Stumbled onto this amp yesterday on my day off, fell in love with the tone from the first open a chord, lol. Rivera Rake. From what I understand these were the predecessor to the Fandango series, in fact, I've already been told I can simply download the Fandango manual for now as it's "the same amp in blonde and with no reverb", lol. It's in excellent condition - someone loved this thing. Looks to be an early 2000 model.
55w, EL34, two channels. Effects loop with independant send/return controls. A 'vintage/modern' switch on the back. Push/pull on the 'mid' knobs. Very Marshall on the crunch channel and amazingly Fender on the clean channel! Also has a "Nija Boost", lol, where engaged, it easily gets into modded high gain territory. A nice discovery is how both channels can pull double duty for different flavors - the clean can get crunchy and the lead side can get quite clean, but of course each shines most at their respective task.
No time for clips, need to get more familiar with it anyway...but did take a couple pix..
looking forward to clips because I really don't know anything about that amp!
Lol!! Nice!! ;D /\
I hear ya, not that well known of a series, only in production for a handful of years.
Here's a decent yt clip...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQmfhlAvg7E
nice!
that guy plays a mean guitar... but he's the reason I don't like to buy used pedals. footsweat ftl. ;)
Bet it' great! The Fandango i had for a while before shipping it to Lance was just as described. Great Fender on one channel and great Marshall on the other.
Riveras are beautiful and beautifully made. If that had 50 fewer watts I'd be very interested.
Turns out it's not that loud an amp though, or better yet, it's just the best sounding amp I've had when sampling it at lower volume settings. But really, even with the master at noon, it's just not that loud, nothing like some of the other 50 watters (and in the case of the Budda SD30 II and also the Carmen Ghia - both of which were way louder than this thing) I've heard. Now part of that could be that I've only tried it in the 'vintage mode', which I did purely cause that's where it was set and lo and behold - per the manual, that switch is a half pwr setting!
"Vintage-Modern switch: Switching amongst the two settings will produce a change of output power as well as harmonic balance. In Modern mode, the output power amplifier operates in "Pentode" and will sound the cleanest, have the most headroom, and sound bright, with odd harmonics (i.e., 1,3,5,7, etc.) more noticeable. Vintage mode brings the output tubes to work in "Triode" mode, halving the power elected by the High-Low power switch, and lowering the odd harmonics while raising the even (2,4,6,8, etc.) resulting in a sweeter, darker tone."
I also heard of a common Rivera amp tip of inserting a patch chord into their send/returns and setting them both around 6-7...supposedly allows you turn up the master a good bit but still keeping it at just above bedroom volumes yet toneful. I guess this is like the inserting of an effect with a vol control into the loop. Eh...I don't even mind that stuff, not gonna bother trying all that cause it sounds great as is to me, volume not really an issue.
Thanks, dbm! So far so good. :)
edit/update: man o man, I'm considering selling/trading off my two drive pedals as this amps gain voicing is soooo pleasing to my ears. The Bogner Red and the Jetter Red 2 are prolly endangered species now, lol. Definitely keeping the Xotic RC Booster however, it just works so well boosting both my main amps.
Quick test clip fwiw. Crunchy settings and random chords. sorta in the brown sound hood...
Rivera Test / Save
Those sound pretty usable to me. :)
Thanks! I'm having a little problem biasing this thing. I'm sure the Svetlana EL34s it came with could use replacing, so for now I slapped in a matched new pair of 6CA7's I had and recorded these clips. Have no idea on the bias, lol. I might try and tweak it by ear today, never done that before. I've got an email in with Rivera tech support on exactly where the caps/contact points are on the board (they got back to me yesterday saying that won't be a problem, they just didn't happen to have a tech guy on hand atm). I need to be able to get a reading with my multi-meter and get some true EL34's back on there - it seems like it lost a little of that Marshally growl with these particular tubes. Still sounds angry though.
are you using more than one mic on the heavy clip? sounds a little scooped/hollow somehow?
very nice sounds though, I dig it!
Thanks DTR, sheep!
Yep, two mics, and they're literally touching each other to avoid phasing issues. Same mics and positions/distances on the same speaker for a long time now. I just tweak the amps to sound best through that setup since it seemed like I finally landed on a good placement for everything I do. "Hollow" I can fix, glad you didn't say anything about phasing again!! Both clips were done with this same setup, just changed amp settings (for the heavier clip I turned up the gain, turned down the mids and played with the 'focus' knob < that was prolly the culprit, lol). Gonna mess around with it again today, especially after I throw some other tubes back in and bias it up. Thanks for the input - GREATLY appreciated.
