hear it punch through more or compress more. 

 

We spent the rest of 06 building up a 1st REAL prototype……..