# Garnet Guillotine



## JimiGuy7 (Jan 10, 2008)

I am currently in search for the Gordie Johnson tone and I have noticed these little Garnet Guillotine`s on the Garnet Amps site. What I want to know is if sounds anything like a Garnet Herzog? The Herzog re-issue is like $250 more and I will buy one if I have to but I would like to save a couple of bucks if at all possible. They have sound clip links on the Garnet Amp's site but the don't work so I need some help/advice on acheiving the Gordie Johson tone.


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## Ti-Ron (Mar 21, 2007)

Never heard about that before, thanks for the tip! But are they genuit and legit? Is it a comeback of Garnet or just someone who's doing clone? The site is not clear about it or maybe I miss something! The Herzog itself sounds interessing! Any thoughts or reviews outta here?


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## traynor_garnet (Feb 22, 2006)

These were one of Gar's last creations. A tube overdrive pedal but they are not really the same as as Herzog.

BTW, if you really need a Herzog, crab any small Champ like amp, run it into a huge resistor with a line out, and viola!

TG


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## Ripper (Jul 1, 2006)

Ti-Ron said:


> Never heard about that before, thanks for the tip! But are they genuit and legit? Is it a comeback of Garnet or just someone who's doing clone? The site is not clear about it or maybe I miss something! The Herzog itself sounds interessing! Any thoughts or reviews outta here?



Garnet isnt out of business, if you check out it's website they are still building the Herzog's on order, putting out the guillotines and supplying logos etc for people restoring amps. The business was taken over by a true garnet fan and long time friend of Gar's.


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## Ti-Ron (Mar 21, 2007)

Ripper said:


> Garnet isnt out of business, if you check out it's website they are still building the Herzog's on order, putting out the guillotines and supplying logos etc for people restoring amps. The business was taken over by a true garnet fan and long time friend of Gar's.


Thanks for the new! That is really nice!


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## KapnKrunch (Jul 13, 2016)

Any experience since last post? Eight years ago. 

Sound samples still don't work. How credible is that?

Love to get one, but are these acolytes of Gar's up to the task? Anyone vouch for their promptness?

The Stephenson Stage Hog is similar to the Herzog in that they are both COMPLETE amplifiers, producing both power tube distortion and preamp tube distortion. 

Guillotine looks like preamp only, but with two 12au7's could be like the Stage Hog which will accept a variety of this type of tube with different results. One tube preamps, other tube push/pull. I think. I am no amp tech.

Uniquely Canadian invention. Revive this thread!


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## cboutilier (Jan 12, 2016)

KapnKrunch said:


> Any experience since last post? Eight years ago.
> 
> Sound samples still don't work. How credible is that?
> 
> ...


A 12au7 can be used as a lower power output tube


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## KapnKrunch (Jul 13, 2016)

Yes, i know a 12a_7 is used as a power tube in Stage Hog.

Thanks for confirming.

Is the second 12au7 used as a power tube in the GUILLOTINE in particular?

And is it used as a push/pull? It does have two sections doesn't it?


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## Hammerhands (Dec 19, 2016)

I think Garnet Amplifiers is mostly one guy named Pete. I bought a Herzog from him earlier this year, it only took a couple months. I would email him from the website to see when he can build units. Check the Facebook page, there are Herzogs in custom Tolex and some custom amplifier builds, including some Sessionman amps.

You can get the Guillotine sound clips on the Garnet site to work but they do not do the unit justice [right-click and download them, they are .wma files which you need an app for on an Apple device]. They were recorded using a Stratocaster, single coils and low output, you would need a boost to make that setup work well. The sounds on the website are in the light break-up range. When you use higher output humbuckers, it has a lush, thick, complicated sound.

My opinion is the Guillotine is the greatest thing in the history of things. As noted in a previous posts, it doesn't do what the Herzog does, that gets very hairy, or spiky, and has a level or two of madness beyond. The pedal I had before the Guillotine was a Mesa-Boogie V-Twin and it had some similarities such as you can play a chord like a 7b9 into lots and lots of distortion and it doesn't sound the same as a 7#9 or a straight 9. A notable difference is that there is a bass and treble roll-off on the V-Twin that is always there, you can't dial it out, where the Guillotine is raw and pure.

It is interesting that on the website the Guillotine is described as a sort of a tube amp replacement. I've heard it, briefly, into an old Peavey Century or something similar, and it was huge. It also says, "The Guillotine develops its remarkable variety of sounds from a proprietary circuit that cascades an amazing four stages of tube gain..." so the second tube is not used in push-pull, and there doesn't seem to be an output transformer. My guess is that the circuit is similar to the "Valve Caster" but with a lot of effort put in to lowering losses.

I recorded this sample a few years ago, this is a Gretsch Country Club into the Guillotine and then into a Super Reverb. It goes in steps from bypassed to very high gain, and then I hit the pull-bright. It would have been better if I had used the pull-bright at each level because you can really appreciate the depth of the layers.


__
https://soundcloud.com/https%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fuser-143004170%2Fgarnet-guillotine

This Super Reverb is interesting, before I got it someone had converted it into a head and it had had a lot of work done by Gar including a Garnet output transformer and a solid-state rectifier. I had Gar put it back in a cabinet for me, which he had Pete build.

I got one of the first Guillotines from Gar. I found a problem with it where if you played with a lot of bass you could bottom out. Gar said, "I didn't think anyone would play with that much bass." He gave me a different unit with larger capacitors. I bought second Guillotine a few years ago from Kijiji, that one still bottoms out, so I'm not sure if it is an issue for anyone else. I've used one Guillotine as a boost into the other for my Tele.

There is another unit that Gar made called a Brute Force which is described along with the schematic in his book as a miniaturized Herzog. Pete said he had no current plans to do a reissue of that.

If you are into building your own, I was fooling around with a reverb circuit based on the blackface Fender amps, a half a 12AX7 into a 12AT7 in parallel driving that little reverb transformer. That was sounding really good.


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## Granny Gremlin (Jun 3, 2016)

Heh, I have the Garnet book; gonna have to find that Brute Force circuit. Don't remember seeing that in there.

Thanks for the info.


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## Hammerhands (Dec 19, 2016)

Page 190.


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## KapnKrunch (Jul 13, 2016)

Hammerhands said:


> I think Garnet Amplifiers is mostly one guy named Pete. I bought a Herzog from him earlier this year, it only took a couple months. I would email him from the website to see when he can build units. Check the Facebook page, there are Herzogs in custom Tolex and some custom amplifier builds, including some Sessionman amps.
> 
> You can get the Guillotine sound clips on the Garnet site to work but they do not do the unit justice [right-click and download them, they are .wma files which you need an app for on an Apple device]. They were recorded using a Stratocaster, single coils and low output, you would need a boost to make that setup work well. The sounds on the website are in the light break-up range. When you use higher output humbuckers, it has a lush, thick, complicated sound.
> 
> ...


Thanks so much for that info!

Pete Theisson I presume. I have exchanged emails with him. A decade ago. Also with Randy Jamms, "the Tone Lizard". Good guys. 

Thanks again.


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## Granny Gremlin (Jun 3, 2016)

Thanks again. I was actually mulling over a DIY Herzog, so should look at that first. ... because the project pile isn't quite big enough.


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## High/Deaf (Aug 19, 2009)

Granny Gremlin said:


> Thanks again. I was actually mulling over a DIY Herzog, so should look at that first. ... because the project pile isn't quite big enough.


LOL I hear ya. If my "projects for retirement" pile gets any bigger, I may just want to stay at work out of fear. Nahhh, that's not likely to happen. I'll just consider it my being optimistic in that I will live to be 125.


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## Steve_F (Feb 15, 2008)

Time for a necrobump!

Any other Guillotine owners? I am thinking I’ll buy one when the production kicks back in to gear.
I’m a big Garnet fan. I’ve already got a Herzog but I’d like to get the Guillotine to add another channel of gain to my other old amps.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Looking at the circuit for the Herzog, it is a *complete* amplifier, with a preamp, power section, and output transformer. I don't know enough about such matters to know what particular role THAT specific transformer plays, but transformers generally exhibit enough coloration that just about any tube amplifier will have *some* level of negative feedback from the speaker side of the output transformer to keep excessive harmonic distortion under control. Neither of the two diagrams I have (and they are a little different from each other) include any post-transformer negative feedback, although one drawing shows a .003uf cap to ground on the output of the 6V6 power tube_ before_ it feeds the output transformer. In principle, that will alter what the transformer might be distorting, but does not dictate what distortion is to be amplified, in the way that negative feedback does.

Both employ diodes for power rectification, rather than the type of rectifier tube one would see on a typical 3-tube (12AX7, 6V6, 5Y3) low wattage amp. One has the gain of the 12AX7 preamp and driver sections set a bit higher than the other one does (1k5/25uf, rather than 2k7/25uf), and appears to impose a bit less filtering of the power supply than the slightly higher gain version does. The lower-gain version has a 470pf "bleed" cap on the Volume/Drive control to take out a bit of top end, while the higher-gain version is the one with the treble-bleed cap to ground on the output tube.

I have never knowingly heard either of these. I'm just noting what the circuit diagram indicates.

An Epiphone Valve Junior actually comes pretty close to the design of a Herzog, albeit with an EL84, rather than 6V6, and the accompanying tonal differences between those two output tubes, and no post-transformer output volume control. And as you might expect, I cannot speak to the differences between the output transformers on a stock Valve Jr. and Herzog.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

High/Deaf said:


> LOL I hear ya. If my "projects for retirement" pile gets any bigger, I may just want to stay at work out of fear. Nahhh, that's not likely to happen. I'll just consider it my being optimistic in that I will live to be 125.


When I got my Ph.D., and was headed off to non-student work and paycheques, my dissertation supervisor told me "You know this is the most disposable income you're going to have, right now?". And he was right. The more income I earned, the more financial commitments I had that ultimately constrained how much slack there was.

Sort of the same thing with "retirement projects". You _think_ you're going to have all this time to finally complete them, but stuff piles up. And there's nothing like "I can finish that tomorrow, but right now this is really interesting..." to make the pile ever bigger. If it's not hobby projects, it's household ones. EVERYTHING starts demanding your time.

When I did my doctorate in aging out in Victoria, I'd ask the retirees we had as research volunteers when they could return for another lab session, they'd pull out their little black books, flip through pages, and let me know when the next available time was...next week or month...that they could "fit me in". Time gets filled up pretty quickly, if you're easily distracted.


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## MarkM (May 23, 2019)

mhammer said:


> When I got my Ph.D., and was headed off to non-student work and paycheques, my dissertation supervisor told me "You know this is the most disposable income you're going to have, right now?". And he was right. The more income I earned, the more financial commitments I had that ultimately constrained how much slack there was.
> 
> Sort of the same thing with "retirement projects". You _think_ you're going to have all this time to finally complete them, but stuff piles up. And there's nothing like "I can finish that tomorrow, but right now this is really interesting..." to make the pile ever bigger. If it's not hobby projects, it's household ones. EVERYTHING starts demanding your time.
> 
> When I did my doctorate in aging out in Victoria, I'd ask the retirees we had as research volunteers when they could return for another lab session, they'd pull out their little black books, flip through pages, and let me know when the next available time was...next week or month...that they could "fit me in". Time gets filled up pretty quickly, if you're easily distracted.


This is a great perspective, we had about 8 years between our kids and grandkids. This was the best time in our lives for free time. It’s all over now!

I appreciate your perspective on the Epi Valve Jr., I have a modded Jr. and a stock and I am liking this simple amps sound mor and more.


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