VAUGHN SKOW's blog

The (Amp) Love Doctor Is In (again)

"Wanted: One sweet little lady with a generous bottom and a sweet personality, who is able to gracefully handle my overwhelming 100-watt personality. Ideal candidate would be healthy as a 19 year old, but with the wisdom and experience of a gal three times her age."

Over the last few weeks I have once again been receiving a bunch of inquiries as to which speaker would be the best fit for a particular amp and style of playing.  I’m often a bit hesitant to give an overly forceful recommendation because, as I discussed in my original Love Doctor blog, not every couple is, well, compatible; and sometimes what seems like a perfect match to one tone-junkie winds up in RMA divorce court for the next.  And so it is that I decided to re-visit this subject again.  Oh, by the way, at the end I’ll be asking for your comments.  I think we have gotten the comment posting system worked out now, so hopefully all of your comments will appear properly!  Okay, so let’s get to it!

10" Shoot Out Finale - The BIG GUNS!

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is it, this is what you have been waiting for! The great finale.  This week I conclude the ultimate 10-inch shootout. If you caught the last two blogs, then you know that the diminutive little  WGS Veteran 10 has been doing amazingly well, sounding richer and warmer and beefier on the bottom end and smoother on the top end than either the Jensen P10R Alnico or the Eminence/Fender blue-frame Alnico ten .  In this last shootout, I’m going to pull out the big guns, the WGS G10A and G10C. As before, we used a pair of matching Custom Vibrolux Reverb amps, one with the stock Jensen’s, and one with a WGSG10A/G10C combination.  I know those speakers well, so I thought was prepared for what was to come, but it actually caught me off guard.  Read on dear reader, read on!

More about the big ten-inch! (Shoot-out part duex!)

Twelve-inch speakers get all the glory, but personally, I love ten-inch transducers.  Many of my favorite amps of all time produce their magical sound through either a quartet or a duet of ten-inch speakers. So, last week we did a little shoot-out of tens in Super Reverbs, trying to see just how close we could get a modern Reproduction Super Reverb Amp to sound like a vintage ’67 model ... and darn if the little WGS Vet Tens didn’t almost do it!  Okay, so this week I’m doing another great speaker shoot-out involving the WGS Veteran 10.  In this shoot-out, I aim to please you, the loyal WGS fan, by addressing several concerns you had with last weeks shoot-out.  This time around, we used a pair of matching Custom Vibrolux Reverb amps, and man was it a serious shoot-out, we got down in the dirt, baby.  Read on for the nitty gritty.

Shoot-Out at The Super Reverb Corral!

Hi fellow tone junkies!  This week I’m doing another great speaker shoot-out involving the WGS Veteran 10.  I’ve been hearing from amp and cabinet builders out there how amazing these diminutive little transducers are in 4x10 cabinets and combos, and I wanted to thoroughly investigate the claims.  The benchmark tone is my beloved ’67 Blackface Super Reverb Amp with its original CTS Alnico speakers.  Going up against the grand old gal is a modern Fender Super Reverb Repro Amp; first with the factory Jensen P10R Alnicotens, and then with a quartet of WGS Veteran 10s.  I know, this is kind of like Sampson going up against Goliath, but you all remember how that story ended, right?? So, anyway,read on for the results!

A Few Of My Favorite Things

I need ya all’s help.  I’ve had a bugger of a cold the last week, and for the most part, I’ve been banished to the spare bedroom in what will probably prove to be a futile attempt to keep the cold from spreading to the rest of the family.  So, I’ve caught up on a lot of reading, and watched way too much television.  I fellow can get a little blue in this state if he ain’t careful.  Okay, do you all remember the song from The Sound of Music that goes "I simply remember a few of my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad"?  Well, let’s all put a list together and maybe I won’t feel so bad; shucks, maybe we’ll start a dad-gum tidal wave of feel-good emotions ... it’ll be groovy, dude!  Okay, maybe I need to back off the anti-histamines a little, but seriously, let’s get to know each other a little better here.  I’ve got commenting turned on, all you have to do is sign in to post your comment.  Daniel, David, Dean, Wayne and all the WGS crew, ya all chime in too! Ready, set, let’s get motivational!

The Fender Champ II - one Rare Bird!

Ya all know me well enough by now to know that I’m a big fan of vintage Fender amps.  Primarily, I like the tweed and blackface era amps ... they rock, and in their day, no other amp could touch them in performance, quality and value.  However, things really began to change at fender in the late 1970’s.  The CBS bean-counters had cut corners again and again, and basically ran the Fender name straight down into the mud.  Right about that time, a fellow named Randall Smith was really shaking things up with his new Mesa-Boogie amps, which began life as souped-up Fender Princeton Amps.  Basically, Boogies were cool, Fenders were not.  If fender was to survive, they had to do something, and they had to do it quick.  As it turns out, Smith was far from being the only guy out there becoming famous for hot-rodding old Fender amps; another guy by the name of Paul Rivera was also making a name for himself by tinkering under the hood of some vintage Fender amps and turning them into high-gain hot-rods.  In one of the few good decisions Fender made during that period in time, they hired Rivera and gave him the green-light to revamp the amp line "damn it, make them keep up with the boogies"!  The first model to come out as a result is the subject of this blog, the Champ II.  It was only produced for about one year (1982), making it among the rarest of all Fender amps.  Ya ready to dig in, well then...

read on!

As you can see in this picture, my Champ II is almost exactly the same size as my 70’s silver-face Champ; but man, oh man are they different under the hood.  The original Champ had remained virtually unchanged from tweed days all the way up to the latest silver-face models; the Rivera Champ II was something totally different.  The Champ sported a single 6V6 operating in true class A mode, producing about 7 watts through an 8-inch speaker.  The Champ II has 2 6V6’s in push-pull producing about 18 watts through a ten-inch speaker, and has an extra pair of 12AX7 triode gain stages in the pre-amp section.  In other words, this was akin to a Princeton or Deluxe in the whoop-ass department, only with a little something extra in the front-end.  This was that tiny little amp that you carried into a rehearsal to laughs and mockery, but by the end of the rehearsal everybody was gathered around reverently asking about it.  Oh, and get this, because the Champ II is made of good-old finger-jointed pine, it actually weighs LESS than my 70’s silver face chip-board cabineted Champ (with the stock speakers anyway).  Finally ... Fender had come out with a cool new design! 

The Champ II sports a simple bass-treble tone stack in vintage fender fashion and pre and master volume controls.  It’s that later feature that was all the rave of the day; you could crank up the input gain and get some good 12AX7 overload, whilst keeping the master wherever practicality dictated.  What does a Champ II sound like?  Well, that’s a bit of a loaded question.  With the master wide open and the input gain below about 5, it sounds very much like a Princeton.  However, with that extra gain, it could really put out the sustain (as it was called in the day), plus, it was armed with a new secret weapon.  In tiny lettering under the treble control on the Champ 2 are the words "pull for mid boost".  With this control engaged, it no longer sounds at all like a Princeton, now it sounds like a little JTM 45; gone is the smooth glassy top end, replaced with throaty (yet tasty) snarl.

All in all, the Champ II turned out to be a very cool amp, and the little buggers are now becoming highly sought after.  The Rivera-era tube amps of the 1980’s were the last of the hand-wired Fender amps based on eyelet/turret boards.  They sound good, are reliable, and are easy to work on or modify, just like what you would expect from a classic Fender tube amp!  After only a year, the Champ II was replaced by the Super-Champ, which was basically the same amp only with foot-switchable reverb and gain boost.  I’ve heard several Super-Champs side-by-side with my own personal Champ II, and I can tell you that the Champ II sounds better, probably because of the less complex circuitry ... especially the complicated switching and accompanying LED indicators (powered by the filament tap of the input tranny).

One last word on the Champ II and then I’m shuttin’ up.  I currently have mine loaded with a WGS G10A, and baby, I gotta tell ya, what a difference that speaker makes in this amp.  With the G10, that little bugger can keep up with a drummer on a club stage.  Is it the ultimate pint-sized amp ... maybe.

See ya all next time around -Vaughn-

Oh, and here is a great interview where Rivera talks about his days at Fender, enjoy!

email vaughn

About Vaughn Skow

A "Sleeper Amp" from New Zealand

It’s been a miserable day today ... cold, rainy, just plain yucky.  I know, those of you in the mid-west and northern states are right now wondering what the heck I’m wining about, right?  And those of you who are reading this from Nordic and Scandinavian locations must just plain think I’m a whimp!  But, let’s face it, this winter, for most of us in the US, has been a long and dreary one.  As I sat down to start this blog, I was all prepared to give myself a little pep-talk to get my attitude in the right place for ripping out an awesome blog.  But then the miracle happened, I opened an email from Jason, a WGS customer in New Zealand.  Jason evidently enjoyed my blogs on "sleeper amps", and had a great story to tell about his own personal "sleeper amp", along with a great testimonial as to the ability of a WGS speaker to bring out the best in an amp.  Tell ya what, I’ll shut up for a little while and let Jason tell his story ... oh, and it’s complete with pretty pics, too.  So, dear reader, please read on!

Update from Latest Speaker Winner:

    Thanks for the update and the kind words, Ed! Keep on spreading the WGS Gospel. -Vaughn Skow-

Amps That Don't Exist - Part Two!

Okay, so in last weeks blog I started out this little series with my 1959 Brown Fender Super Amp, which was featured in the October issue of Vintage Guitar Magazine, and will be featured in Dave Hunter’supcoming vintage amp book.  Yea, yea, I know even though that amp never "officially" existed, it obviously was made by Fender and so, it sorta does exist.  This week’s amp really never has existed anywhere ... except for the one I have, of course!  Ladies and Gents, I present to you the 1965 blackface Fender Bassman 1-12 combo, most definitely the best sounding 1-12 combo that never existed!  Interested??  Then read on, baby, read on...

Our latest FREE SPEAKER Winner!

Congrats to our latest speaker winner,  Ed Dewit of Chuckey, TN (such a place could only exist south of the Mason-Dixon line).  Ed is an amp builder and a hard-core tone aficionado - in other words, he’s one of us!  Chucks main rig is a JTM45 style amp he built for himself (my favorite of all Marshall’s).  Chuck is getting a free Green Beret, and chose to add a second one to the one we are giving him. The JTM 45 through those Green Berets will be pure vintage Britt tone!  Ed sent us a brief note, that I’d like to share with you all, so read on!