Stock Blues Jr. ready for mods. Help!

[Grassroots]

My goal is to beef it up a bit, I just use a delay with no distortion now.

Any tube and speaker recommendations? Also, any distortion or fuzz pedal recommendations to go with this amp? There's a lot of info to go through on the other threads. I'm aware of Billm and all his mods, but it seems way to complicated for me. I try and keep it simple.

I mainly play a Japanese Jaguar or a PRS SE through it.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Billm]

Tubes and speakers aren't mods. Tubes have a minor effect on tone. A good speaker will open up the bottom end and give the cleans some more authority, but the amp is being strangled by the tone stack. You don't have to do all the mods, but the basics (tone stack, power supply stiffening, cooler bias, TwinStack mod on the mids control) will set it free.

If you're not the soldering iron type, there are techs everywhere who can get it up to speed.

 

[PatrickE_FenderADV]

Spend some time on Bill's website... it'll help you understand all the options available to update/mod the BJr's. He's a very helpful guy too. I'm going to buy a BJr in the very near future once I sell my Deville and jump into some of this stuff... can't wait.

 

[jlagrassa]

I would start off with better tubes and a speaker change first I prefer JJ tubes with a Celestion G12H30 as I only play the amp clean or just a bit of grit dialed in if you dial the amp in too hot it will sound nasty and wont work to well with pedals, for pedals I use a Barber LTD for low gain od and a Barber Custom Super Sport for high gain these work great with the amp.

If you know someone who works on electronics I would recommend Billms mods such as the tone stack and power supply stiffening mods it really helps getting some low end out of that little box! I'm sure there will be more suggestion for you to read up on there are plenty of BJ users here!

 

[Billm]

> better tubes

Everybody likes to dis the Sovteks/Groove Tubes, but they seldom compare new to new. Usually it's the old, clapped-out Sovteks that stayed in the amp a year or two longer than they should have vs. the shiny new JJs. Not that I have anything against JJs; I use them for my output tubes. But there's little merit in replacing a perfectly good tube.

 

[Grassroots]

Thanks everybody. Billm's site is tremendous. I've been looking around there a bit. About how much would it run me to get the basics done by a tech?

Also, would anyone like to describe their EQ settings? I mainly keep the fat switch on and the volume high then tweak from there.

 

[Greggy]

Although my blues jr. is long gone, when I had it new I replaced the sovtek el84s with JJs. I usually don't hear a great deal of difference with tube swaps, but the JJs made a noticeable improvement. Sounded more present and less spikey on the high end. Another good suggestion I heard here on TGP is to control the volume by turning the volume control all the way up and adjust volume with the gain knob. That worked well for me on cleaner tones.