Combo to Head conversion with horn???? help please

[jdc5294]

I have an old Sabre Reverb amp that I believe is just an old keyboard or bass amp by Gibson from the 60s

 

It's a little heavy on the low end, but my setup is gonna be this paired with an top-end heavy Rockerverb 50 head into a cabinet, so the two will compliment each other nicely. Anyway, the Sabre has a mids horn coming out of the side in addition to the 15" speaker.

 

There's an External Speaker jack in the back so I won't have to do any funny buisness getting the signal out, but my question is: is the signal for the speaker AND the horn going into that external jack? The horn adds so much to the tone coming out of the amp and I want to know if I'll need to do anything to get both signals going out of the head and not just the signal for the speaker. I guess a followup question would be any thoughts on putting the horn's signal and the speaker's signal into 2 seperate speakers? Thanks.

[Steve2112]

hi jdc!  Nice old amp you have there! Definitely a collectors item.

 

That speaker out is just that...it is a speaker out. Might want to check ohms a sometimes that can affect the tone coming out though rarely does any damage. Your amp MIGHT have some crossover circuit going to the different speakers, but this External Speaker Jack would be before or bypass any of that.

 

There's be no real way to get the two different speaker lines output to differnt amps. You'd have to use that combo and mic the different speakers then mix at the board.

 

I have a couple questions. If you like this amp so much, why try to output it's sound to other rigs? You're tone won;t sound the same going to other preamps/poweramps and cabs. Just use the amp. You can use a 1/2 stack and combo in combination.

Second question...what kind of gigs do you play? If you don't use a PA, the audience will have trouble hearing what you are hearing, even if carefully mixed to suit you. If you use a PA, you'd need at least three channels to get your full Sabre and Orange tones.

[jdc5294]

 

thanks for the advice! 2nd question first: yeah we mic up to a PA system our sound guy lugs around, we play mostly big sports bars with ~150 people showing up.

 

as to the why, it's not really a guitar amplifier and i've noticed when i'm driving the amp somewhat hard with a fuzz box or something like that there's a fraction of a second after I let up playing where there's no sound coming from the amp whatsoever, then it comes back. i think i might be asking the speaker and the horn to do more then it was designed to do so i thought i'd try making it into a head and giving it a better way to output it's sound to see what happens. I'm not destroying the original box, i'm making a new one and all the materials have cost me about $20 so it's no big deal and i can always go back.

also to address the 3 channels, i was hoping that with all of those frequencies (horn and speaker) going through that one jack and therefore to the speakers, we could pare down to only 2 mics for me.

 

From what I can see now that I've opened it up I actually think the signal to the speaker AND the horn are going to that output jack, but we'll see when I plug it into my friend's 2x12 cab. And like I said it's about 30 minutes of work to get it back to where it was.