Fender Amplifier History

In 1946, Clarence Leo Fender began building guitar amps in Fullerton, California. His first destination for players, and Spenta a lot of time, in concert with the musicians to improve their designs. He originally trained as an electrical engineer, and was never so much a musician, so this consultation has been its main guide development over the years without getting models. As we shall see, often leads to very significant improvements in the design of an amplifier, although sometimes leads him down the wrong path. All Leon models were based on research developed and released to the public domain, 30s Western Electric, and used vacuum tubes for amplification. More detailed description of the individual amplifiers are available atthe Fender Amp Field Guide.

After a prototype of a few amps, it began building its first big series of amplifiers in 1948. They were known as tweed amps because they were covered in the same type of cloth used for luggage at the time. These amps varied in output of 3 watts (champion or champion) of 75 watts (high power Tweed Twin). They were characterized by a warm clean sound, with harmonic complexity of the input signal, and a gradual emergence of a hot fudge distorted. It featured the first use of Fender Tremolo with a filling in the amplifier. This is often mislabeled by Fender vibrato.

Therefore, a cleaner interior height (volume before distortion) to please his players, the Fender changed color and light brown in 1960. These were known for their harsh on the surface of the plastic (DuPont Tolex) white, pink or dark brown. There is often a lot of overlap in a series of amplifiers. You can see brown tweed amps with the internal amp and the Tweed amps of some innovations went brown. These were the high power amplifiers, as colleagues tweed. In general, they are cleaner clean sound is a bit 'less harmonic complexity and the same overdrive tone. In order to get more volume, Fender also started to use the JBL speakers at this stage, much more powerful and stronger than the original Jensens. JBLs were generally available in most of the higher powered models a custom order. Fender also began using Oxford, Utah and CTS speakers interchangeably Jensens, usually a speaker who could provide would be economically used.

Jensens and Oxfords remained the most common in this period, by far, however. Jensen offers the more traditional Fender sound and is preferred by most collectors. Amps Brown / Blond also introduced an effect sometimes known as "harmonic vibrato", a system of vibrato phase which took two and a half 12AX7/7025 pipes, but had a gentle vortex has been imitated but not improved 40 years . Much of this character tremolo because it separates the low and high frequencies and the use of the tremolo effect on their own and out of phase.

In 1963 Fender wanted more power, less distortion and reduce costs, then changed to amp what is commonly known as "blackface" cosmetic. These amplifiers have a Tolex cover black, silver grille cloth, black control panel and forward looking. By reducing the amount of midrange frequencies in the signal, Fender was able to increase the volume without increasing distortion. This resulted in the Fender "spark" a classic Fender clean tone light most beloved players favorite country. The era blackface also made extensive use of reverb, which uses springs to provide a feeling of space (or in case of surf music, a pause ECHO washing) for sound. The tremolo was changed to a simple circuit based on an optical coupler and requiring only a single pipe. The amplifiers are always excited spectrum of 4 to 85 watts, but the difference in the crowd was even greater because of the tone improved cleaning of 85 W Twin. One of these, with JBL speakers, absolutely deafening, even in a large room.

In 1965, Fender was tired and sick, he sold the company to CBS Fender Musical. As a large conglomerate, the management seemed more interested in money than in making the best money can buy amplifiers, so in the next 18 years, the quality of Fender amplifiers gradually went downhill. Silverface These are the wings, and can vary from almost identical to the Blackface (before 69) completely different (in the late 70). Some of these "innovations" that were found are zippers volume up, volume controls, general processors Ultra-clean start again, increasing the power output of 100 watts to 135 watts and 135 Twins Bassman The Super Six Reverb Reverb and Quad, and changes in other circuits to reduce distortion. The cosmetics of these amplifiers are similar to amplifiers face painted black, but the control panel to the front is silver with blue block letters instead of black with white lettering manuscript.

Early 80's, under the supervision of Paul Rivera et al was the recovery of R & D-Fender, in the short term, highly desirable amps. They range from two-channel Super Champ, putting out 18W a channel through the exchange version of the twin. Recently made Fender amplifiers with discrete components were connected by a wiring point, the method was later replaced with the use of printed circuit boards.

After this short period of time, began to build a Fender amps like the names of earlier versions, but not much in common. They are not very interested in vintage amp lovers, although it is definitely still people playing with skirts 80s model, in particular the "red knob Twin" in 1987. Early 90's Fender amps was republished some of his most beloved, Double, Deluxe Reverb, Super Reverb, were mostly brighter sound than the original, but have had some success. Recently I came from the hand wired amps Fender Custom Shop Tweed and better meet the Blackface amps for their sound and technical information.