Finally, I crawled out of the shell and started looking for an amp I could play at home at night and also in a studio/practice situation. I settle on the “Lil’ Lanilei” by Tris at Songworks. However, that took some eight weeks to build and I was getting antsy …

Then I read about Clapton using the Gibson Skylarks in the studio. A little research turned up some interesting points: They sound great, are damn cheap and have very simple circuits.

Turns out the real ‘Class A’ single ended Skylarks are not so cheap. This one went for $255 + 40 shipping and that is as cheap as I’ve seen one go in a long time. 400+ is the usual. They look like this :

After a couple of weeks on ebay, I found two 60′s Crestline GA-5′s (well, one GA-5T (Tremolo) and one GA-5). These are both Gibson ‘Skylark’ amps, but not likely the kind used by Clapton They each cost 200 with shipping and both arrived with significant hum. New, they looked like this :

As the GA-5 arrived first, I worked on it first. I removed the old speaker wire and added a longer run of real speaker wire, and I replaced the power filter capacitors. That amp rocks. Simply fantastic clean at low volumes and great 60′s crunch as you turn the (only) dial. The other ‘dial’ is the on off switch.

The other one still has a nasty hum.. I’ll start telling that story soon.

My inaugural post on this blog is dedicated to the memory of this damn thing.

What is it? It is a network of resistors and capacitors in one funky square package. It has three leads coming out the bottom and was apparently made specifically for Gibson amps. This image is from the Gibson Master Service Manual (Hawk, pg. 318) and while hard to read, it’s also hard to mistake.

The circuit inside is just below it and shows values of 500 pF , 220k (for both resistors) and 0.0047 μF (5%). I have also seen this network drawn on a 50′s GA-5T schematic but I can’t find the schematic again. The pre-crestline 5T is pretty rare apparently. You can tell it’s the 50′s version because it has four tubes, not the 5 tube Crestline.

The 5 tube GA-5T Crestline is how I got into this mess, but that is another story.