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Salves For Valves
Guitarist
|March 2025
Jamie Dickson checks in with tone-meister Dan Coggins who shares his tips on getting the best from your valve amp

As regular readers of this column will know, sometimes we focus on very specific topics and sometimes we meander a bit more freely across the topic of guitar tone. Recently, I picked up the phone to one of the most knowledgeable tone-smiths on the British scene, Dan Coggins. Dan was the designer behind the highly influential Lovetone effects pedals from the 1990s, and today he's a frequent collaborator with ThorpyFX and designer of the Gear Of The Year-winning Dinosaural Cogmeister overdrive. What fewer people may know, however, is that he's also a valve-amp maven with years of meticulous repair and restoration experience under his belt. So while we were chatting, I took the opportunity to draw on his know-how regarding the myths and realities of how to get the most from your valve amp.
We typically see power valves sold in matched pairs - is that crucially important?
"Yes and no. I mean, it's not as crucial as you think. It's only important if failing to do so results in background noise coming up because if [the two power valves] are not equal and opposite in a push-pull arrangement, then they won't reject the power-supply noise or hum. But most amps were designed to - or should be designed to - tolerate a bit of mismatch. I mean, years ago, I bet you Hendrix's output valves weren't all matched in his amps. He probably just replaced them every five minutes because he was caning them so much. But I heard or read somewhere that his favorite Marshall - that he used in many of the studio recordings - was one that still had the original factory KT66s in it, so it was one from, like, early '67 and he used it on a lot of gigs as well. So they obviously weren't changing stuff that often."
Are there any aspects of valve amp tone that are under-appreciated, do you think?
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