Carvin RSP Bass Preamp Cleaning

Hey Gospel Guitarist here and today I'm going to do a video on my cleaning of my recent acquirement of the Carbon RSP bass preamp. So I'll be opening this puppy up and we'll be taking a look around inside and as you can see I have my deoxit and my power air there so I can blow out the residue and dust and let's check out the inside. One of the things you want to do is make sure you find some kind of a little container for your small screws and things that you might be disassembling so you don't lose any of the screws so I'm just using a little metal tin here. Okay got it open as you can see or maybe you can't see it's almost empty. It has one circuit board here with a preamp tube on it and then all of the pots and everything are on the front side of this long motherboard so I have to figure out how I'm going to get in here to you know clean the pots and things like that but let's at least figure out what kind of tube we have. You can just pull the tube straight out. There's one bigger space in a tube that you line up when you install your tubes. So this one here the tube is actually very clean. It doesn't look dirty at all like I don't know if this is a replacement. It's a Sovtek 12AX7LP and I have a tongue saw that I was going to try out in it and I also have a penta tube. I have a pair of penta tubes that came out of my Digitech 2101 and I put mullards out of this box in that and then I have my tongue saws here which are 12AX7 which sound really really good in guitar amps and some people online suggest these for bass preamps so I'm going to want to try this out and see how it sounds. I'll try both of them out see how they both sound. I'll probably wind up with the tongue saw in there. One of the things I want to do is spray and clean out the tube connection so I'm getting your trusty can of deoxit. It has a dial on the top for low medium and high output of the spray which I thought yeah that's you know that's so handy right so all you do is just spray it in there and uh I don't want to get it too soaking wet and then you can just take your tube and run it up and you know put it in and get it all wet wiggle it around a little bit not too radically just wiggle it around so that that deoxit can get in there and clean out all those connections inside and you don't want to get in a real hurry doing this because you don't want to bend pins and damage the socket so but basically that's all you need to do is now don't apply power very soon after you do this and make sure to blow out any wet and get everything dried off you know give it some time this will probably sit here for most of the day before I power it up again after I get done cleaning it but um I wasn't hearing that much when I was play testing it when I engaged the tube I'm used to the unit I used to have had a little more growl to it um and I don't know it might just had a better tube in it back then they were using groove tubes a lot so it made this is probably a replacement tube um softly shiny for kind of a dirtier unit it's not too bad in here actually not not a lot of dirt there's a little dust but it's really not horrid in any way I'm not seeing any major rusting or damage on the components at all I'm just going to go and look over everything real well I'll probably disconnect anything with connectors on it these ribbon cables will probably get disconnected and sprayed because sometimes ribbon cables can be the source of noise and just intermittent operation so just minor maintenance stuff um and just let that sit there a little bit so I think that's it for the tube and then yeah you can just take your air make sure you get this thing blown out that's it it's all there is to your tube clean and then pick your new tube whatever you want it to be and stick it in there in this case I will try the tongue solid it's probably just going to sit in here and stay in here so and the pencils are okay for a mild gain but this is only a two-stage gain you have one tube so if I want it to get really going I want to get a hot tube in here it's the whole purpose of having a tube in your base ramp anyways to get the little fuzzies going so I figure I'll have an easier time with that with a high gain tube as the tongue solve this is a new old stock tongue saw reissued out of Russia and they're really really good tubes so pulling these ribbon cables off as you can see they just got the little connectors similar to what you have on your computer same deal just give them a little spray there and then slide these on and off over and over again and try not to damage anything when you're doing it so get it seated and then so some people you know kind of like how does that get dirty and well you'd be amazed what can get in wherever air can get oxidation can get so you know it seems like it's covered up if air can touch it oxidation can happen so I'm just going through everything and just going to clean everything I don't you know this is one of the first times I've had to do this I bought other gear but um this one has a little bit tight controls they're not as fluid as the new unit when I remembered it you know but some of them are loosening up already just so this one might have been sitting around for a while they're actually feeling a little bit better today after using it a bit last night so they may be waking up on their own but I still would like to deox them I'm obviously going to have to check out some things online as to how to get into these little tiny square pots they're not the big round pots like your guitar and that you'd find in your in your you know guitar heads these are just little tiny pots on the board so I don't see an opening right now as to getting some of the oxide inside them and they may be sealed so they may be self-cleaning just where you keep using them and they clean themselves so I don't know is there such a thing I don't know I know they're sealed pots but I'm not an electronics expert and I'm trying desperately not to uh learn how to discharge capacitors through my hand this time I had that wonderful experience with a tube amp trust me you want to learn how to not do that not a very comfortable feeling and I didn't do it just once I did it twice because I couldn't believe it happened the first time so I touched it again um yeah I'm brain dead did that really happen okay yep it happened shouldn't touch that ever ever again and I haven't done it ever again so that's it for cleaning these contacts and now I'll do it up here and follow the other cables around do them too okay well I have disconnected the ribbon cables and it's pretty close quarters in these areas but um there's not a lot of the molex plugs I guess they're kind of a molex plug um type of thing I just spray it in work them on and off of the connections a couple times and I also kind of dampened the rag with uh some deoxit and um I just kind of matted down all of the contacts on the back you know of the motherboards I mean I don't know if that does any good I just figured you know epoxidation can happen at solder joints well why not just get them a little bit moist and uh you know it's not going to hurt anything so and uh may or may not do anything but uh it's supposed to you know take care of your oxidizing so uh that's about as far as I'm going right now I need to do research on if I can get the oxid in those and then uh if the video continues I figured that out well actually there is an obvious thing to do when you're cleaning your gear I made a video on this also I just happen to use this because it's sitting here at the moment um take a guitar plug get some deoxit on it and run it in and out and turn it inside your jacks and the reason you turn it is because when you insert it you're only rubbing the surface metals like one at one point but your equipment is used to just sitting here like this your plug is sitting there and it can that part of the contact inside gets used a lot so you want to turn it to scrape off any oxidation on the inside without pulling it in and out and do all of your jacks that way so if you're getting noise not that kind of noise but um sometimes it's usually a lot of people talk about the uh effects loop on your guitar amp just if you don't use it it sits there and collects dust and eventually that dust becomes a conductor and starts causing problems so any jacks whether you use them or not just go through all the jacks on your gear and clean it up now this is I prefer to do this without a cord on one I just don't feel like going across the room and getting just a plug um they're easier to turn if there's no cable connected to it so that's all I'm doing now is just running through and as you can see I got a whole ton of them here to do and so get a good amount on here and run through all of this and make sure that all of this gets cleaned up and doing good so far I haven't felt any voltages I have this bad track record about that um it's like I don't watch where my fingers are going half the time and and I pay a price for that so you know luckily this this doesn't have any kind of high power output it's just a preamp but if you're doing this with a guitar a guitar head and you've got your head taken apart and you're looking at there don't you gotta be real careful those tubes those capacitors the big round black things that look like batteries trust me don't touch those okay or you'll learn a lesson I learned very quick and very rudely so anyway I'm going to continue doing this you don't need to watch okay now that I've gotten through all the holes here um you want to take your compressed air and blow out the jacks just want to make sure you're not getting any puddles sitting around inside there and while I got compressed air out even though it's pretty clean in here actually I prefer to blow out any dust bunnies because they can cause problems if they're back there since I don't own this I don't know where it's been and where it hasn't been and then okay well I got access to the faders but I don't think I want to use now you know Deoxit makes a one specifically for faders because if you use the wrong thing on your faders it can start deteriorating the fader itself so I will probably remove the lid at a later date when I get the fader specific Deoxit and use that on the faders they're nice and tight they're really nice and tight fluid right now they don't feel cheap at all like some of them do so that's basically just a quick video on some of the things that you want to do when you get a piece of older gear about just going through the thing and making sure everything is connected make sure that you don't see any breaks in any of the cables anywhere above all before you put it back together make sure you put your tube back in don't want to forget that and power it on I keep kicking the thing there so you want to go through check the cables see if there's any breaks even on your ribbons make sure all the the wires are actually connected at the other end just look for any like burn circuitry and anything that might look like a problem just just look use your eyes I know a little bit about what what to look for for burn spots but that's that's about it I don't have a lot of electronics knowledge but I do know if I see a big black spot right here that's not good and something probably burned out on the board there so just check your gear out and be careful when you're doing it as to what you're touching and and usually red leads are hot so not hot when it's not plugged in but they can things store stuff so just watch your fingers if you found the video helpful please subscribe if you did and any helpful comments that you can leave about checking things like this out please please post any experiences you've had especially if you're an electronics genius so need all the help we can get around here so thanks for watching have a good day