That was fun! The Tramp is a COOL amp.
Clips to come...
I'd like to thank Mark and Rob too - it's a lot easier to dig into the sonics of an amp when two great players have the guitars in their hands!!
The Tramp is AMAZING. IMO it's bulletproof. Sounds phenomenal, and works with every guitar we could throw at it, every cab we plugged into, and every pedal we tried! You folks are going to love it!
In a word - CREAMY... in two words - SMOOTH and CREAMY! Overall it's a little darker and thicker than other Trinity designs, doesn't have the same sort of top end focus that say the TC15 or Triwatt have. The Tramp has a welcome warmth, almost vintage voice but with a little more solidity and clarity...
The controls... in Tweed mode, the gain control is usable through it's entire travel - gorgeous cleans around 5/6 on the dial, slight breakup around 7/8, and an amazing humming drive at 9/10. EVERYTHING I need in the spectrum from clean to dirty is right here. Pulling the gain knob out engages 'Tude mode. Anyone that knows me would acknowledge that I LIVE for the dirty region of any amp and the very fact it was called 'Tude excited me even more!! But the truth of the matter is, that I don't think there was anything happening in 'Tude mode that the amp needs. The gain travel was good up until about 7... past 7 it just got out of control and farted out in the bottom end. Interestingly, switching between 'Tude on 7 to Tweed on 10, the tones were about equally gainy!! The 'Tude tone was a little more "complex", but only subtly so, and frankly it didn't "feel" as good to me. At this point we experimented with leaving it in Tweed mode and throwing pedals into the mix - INFINITELY more satisfying than anything we were able to get with 'Tude and with the right pedal, WAY more gain.
So, I suggested to Stephen that 'Tude could be removed from the circuit without sacrificing any flexibility OR tone...
Thin/Fat switch is really effective. Thin is lean, clean and tight, Fat REALLY fattens things up and dumps a little more gain into the circuit. I also loved the fact that Thin/Fat both work with ANY guitar - it wasn't a situation where you have to use Thin with a Les Paul because Fat is too fat, or you have to use Fat with a Tele because Thin is too strident. You get two different and useful options with every guitar you plug in...
Bass and treble work as advertised and sound great through their entire travel. There's also a Master Volume and the VRM Volume. VRM is GREAT - you can have raging tone at volumes that guys that played in loud bands in the 70's won't be able to hear!!! But here's where it get interesting - all 4 controls do what you'd expect them to, but they also seem to act as interactive tone controls. Specifically the bass control seems to work well in conjunction with the MV, and the treble seems to work in tandem with the VRM. What do mean Brent??!!??
I noticed that boosting the MV seems to also bring up the bottom end of the tone, and that boosting the VRM seems to add top end to the tone. So, I started to experiment with boosting the bass while I turned down the MV and vice versa. I also experimented with boosting the treble while turning down the VRM and vice versa. This IMO is the COOLEST part of the amp!!
It's cool because as you work these tandem controls in opposite directions what happens is that the treble/middle/bass relationships in the tone don't change, but the tonal quality itself changes!! This is VERY cool.
And in addition to that in the absence of a mid control, by messing with the relationships between the tandem controls you can effectively control the midrange!!!
Anyway, in light of this, the temporary mid adjustment pot that Stephen had wired in became redundant so it was set back to "unity" and will be left off the amp... FWIW, my favourite tones lived with the gain somewhere 5 and 10, bass and treble between 3 and 7 and usually in the opposite direction from each other, and MV and VRM around 9, thin or fat...
The OT apparently can handle a bunch of different tube types, so we discussed the possibility of having a preset bias switch that would allow swapping between 6V6, KT66, and 6L6!!! Awesome!! We also ran the Tramp into every cab in my studio and it was phenomenal through all of them. My faves were my Mesa 412 with UK V30's, and my vintage Bassman 212 with CL80's. Given this we talked Stephen into the idea of having an "external speaker" jack on the back as well... We imagined someone using the Tramp at home for practicing with a 6V6 tube and the stock 10" speaker, but then when it was time to go out and play a gig, you could swap out for a 6L6, and drag along your favourite 212 for gig levels... Talk about versatile!!!
The 10" Jensen Stephen had in it sounded amazing - perfect actually. This is the speaker I'd want in there, or maybe a Jensen P10R. We also tried through my cab with 10" TTC's and it sounded great as well, but I LOVED that Jensen.
We also tried 11 distortion pedals (including OCD, Vintage Rat, Russian and US Big Muffs, Tube Screamer, bunch of Boss stuff - all the usual suspects!) and a boost. The Tramp LOVED them all - this amp is an incredible pedal platform and might even make you love your pedals a little bit more than you do now... Every guitar we tried was great too - Tele, Strat, a couple of Les Pauls, 3 PRSi including a hollowbody... what was also nice was that once you got a good tone dialed in, you could switch from bridge to neck on the guitar without having to change anything on the amp!!!!
The design of this amp is REALLY right...
It's no secret I'm a fan of big ass, loud amps. I wasn't sure if the Tramp was going to satisfy my appetite for BIG tone. Well, rest assured it did... in spades! It's not as loud as a lot of amps, but the tone's ALL there. It's as simple as simple can be, but still allows for tons of tone shaping, and it works EVERYWHERE and with EVERYTHING!!! It's perfect. 10 out of 10. And with the exception of removing a couple of the redundant features, I wouldn't change a thing about it.
I want one.
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The darker vibe in Tweed mode is because that's a characteristic of the Tweed Champ/Princeton amps, and we're trying to stay faithful to that type of amp sound. Purely personally, I way prefer the amp in 'tude mode. Everyone has different tastes, and I'm not a big pedal user either. It didn't fart out for me though - but this prototype has taken quite a lot of beating so far, and we've sometimes had things come loose inside, which is pretty much inevitable. That's what prototypes are for. 
As a reminder, I think these clips were almost exclusively Tweed mode. No 'tude . As Brent said earlier, 'we experimented with leaving it in Tweed mode'.