Mellowtone Amplifiers
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 10:20 pm
Several years ago now I became friends with the guy behind Mellowtone (you know, of wolf computer fame). Turns out we're from the same town! He got into building amps 8-9 years ago and has only made a handful of them. I'm lucky enough to have three of them. This first one here is the prototype mellowtone amp. It's 2 6V6, black panel champ style tone stack, tweed champ style power section. About 12 watts or so, the cabinet it's sitting on here has an EVM12L speaker in it.
This amp is loud and clean. Hi input, lo input, volume, treble, bass. Lightweight, easy to move, beautiful sounding amp. I think I bought it from him in late 2017?
Years later in 2021 we designed this one,
This one we called the Super Parlor. Similar in design to the prototype but 6L6 this time. Has a bright switch and is a 2x10 combo. Speakers are one eminence ragin cagin, the other a Jupiter 10LC. The back is almost all the way open. A lot tighter of a sound and playing experience than the first one.
This last year we spent a ton of time designing a new amp. We called it the Parked Normal.
The Parked Normal has a ton of stuff going on in it. It's a full octal build, (2) 6SL7 (2) 6V6 (1) 5Y3 tubes run this thing into a 12” EVM12L speaker in a generously sized pine cab. Oversized transformer, has an additional tube gain stage that can be toggled on with a footswitch for a boost. Gain, Volume, Treble, Middle, Bass controls. As well as several toggle switches for changing the EQ around. The Jazz switch knocks a tiny bit off bass off and boosts the upper mids. The Rock switch is a tone stack lift that sends all the EQ to higher fixed values for added gain, and the bass switch simply cuts out some bottom end. The oversizedness of the design was to ensure that the milkman reverb and harmonic tremolo unit I own would fit on top of the amp. Again it has a huge opening in the back. This amp owns.
The first two were what we expected as far as sound goes. But Parked Normal really shocked us when we finally assembled it in my living room. It's kind of other worldly. Feels like he stumbled into something special.
Is Mellowtone gonna put these into production at all? Probably not, amps are hard dude. They're expensive to build, difficult to ship, and then they can also just kill you while you're working on them. But who knows, he was working on a smaller version of the parked normal last I checked. So maybe one day they'll be available in some form.
This amp is loud and clean. Hi input, lo input, volume, treble, bass. Lightweight, easy to move, beautiful sounding amp. I think I bought it from him in late 2017?
Years later in 2021 we designed this one,
This one we called the Super Parlor. Similar in design to the prototype but 6L6 this time. Has a bright switch and is a 2x10 combo. Speakers are one eminence ragin cagin, the other a Jupiter 10LC. The back is almost all the way open. A lot tighter of a sound and playing experience than the first one.
This last year we spent a ton of time designing a new amp. We called it the Parked Normal.
The Parked Normal has a ton of stuff going on in it. It's a full octal build, (2) 6SL7 (2) 6V6 (1) 5Y3 tubes run this thing into a 12” EVM12L speaker in a generously sized pine cab. Oversized transformer, has an additional tube gain stage that can be toggled on with a footswitch for a boost. Gain, Volume, Treble, Middle, Bass controls. As well as several toggle switches for changing the EQ around. The Jazz switch knocks a tiny bit off bass off and boosts the upper mids. The Rock switch is a tone stack lift that sends all the EQ to higher fixed values for added gain, and the bass switch simply cuts out some bottom end. The oversizedness of the design was to ensure that the milkman reverb and harmonic tremolo unit I own would fit on top of the amp. Again it has a huge opening in the back. This amp owns.
The first two were what we expected as far as sound goes. But Parked Normal really shocked us when we finally assembled it in my living room. It's kind of other worldly. Feels like he stumbled into something special.
Is Mellowtone gonna put these into production at all? Probably not, amps are hard dude. They're expensive to build, difficult to ship, and then they can also just kill you while you're working on them. But who knows, he was working on a smaller version of the parked normal last I checked. So maybe one day they'll be available in some form.