1965 Fender Super Reverb, NOT The Reissue

[mojobone]

Simply put, it's the best 6L6 amp Leo Fender ever made. The articulation is so extreme, it'll either make you a better player OR decide to give up the electric guitar entirely. (but don't worry; you could still throw the stompbox of your choice in front of it and continue to pretend that you can actually play the guitar)




It'll make a great guitar sing like a horny angel or expose a crap guitar for a waste of wood. I have many modeled amps, many of them great sounding in their own right, but nothing that sounds like this. If you're looking for an amp that will kick your ass and make you a better player, I heartily recommend you seek one out.

They're not exactly thick on the ground, these days, but compared to modern boutique offerings, the price is pretty agreeable; I was able to score mine for a shade under $2k, and I consider it a bargain. I'd classify my specimen as a player; the speakers and power transformer are not original, but it in no way hurts the performance, and cosmetically, it's pretty clean for a fifty year-old amplifier.

[funsongs]

Lucky you... for the gigging pro or high school renunion/museum out-break!
I'll have to be content when I can manage to get a Classic Vibe Tele & a Blues Junior III rig.

[mojobone]

Actually, it's a little loud, for most of my gigs, these days; even at 40 watts, four ten inch speakers are gonna move a lot of air, moreso than any 2X12. That's a part of the reason why this amp is so great; the preamp section is little different than a Twin Reverb, but there's way less clean headroom. (in part, that's due to the smaller output transformer) That means the clean range on the volume knob runs from 1.5 to 3.5, where you start to hear some bloom from the power section, which is Class AB, tube rectified. Tube rectification (conversion of wall AC to DC that the amp can use) happens a little slower than the solid-state variety (this is commonly referred to as sag) and it's not constant across all frequencies and volume levels, so each strum or pluck gets a little shaping applied to the attack transient, and the harder you pick, the more you get. As you turn up the wick, you get a little more of this quasi-compression from the power section, and it comes on more quickly than with a Twin, which was designed for maximum headroom-steel and country guitar players made the Twin famous; THIS puppy is the ultimate blues amp-like a Bassman with reverb and tremolo.

This is similar to what happens in a Class A amplifier, but the initial attack transient is more squished; I theenk this is because the tubes are in parallel, (hence the old saw about Class A watts being louder; the Class A amp's notes have more poke, but when the amp distorts it sounds more raucous, not as smooth and clean as Class AB) a Class A power stage compresses more quickly as you turn up, and you get that trademark Vox sparkly thing happening. The sound can read as clean, but there's always distortion and compression happening; a Class A amp is never really completely clean. This is how most small amps operate; even the class AB ones tend to have solid-state rectifiers, the dynamic response stays pretty linear over a short range, until you get chime, then (very quickly) grind and then mush. Somewhere between grind and mush, maybe there's a singing lead tone. The Twin stays clean almost all the way up the dial, the Super is somewhere between that and an AC30

The Super Reverb was specifically designed to exploit all the subtle shades between clean and dirty and never goes farther than the grind stage, which happens at about the same point as the power section reaches full bloom, a recipe for really wide dynamic response which a good player can exploit. The other notable result of this design is that sustain begins to increase immediately as you turn up the volume knob and it increases more linearly than the volume. The articulation happens because the tubes are in parallel; you're not asking so much of a single power tube. The upshot of all this is an extremely expressive amplifier; with pick and fingers, you can easily draw out a single note to emphasize within a given chord, the way pianists do. The drawback is that beginners are not gonna sound good, right away, which I think is the major reason why almost nobody models this particular amp.

[andygabrys]

Lucky you... for the gigging pro or high school renunion/museum out-break!
I'll have to be content when I can manage to get a Classic Vibe Tele & a Blues Junior III rig.

in my quiver I have a classic vibe Tele, and its great.

Ok so its running through a Mesa F-30 and a bunch of boutique-y pedals but still they are amazing axes for the little money that you drop on them.

criikey Mojo - that is likely a screaming loud amp even on 3. My band mate has an old Gibson (don't know which model) that has 1x12" speaker / tweed and he's usually on 1 when we gig. I think that amp is all class A 100% and it gets really squishy as you turn it up. The clean headroom goes away quickly, but its fun to play.

[eeoo]

Yeah, great amp but too loud for my purposes. I'm more of a Princeton guy.

[mojobone]

Yeah, great amp but too loud for my purposes. I'm more of a Princeton guy.

I'm the proud owner of an original silverface Princeton, and I know exactly what you mean. My main gig amp (a 28-watt Laney AOR 1X12) has 6V6s, and Fender's brown tolex/tweed Deluxe Reverb is maybe the Holy Grail of single-channel Fenders. I dig 'em for gigs where you can mic up, but for anything from medium size dance halls to theaters and small arenas, I'm bringing the Super, but not my '65; I have a '69 silverface for giggage. My new baby will see strictly studio usage.

[feaker66]

Hey Moj That is the amp I played with starting in 1972 I first had a chet atkins, then a monkey model, then the ES-335 until the trailer came off the hitch on the way to a gig when it all smashed. The gibby was in half, the Fender smashed. I sold it for a hundred bucks.(glued the gibby) I just found it and played the amp locally a few weeks back. Still sounds great and I am going to buy it back for 300. I can fix everything. Always liked the tone. I remember we all just played our guitars thru own amps and ran just the vocals thru a peavey pa system. I still don't like putting everything thru the pa. ha ha thanks for the memories bud

Sincerely

Paul