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Dave Hunter
The Voxmobile
Too Fast to Live, Too Cool to Die
Free love, slick guitars, hot cars! Few pieces of late-’60s pop culture were anywhere near as hip and groovy as this marketing stroke of genius.
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Dave Hunter
Dickerson Melody King
Few who love vintage amps can resist its art-deco appeal, let alone its luscious hand-wiring and edgy, touch-sensitive 6V6 tone. A tweed Champ doesn’t stand a chance in a cage fight.
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Dave Hunter
Fender’s 5E7 Bandmaster
There’s something about the 3×10 Bandmaster that drives vintage-Fender nuts gaga. Introduced in 1953, it underwent substantial design changes in its first few years, earning status as a true classic every step along the way.
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Dave Hunter
Matchless Superchief 120
A maker at the forefront of the “boutique amp” movement, Matchless is known for its Class-A designs – that is, cathode-biased amps with no negative feedback, which take the Vox formula to new places. Over years of listening to conversations regarding “the most powerful amp you ever played” and such, one model is mentioned time
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Dave Hunter
Recording Acoustic Guitars
The Art of Home Recording
Recording an acoustic guitar is very different from recording an electric, employing different microphones, placement, and technique. Here are a few essential steps.
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Dave Hunter
Fender 6G13-A Vibrasonic
Amid the classics in Fender’s “golden-era” amp line, some remained in production only a short time because of timing, misjudgment of the market, or both. Such is the case with this brownface model.
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Dave Hunter
Vega Model 120
Viewed from our contemporary perspective, it’s difficult to fully appreciate how different the music scene in general – and the guitar scene in particular – was back in the early part of the last century. When the electric guitar hit the ground as a viable entity in the mid 1930s, everything was up for grabs…
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Dave Hunter
Dallas Shaftesbury 30
We mine the rich seam of obscure vintage American tube amps on a regular basis here in the pages of VG, but less often do we delve into the equally fascinating histories of B- and C-list British guitar amps of the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s. Nevertheless, there was plenty of life in the British
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Dave Hunter
Ampeg’s Jet Reverb Prototype
Ampeg is frequently credited for being not only one of the first makers to put reverb in its amplifiers, but also for producing what was one of the consistently best-sounding reverbs of the 1960s. If we accept that the Ampeg reverb circuit is a noteworthy stop on any tour of tube-amp history, this is one
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Dave Hunter
A 5E3 Mystery
Readers of Vintage Guitar occasionally stumble on unique, prototype, or otherwise fascinatingly non-standard amps, and it’s a pleasure to share when they’re made available to us. In an upcoming issue, we’ll feature an Ampeg prototype, but this month, we’re looking at the “opposite” of a prototype – an amp made well after the model was
