Vintage Fender amps?

jfine
Top Producer
Posts: 391
Joined: Sun Nov 08, 2009 2:41 am
Location: Vallejo, CA and Springfield, OH
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby jfine » Sun Feb 14, 2010 2:35 am

Cool setups there, pigi! Is that a Teisco May Queen in the foreground? Those guitars make me laugh--I guess the Japanese at that time didn't know that the Vox Mando-Guitar they copied the shape from wasn't a full-size guitar!

pigihangeev
Active Member
Posts: 71
Joined: Tue Dec 15, 2009 9:49 am
Location: Cagliari - Sardinia - It
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby pigihangeev » Sun Feb 14, 2010 5:33 am

Hey Jfine! Actually I like a lot the shape of this guitar, check this:

http://www.fetishguitars.com/html/eko/index/auriga.html

and also dig the way it sounds!!!

Image

rog43win
Top Producer
Posts: 554
Joined: Tue Feb 02, 2010 7:29 am
Location: New York
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby rog43win » Sun Feb 14, 2010 7:45 am

I love the Fender amp sound as well. I started out with a Fender Super Amp....2 10's.......then upgraded to a Fender Super Reverb.....4 10's.......I loved that amp, only 45 watts, but still a great amp.......I saw a used Fender Showman......1 15" ......blond piggyback.....I liked the look, so traded in for it.......but after getting married, and needing more space.....I traded that in for a Sound......one 15 and reverb and vibrato......I still have that one, packed away in a closet.....since I stopped playing out, I got a little Fender J.A.M. ....one 15" with effects........small, but does the job in my living room...........still wish I had the Super Reverb though......I think it was $400 new back in the 60's ...........

Roger

jfine
Top Producer
Posts: 391
Joined: Sun Nov 08, 2009 2:41 am
Location: Vallejo, CA and Springfield, OH
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby jfine » Mon Feb 15, 2010 4:48 am

pigi--a little off-topic, but that fetishguitar website is way cool! Thanks for the link. I got on there and noticed a section about Melody guitars--no mention of amps, but my first amp was a Melody. Don't know whether it was the same company or not. My amp was a small practice amp, 1-8" speaker, maybe five watts--all-tube, most amps were in '64--one channel with four inputs(!), tremolo, covered in red vinyl with silver grille cloth and an oval "Melody" nameplate. I've never seen another one.

twango the clown
Active Member
Posts: 55
Joined: Sun Feb 21, 2010 6:38 pm
Location: Massachusetts
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby twango the clown » Mon Mar 01, 2010 11:30 am

dubtrub wrote:Is anybody here into collecting and or playing vintage Fender amps?

Many of you already know I still have my 65 Bandmaster that I purchased new in Stuttgart Germany as well as my little silver face VibroChamp. My main studio amp is a Weber 5E3 kit which is a copy of a '57 tweed Deluxe, and although I no longer play gigs, when I was playing with a blues band I was using a '63 reissue Vibroverb. But, I have to say I love vintage Fender amps as much as I do vintage Fender and Mosrite guitars. I have restored and sold several vinatge amps over the last few years, but wish I had the room to keep them all. I probably have have every book ever written about Fender amps. I know they aren't mentioned very often here on the forum but I have to admit, I am pretty much addicted to them.

I would like to add an original Mosrite amp to my collection but I haven't found one for a price I could afford, plus I don't have the room for the larger size amps.


Boy, do I wish I still had some of the amps I have owned in the past. The best was a Fender blackface Pro Reverb, sort of like an underpowered Twin. I got it by trading an ancient brown Vox AC-30 to a dealer, and the guy says to me, "You know the baffle panel is on inside out, right? I had never noticed. So, he took it off and on the other side was stencilled The Animals! But a deal was a deal and he drove off like a bat out of you know where before I could change my mind. Not a chance. That pro was the warmest sounding, toughest amp I ever had. Funny thing was, the other guitar player in my band also had a blackface Pro, and played the same year Les Paul Junior as me and we sounded completely different from one another. I only sold the Pro Reverb because after my kids were born I didn't think I'd be needing an amp that big any more. Ha!
I also had a blackface Deluxe Reverb and a silver-face Bronco (same as a Vibro Champ, but with Bronco in red.) In the eighties I played a brown tolex Vibrasonic, which I sold because the sound of one 15" JBL was way too clean for me at the time. In the sixties I also had (and was robbed of) A Tremolux, which was a really silly piggyback with one 12" rated about twenty watts.
Nowadays I come pretty close to a vintage sound on my Blues Deluxe, which is sort of a fake tweed Pro Amp with modern appointments. Even that is twenty years old now. I also really like my Super Champ XD which is like a princeton on the normal channel (15watts, 2 6v6's through a 10") and has a bunch of digital crap on the other side.
Yeah, I loved my old vintage amps, but my experience with them was that it was a sin to take them out and brutalize a piece of history in some dive, and even then the prices were skyrocketing, so I bent to pressure from my (now deceased) wife and sold them, one by one. :cry:

User avatar
JimPage
Top Producer
Posts: 984
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2009 11:26 am
Location: Washington DC Metro Area
Contact:

Re: Vintage Fender amps?

Postby JimPage » Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:45 pm

Hey--

After reading several books about Leo Fender earlier this summer, I decided, "To heck with it; I'm going for it," and got two vintage Fender amps. I had had a Twin Reverb and a Showman back in the 1960s, but they were long ago traded for something else.

The '66 Tremolux head now sits in a JD Newell combo cabinet with two Weber 10A125s. Our forum's Zarfnober is currently reTolexing the Tremolux's piggyback head, and I hope to find a suitable original speaker bottom for it one day.

The other amp is a 1975 Silverface Vibro Champ. It is a lovely sounding amp; different voice than the Tremolux with a much different vibrato sound.

One of my good friends, a super pedal steel and bass player here in suburban Maryland, is also a real connoisseur of old Fender amps, and was nice enough to do the maintenance on the Tremolux, replacing the internal bits that needed it after 45 years. He did a wonderful job and made sure I'd save the original caps and resisters in case I ever need to sell the amp. He has a studio full of old Fender amps, and was able to show me the sonic signatures of the various models.

He also has a silverface Vibro Champ, a year later than mine. We A/Bed them with three different guitars and it seemed that his had a more mellow and musical sound. He fiddled with my VC for a few minutes and then took the rectifier (I think!) tube from his VC and put it into mine, which had a Radio Shack rectifier tube. Suddenly my VC had the more mellow and musical sound!

Of course, he wouldn't sell me THAT rectifier tube, but he rummaged through his stock of tubes until he found a NOS Sylvania rectifier tube from the early 1960s. He put that into my VC and it sounded great!

Now, at some point, he'll go through my Vibro Champ and make certain everything is up to snuff, but he said to just enjoy it for a while as it sounds so nice and seems to be in good working order.

The Vibro Champ, like the Tremolux, had never been monkeyed with and still has the original 8" Oxford speaker. His has a newer Weber in it, but after that new rectifier tube, both Vibro Champs sound very close.

These amps sound so nice and seem to possess a military-grade toughness in the build quality.

I love these amps!!!

--Jim
Image
• '99 Martin D-41
• '67 Mosrite Celebrity II
• '72 Mosrite Celebrity III
• '83 Tokai TST56
• '10 Hallmark Barris Krest
• '10 Hallmark 60 Custom
• '10 Hallmark Stradette
• '50s Tele Clone
• Basses: Ashbory, Hofner, 51RI Precision, 5-string, fretless


Return to “Other Instruments, Equipment, Accessories & Projects”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 63 guests