I'm new at this, so I don't know if this is normal or something to worry about.
I have a Fender Standard Stratocaster hooked directly to a Fender Blues Junior amp. Both are brand new (4 days old). On the 4th day of playing, I started getting static through the amp. It's not buzzing strings. I know what that sounds like
. I took a look at the back of the amp and all the tubes are orange-hot. This doesn't seem right to me. I'm an electrical engineer by trade, but I'm not old enough to have experience with vaccuum tubes.
I don't think I'm pushing the amp very hard. The settings are as follows:
Guitar
- Volume: 4-5
- Tones: 10 (but I'm using the bridge pickup, with no tone control)
Amp
- Volume: 5 (Fat switch on)
- Treble: 5
- Middle: 5
- Bass: 5
- Master: 3-4
- Tremelo: 3-4
A few more (possibly relevant) pieces of information:
I'm using a cheap radioshack guitar cable until a mess with UPS gets sorted out. I would think a bad cable would cause a more consistent static. Mine is intermittant.
When the amp first arrived, the tubes were not installed. It appeared that they had fallen out of their sockets during shipping. They seemed OK so I installed them per the instruction manual.
I'm not even sure if the static and heat are related. Any insight would be helpful.
Thanks,
Tom