Resurrecting a Fender Supersonic 60 Amp This is the tale of a fender Supersonic 60 Head almost self destructs What Happened? This Fender Supersonic 60 Head was a smoking amp – literally . While playing there was a strong smell of burning and smoke then the amp blew the mains fuse. What was the cause? I open up the amp and there is soot covering everything. It looked like ashes from a forest fire it […]
The Fender Blues Jr is a popular amp. It has enough power with 15 watts for small gigs and it does have the Fender tone with a hint of “Britishness” with the EL84 output valves. . The reverb circuitry is solid state and three 12AX7’s for the pre-amp stages. The 15 watts comes from a pair of EL84’s feeding into a 12 inch speaker. The amp is constructed on printed circuit boards. One holds the
A Fender Hot Rod DeVille arrived as it was very unwell. I decided not to even switch it on but get the back off and examine the innards. One of the output valves looked like it had fallen from a helicopter. It had gone all white inside (due to vacuum loss) and the glass was cracked. The valve base had lumps missing ! If you load the van after the gig tell your roadies to
Unwell Fender Hot Rod DeVille makes full recovery Read More »
A Memory-Filled Journey Into The Life Of Guitar Legend Leo Fender The world occasionally produces one of those rare thinkers whose name becomes iconic. Thomas Edison lit up the world; Albert Einstein profoundly altered the study of physics; Walt Disney reimagined entertainment; and Leo Fender perfected  the electric guitar. Fender grew up in Fullerton, California, where his interest in electronics lead him to open his own radio repair shop in 1938. It wasn’t long before
A Memory-Filled Journey Into The Life Of Guitar Legend Leo Fender Read More »
The phase splitter valve while it is a pre-amp type valve is really not part of the pre-amp chain at all. It is actually part of the output stage.  When an amp has two or more valves then it operates in a mode called push pull. Its  job is to invert the signal so that one of your two output valves is driven at any one time. This is a an oversimplified description but I
Phase Splitter Valves they do influence your amp tone Read More »
Its a couple of weeks since I wrote about  fixing amps and I had not seen a Fender amp to fix for a few weeks and then along comes four all on the same day ! In the cover picture we proudly present four broken amps -At the Top a Fender Blues Jr III -Underneath is a Fender Supersonic 40 watter -to the left is a Princeton Reverb re-issue -to the right is a Hot
The Howl and the Hum fixing four Fender amps in one day Read More »
A two rock Gainmaster 35 arrived for a service. It is manufactured by the Premier Builders Guild LLC.  A fancy name! The amps are made in California and are around £2000..  They are built on a printed circuit style board which looks very like tagboard . See in the picture below. This amp is extremely well made and is a relatively simple straightforward design having two pre-amp valves, one phase splitter driving the two 6L6GC