Double Cross at Winter NAMM ‘07
by James Brown
When we showed the 1st real prototype of the Double Cross at Winter NAMM ‘07, we made no bones about it being just that. The amp was really more of a test platform to bounce the idea of the Cross Switches off some of our various endorsers, and to get some feedback from the dealers as well. In order to get it to the show, we had to have the grill made by a local hot rod builder named ‘Sarge’ who hammered the grill out of a flat piece of aluminum. In his shop, he had a complete 40’s hot rod that he had built from scratch made of sheets of aluminum, which was wild to see!
The response to the looks, features, and most of all the Cross Switches was phenomenal. Since most amp companies put switches on lead tones that do dramatic EQ curves and junk like that, I was somewhat leary that folks wouldn’t be able to hear the subtle differences in distortion that we were playing with…..but luckily I was wrong. Each day at the show I watched guys really get into the combinations of distorted tube tone you could get, and mostly they were all excited about how you could tell when they hit the strings harder or softer. This is normally only possible with much lower gain amplifiers.
‘07 was spent making further tweaks to both the cosmetics and circuitry. To make the power amp a little more robust, I decided to add a 12AT7 buffer tube between the phase inverter and power amp tubes. This allows the use of lower bias resistors so that even a borderline power tube will run properly and never thermally run away. I figured this would be a big benefit for a touring product like this, even with the added cost.
Later in the year, our sales manager Bill Xavier suggested that maybe some people might want a tiny bit more gain. I had to admit that it was tempting to add 1 more switch to each channel, but I had to carefully play with the amount of additional gain to avoid losing the delicate balance of distortion tones. When it was all said and done, you could still easily hear each type of distortion and blending them together gave you the best of all. Especially noticeable is how easily you can hear the G and B strings ring in a chord…even at these gain levels.
The last month or so of ‘07 was when we made the most progress toward finishing up this monster of an amplifier project. Our new Industrial Designer, Matt Copley, made some final tweaks to polish up the grill and artwork, and Scott Benson proceeded to finalize the rest of the mechanical design. I worked round the clock tweaking the DI to sound like our Vintage 30 cabs, and adding the extra Cross Switch to give you traditional ‘more gain’ in addition to the other 3 previously on the amp. I just wanted to make sure it would go to 11.
Winter NAMM ‘08 was right around the corner………and we still didn’t have the footswitching stuff worked out…….
