Introducing the Dexter Beachwood

The idea for the Beachwood came from the fact that the amps I currently build are not known for their clean headroom. Small, low wattage amps are known for being overdrive machines, and I think we do that pretty well. What I felt our line was lacking was something that could get decently loud while still being pretty clean.

So I ventured out of my comfort zone of 6V6 power tubes and started exploring 6L6 tubes. But there are a lot of great push-pull 6L6 amps out there. Another issue: those amps tend to be super loud, and that’s not really what we’re doing at the moment.

One of the things I see a lot guitar players looking for is a tube amp that isn’t super loud, but that stays clean enough. By no means did I want to design something along the lines of a Fender Twin. Those things are quite affordable on Reverb right now because no one wants to deal with the weight and volume of those amps.

So I started looking at the idea of building a single-ended 6L6 amp that offers a decent amount of clean but still has the ability to scream.

I started with the circuit from the Fender 5F2a, tweed Princeton. From there, I modified the power section to handle the more powerful 6L6 tube, but I also redesigned the preamp and negative feedback circuit to stay cleaner longer, and stay tighter when overdriven.

I also added a presence control which, while subtle, adds a lot of character across the range. Personally, I like the presence circuit from the ‘59 Bassman, which is a bit more complex than the standard Fender presence control.

As with almost all of our amps, we use slightly oversized pine cabinets, which project sound in really interesting ways. Even a small increase in the size of the cabinet results in a bigger sound with more bass response. The natural-finish pine resonates a lot more than your typical tolex-covered, plywood or MDF cabs. The result is that even our smallest amp sounds pretty huge. We’ll have some sound samples of the Beachwood up soon.