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The “club amp” has been a perpetual best-seller since the dawn of guitar amplification, and several big-name ’60s models are among the all-time classics. But what if you’re looking for a different sound? Let’s check out five fantastic small combos with nary a Fender, Gibson, Marshall, or Vox in sight.

Many tube amps of the 1940s and early ’50s were club amps by default, given the technology, and required some evolving before they could deliver much above 20 watts of output. The category came into its own in the ’60s, when myriad makers offered portable and great-sounding combos as “little siblings” to the big-stage amps that were king of the hill amid the volume wars. We might loosely define the genre as 1×10″ or 1×12″ combos – maybe a 2×10″ at most – driven by a pair of lower-wattage output tubes, often with tremolo and/or reverb built in. In other words, the ultimate “grab and go” amp for venues of 120 people or less, where the amp and room cooperate to hit that tonal sweet spot that won’t blow the doors off the club but can still keep up with a moderately dynamic drummer.

Most players perusing that definition will think “Fender Princeton Reverb or Deluxe Reverb,” and they certainly qualify, as do the fabled Vox AC15 and Marshall 18-watt models. But let’s indulge an opportunity to stray from the obvious and examine five less-appreciated ’60s combos that offer great service in a club setting.

Ask “What’s the best-sounding vintage 15-watt amp ever made?” and chances are that not many guitarists will reply, “The Martin 112T, of course!” But the enthusiasm of those who do ought to tell you something – and just because they aren’t the most common choice doesn’t mean they’re not the right choice.

This 1961 Martin 112T was manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, by Rowe Industries (the same company that made DeArmond pickups and effects) and was simply a repackaged version of the DeArmond R15T introduced the year before. If you investigate Martin’s foray into electric guitars in ’61, you’ll find DeArmond Model 200 pickups on the F Series thinline hollowbody electrics, making the OEM company’s new amp line a natural to co-opt as a partner for the full Martin electric set. Neither lasted long, which might partly be because the amps – as great as they sounded – were entering a new era looking more like something from the era that had just passed, as perhaps did the guitars.

Compare the schematic from a late-’50s 5E3 Deluxe to that of the 112T and you’ll find the circuits extremely similar (the absence of tremolo in the Fender notwithstanding) other than a few subtle twists. But oh, what a difference those twists make. The use of a hotter 12AX7 (vs the 12AY7) in the first gain stage, tighter and brighter coupling caps, and heftier filtering in the power stages partnered by heftier power and output transformers all conspire to make the 112T a bold, stout, punchy sounding 1×12″ – and the fact that so many players are now hip to this fact means they’re quite pricey on the vintage market, despite being “alternatives.”

Even fans of the ’60s Rickenbacker guitars that George Harrison and John Lennon, Pete Townshend, Roger McGuinn, Paul Weller, Peter Buck, and others plugged into their Vox, Fender, Marshall, and Hiwatt amps are likely to gasp, “What? They made amps, too?” Sure did, though in far fewer numbers than the guitars that boomed amid Beatlemania.

The Ric amp most likely to come to mind of a vintage-gear enthusiast is the hulking solid-state Transonic model of the late ’60s, used on U.S. tours by Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, Steppenwolf, and others. When dawn of guitar amplification, however, the existence of this tasty ’60s combo should seem less unexpected. In fact, Rickenbacker had its roots in pre-amplification efforts to make the guitar louder via the National Resophonic Guitars of the ’20s, and key personnel from that venture morphed the acoustic-based approach into an electrified one with the release of the first Ric electric guitars and amps of the early ’30s.

For all this, the first thing you notice about the Rickenbacker B14A combo is… hey, it’s silver! Ricaficionados will recognize the shiny Tolex used on some guitar cases in the ’60s, but it makes an even brighter impression wrapped around an amplifier. Inside, things are a little more pedestrian.

The flashy cab houses what would have been a traditional top-mounted chassis just a few years before, but would have seemed outdated by the time this amp was introduced in ’64. The circuit and construction are a blend of Fender, Gibson, and Valco archetypes, with the rugged eyelet circuit board nodding toward the former and the plethora of smaller ceramic-disc coupling capacitors toward the latter. The engine room generates roughly 12 watts from a pair of cathode-biased 6V6GTs, with a 5Y3 rectifier and three 12AX7s at the front, enabling two channels with a shared Tone control plus Speed and Depth for the tremolo (“Tremlo” on the faceplate).

In use, the B14A might lack the compelling tweed-era grind of its earlier Fender counterparts, but exudes an appealingly toothsome clean sound with a hypnotic tremolo, all aided by an Alnico-magnet Jensen P12Q.

While Gre-tsch was one of the great originals of electric-guitar manufacturing during the rock-and-roll boom of the ’50s and early ’60s, the company never manufactured its own amplifiers. Instead, this Gretsch 6156 Playboy model and its siblings were made by Chicago-based Valco, which also manufactured amps for National, Supro, Airline, and others. In fact, the models available from any of the third-party brands (and Valco’s own house brands) at any era carried largely the same circuits and chassis with cosmetic alterations to suit the company’s varying styles – and with that in mind, it’s hard to argue against Gretsch as one of the coolest re-badgers of Valco products.

If the “Playboy” moniker given the Model 6156 doesn’t quite stand the test of time, it certainly suited a swinging club-sized combo of the early ’60s, and graces a surprisingly fierce tone machine despite its diminutive proportions. Even smaller than the ’60s Princeton it was likely intended to rival, it nonetheless brings as much or more power and volume, along with a stout and original voice to boot.

Rather than the tall, narrow EL84 tubes they appear to be, the 6156 Play boy carries a pair of 6973 tubes, cathode-biased with no negative feedback, in largely the same circuit as the highly desirable Supro Model 24 and others of the era. Those tubes are a little thicker, meatier, and grittier-sounding than EL84s, but still with plenty of sparkle and surprisingly good low-end (through a bigger cab, at least).

As used in this design, they offer a furious roar when cranked up, but without the fart-out compression you’d expect from a little combo. What’s more, they put out a genuine and robust 17 watts at full bore, which is more than an old Jensen C10R is going to want to see for very long. Unlike many Valco-made amps with similar circuits, however, the Gretsch employs a cathodyne (split-phase) inverter rather than an archaic paraphase inverter, which contributes to a bolder clean tone and throatier, less mushed-out overdrive. Add its throbbing bias-modulated tremolo, and it’s one ferocious beastie of a compact club combo.

It might be the multi-colored control knobs that jump out at first glance, but the 1962 Premier 120R combo – “With Reverberation and Tremolo” (thank you very much) is unique in many ways. A year or more before even the earliest Fender Princeton Reverb and Deluxe Reverb models hit the scene, the 120R was offering both reverb and tremolo on each of its two channels, which also carried independent Treble and Bass controls.

Premier amplifiers were manufactured in New York City by the Multivox Corporation of America for East Coast distributor Sorkin Music Company, and arrived early enough to rival Fender’s first serious efforts of the late ’40s. The 120R is closer to the size of a late-’50s tweed Deluxe – about an inch taller and quarter-inch wider – and is laid out much the same. Channel Two, in addition to its “High” input, has something labeled “Two Chan Input.” While we might assume this jumpers the two channels (as players will do with 5E3 Deluxes or many early Marshalls to achieve a beefier overall sound), it actually constitutes a stereo (tip-ring-sleeve) jack to receive input from one of the many stereo guitars that were popular at the time, and feeds the signal from each of those two pickups to its own individual channel… from whence it does not proceed in stereo, since it all ends up through the same mono output stage and single 12″ speaker. Still, it’s a thoughtful inclusion, and one redolent of an era when manufacturers – for a brief time, at least – must have figured everything had to have a stereo feature.

As with most Premier amps, none of the circuit stages are quite like anything seen in the rivals of the day, though they’re also not particularly outlandish or complicated. Gain stages are provided by 12AX7 preamp tubes, with just one stage in Channel Two, but two in Channel One. The bonus triode makes Channel One a little hotter, and helps its signal better survive the insertion loss of having Bass and Treble potentiometers in-line, which follow after both gain stages, with the channel’s Volume control last in line behind them before it all heads off toward the tremolo circuit. Output is a modest 15 watts from a pair of cathode-biased 6V6GTs, with a 5Y3 tube rectifier in the power stage – all of which comes together in an unusual combo with a rich, compelling voice both clean and overdriven.

Finally, our 1962 R-12-R Reverberocket makes the alternative-club-classics cut precisely because it’s not a typical Ampeg, or at least not of the archetype envisioned by the company’s founder and president, Everett Hull. According to the late tube-amp guru Ken Fischer (1945-2006), who worked as an Ampeg engineer long before founding Trainwreck Circuits, Hull felt “rock and roll doesn’t swing – it never will.” What did swing for Hull? Jazz, of course, so the company president – himself a piano and bass player – much preferred to cast his sonic pearls before the princes of the jazz world, and not the swine of rock and roll. As such, Ampeg amps of the ’50s and ’60s were bold, clean, clear, and rich, but they didn’t grind, bite, or sting unless you really pushed them past their optimal parameters. There was one amp, however – and again, this is a Fischer-certified tip – that fell through the cracks – the early-’60s R-12-R Reverberocket.

Part of the key to this Reverberocket’s rockability is its pair of 6V6GT output tubes. The amp went through several iterations from the late ’50s into the ’70s, and many were made with output tubes that just didn’t break up much. We already know, though, that 6V6s give up the goods in plenty of other amps, and the rest of the Reverberocket of this era seemed predisposed to go along with it.

“That was Everett Hull’s one effort to make an amp a little more Fendery,” Fischer revealed in an interview shortly before his death, and while it might have helped an Ampeg finally appeal to a younger crowd, its playing against type doomed it to an early demise.

“You’ve got to keep in mind that Everett Hull hated rock and roll, he hated distortion – even when blues guys would play distortion,” Fischer added. “Amps were not to be distorted. So those R-12-Rs had blue Jensens in them, 6SN7 and 6SL7 octals [preamp tubes], which are always nice, fat-sounding tubes. That amp would be a great indie-rock machine. Ampeg made it for a short while and all the jazz guys were complaining, ‘What’s wrong with the new Reverberockets? They break up too early!’

“So, Everett converted them back to 7591 [output tubes] because people were complaining. But if they had marketed them as a rock-and-roll amp they probably would have been very successful.” Add the Reverberocket’s lush tremolo and a reverb circuit often considered the best in the business, and it’s the very definition of a do-it-all club classic.

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This article originally appeared in VG’s December 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.

On rare occasions, the zeitgeist – not some lucky designer – creates a guitar that captures hearts and minds. Such was the case in 1982, when tastes in popular music and the rising skills of players conspired to birth “superstrats” like the Kramer Pacer Deluxe.

Though he rose to fame playing a parts guitar with a single humbucker, young Eddie Van Halen was the ideological nexus of the superstrat. In 1978, he lit up the world with a new style that combined catchy melodies, blistering speed, fretboard tapping, and “divebomb” vibrato. By the early ’80s, his play had informed a new style of hard rock and championed the locking vibrato recently pioneered by engineers such as Floyd Rose.

The idea of experimenting with traditional pickup layouts became increasingly popular in the ’70s, when Gibson hired Bill Lawrence to devise hybrid guitars like the S-1 and Marauder, while Randy Curlee put a lead single-coil at the bridge and a neck humbucker on his S.D. Curlee models. By ’79, Ibanez, Jackson, and Kramer were mounting twin humbuckers on Strat-style bodies, something that had never been seen.

This reflected the trend of guitar players becoming increasingly attracted to Fender-style aesthetics – the access (and image) of offset double cutaways – but with a beefy Gibson humbucker sound.

The first guitar company to synthesize the Gibson/Fender approach was Peavey, with its ’82 T-27. From its introduction in ’77, the T series (designed by Chip Todd) played with convention; the T-60 had twin humbuckers that converted to single-coils when the Tone control was rolled below 7. Conceptually, it was a step toward the superstrat, but the T-27 was the first production guitar to mount a lead humbucker with the middle and neck single-coils and a stop tail.

While it’s possible the T-27 influenced other guitar makers, it’s more likely that the humbucker/single/single was simply lingering in the ether. In ’83, Dean Guitars introduced the Bel Aire, which builder Dean Zelinsky says came to him in a dream. He exaggerated the upper treble bout, bolted on an ESP neck, and mounted a DiMarzio humbucker at the bridge to accompany the two single-coils. The bridge was a floating ESP Flicker vibrato. Company literature at the time asserted the Bel Aire was the first h/s/s guitar, but in reality, Peavey had beat them to the punch. It may, however, have been the first with a fancy vibrato.

While Peavey and Dean were playing with the new form, changes were happening in Neptune, New Jersey, where Kramer Guitars landed on the scene with aluminum necks touted as an improvement of Travis Bean’s idea. Gary Kramer had bankrolled Bean’s operation, but when the relationship soured, he hooked up with Dennis Berardi, Peter LaPlaca, Henry Vaccaro, Sr., and luthier Phil Petillo to launch Kramer Guitars.

Kramer instruments were well-received but struggled to become profitable. Their largest dealer was Guitar Center, an ambitious chain headquartered in Los Angeles; in 1980, GC owner Wayne Mitchell purchased a controlling interest in Kramer. The connection put them in proximity with Rose and Van Halen, and by ’82, EVH was ready to become an endorser. However, he wanted a guitar with a wooden neck, which prompted Kramer to begin a transition. For several years, they offered models both ways alongside new all-wood guitars.

The first product of the EVH/Kramer collaboration was 1982’s Pacer line with Floyd Rose’s double-locking vibrato system, billed as the “Edward Van Halen Tremolo.”

The Pacer was essentially a Strat copy in every way except for the Floyd. The Imperial variant lost the pickguard and had two humbuckers, while the Custom was the same and offered custom graphics. The Special had a single humbucker, graphics option, and a new headstock that collectors now call “the classic” design. The Standard was the same but with a regular fulcrum vibrato.

There were three basses – the Double J, Imperial, and Special, all with maple fretboards, while the all-black Carrera had ebony.

By ’83, Pacers acquired thinner cutaway horns, the classic headstock, and rosewood fretboards. Controls included a five-way pickup select with a mini-toggle for coil tap and phase reversal – classic superstrat.

The Deluxe remained pretty much unchanged through 1987 except for acquiring a new pointy/droopy headstock.

By ’88, the Pacer was gone and Kramer (which was mostly importing by then) was in financial trouble. In 1990, the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, followed by a flurry of failed attempts to inject cash, including a brief association with Michael Jackson. In ’93, Kramer’s trademarks were sold to Gibson, which introduced a number of generic Asian superstrats carrying classic Kramer names. In ’97, Henry Vaccaro revived the aluminum-neck concept on a line of self-branded guitars that were produced for about five years.

While the T-27 and Bel Aire became footnotes to guitar history, Kramer’s Pacer was wildly successful, helping briefly make Kramer the largest American guitar company. More importantly, the trio established the superstrat, and practically every guitar company began producing the form, including Charvel, Jackson, Ibanez, Aria Pro II, and Westone. Eventually, even Gibson, Fender, and Guild tried their hands at it.

With the advent of “alternative rock” in the late ’80s – and certainly by Nirvana’s Nevermind in ’91 – guitar virtuosity and the superstrat lost their dominance, though they never disappeared and have experienced a revival in recent years.

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This article originally appeared in VG’s December 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.