1966 Gibson Skylark tube amp


My Gibson Skylark had 4 tubes - 2-EL84 power tubes, a pre-amp tube, and a tremelo tube. It had a solid state rectifier. With the 2 power tubes, the output wattage of the amp was about 12.5 watts through a 10" speaker. When swapping out tubes, the Skylark is self-biasing, so you only need to get a matched pair of EL-84's. Gibson made many incarnations of the Skylark; some with an 8" speaker, no tremelo, and 5 watts output up to my model. My model had treble and bass controls and tremelo frequency and depth controls.

The first thing I did was to replace the speaker with a new 50 watt Eminence. The sound cleaned up quite well until about "7" on the dial when it began to break up. Even so, I was unhappy with the Eminence for which I paid $40USD. It just did not do justice to the amp. Though the tone was clear, it was not rich and full. A WeberVST would have been better, but twice as expensive. A new set of tubes would have been helpful, too. The amp itself was quiet - no hum and no crackly sounds at all.

I sold the amp because I felt I was putting too much money into it for what I paid for the amp ($175 + $40 speaker + $45 tubes). Even so, it was a great amp and is only going up in value at auctions on EBAY.

The Skylark is a well-supported amp for which schematics are available over the WWW. The amp techs that frequent rec.music.makers.amps know the Skylark well also.