The model 4000 was not only Rickenbacker’s first foray into the electric-bass market, it was decidedly different from Fender’s Precision – the original electric bass. Beyond frets, four strings, and their role in a musical combo, they have little in common.
In the 1950s, F.C. Hall forged Rickenbacker into a modern guitar manufacturer. Striving to avoid having its instruments look, play, or sound like those from any other builder, he enlisted German luthier Roger Rossmeisel, who delivered several key elements. “Features like neck-through construction made us unique,” Hall said in a 1993 interview with VG. While the P-Bass’ aesthetics have evolved, the lines of the 4000, including its “cresting wave” bass-bout horn, unique headstock shape, and frets clear of the body, have always been standard. Early examples of the 4000 are finished in variants of Rickenbacker’s Fireglo finish (which became available in 1960) and typically have gold-backed Lucite pickguards.
Sonically, Rickenbackers are known for their defined, sharp sound. Construction certainly plays a role; when played with a thick pick and round-wound strings, Ricks evoke a piano-like tone that is unique and recognizable (just ask Paul McCartney or Chris Squire).
While its two-pickup cousins proved more popular in the long run, the Rickenbacker 4000 set the pace as the company established its niche.
This article originally appeared in Vintage Guitar Classics No. 1 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
From 1954 through ’59, the Fender Electric Instrument Mfg. Co. built guitar amplifiers with controls mounted atop using “chickenhead” knobs that go to 12, and covered with “the finest airplane luggage linen.” This line represents the company’s classic “tweed era,” and from the diminutive Champ to the mighty Twin, it remained virtually unchanged throughout the period.
The ’56 Princeton is a small “everyman” amp. Its tubes are a 5Y3GT, a 6V6GT, and a 12AX7. Producing 4.5 watts of “excellent quality distortionless power” through a heavy-duty 8″ Jensen speaker, it has two inputs, controls for Volume and a Tone, and had an original list price of $79.50. Offered in Fender catalogs as part of the Studio Deluxe Set (with the Studio model lap-steel guitar and matching tweed case), the Princeton was touted as radically new and able to “stand a terrific amount of abuse.”
The Fender Deluxe is arguably one of the best-sounding, most versatile small combos ever made. “As modern as tomorrow,” the Deluxe set a standard for tone, volume, and durability that endures to this day. It has a 5Y3GT, two 6V6GTs, a 12AX7, and a 12AY7. With three inputs, two Volume controls, a Tone control, and a ground switch, in addition to a built-in extension speaker jack, it’s rated at 15 watts (RMS) through a 12″ Jensen. Life wasn’t as loud back in the ’50s, and this ’56 Deluxe might have powered an entire band’s electric complement – vocal mic, electric guitar, steel guitar, or maybe accordion. As a solo-guitar amp for recording or small club dates, the Deluxe can sing loud and sweet, and at $129.50, offered outstanding value in its day.
Introduced in ’55, the Tremolux is essentially a Deluxe with tremolo (Tremolo + Deluxe = Tremolux!). This ’58 model had a list price of $199.50, the cool effect of tremolo adding 70 bucks to the tab. The Tremolux has a 5U4GT, two 6V6GTs, a 12AY7, and two 12AX7 tubes, four inputs, two Volume controls, and a Tone control, as well as tremolo Depth and Speed controls and a tremolo footswitch. Fender literature proclaimed its tremolo circuit provided greater ranges of speed and depth than any previous type. Often pictured in catalogs with the Telecaster, the Tremolux was the period’s most modern and innovative portable guitar amp. Rarer than the Deluxe, some current tweed aficionados prefer the Tremolux, saying it seems louder and “just sings better.”
This article originally appeared in Vintage Guitar Classics No. 3 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
When pop-music fans in the U.K. talk about guitar heroes, they tend to put more stake in the way a player’s work fits, contextually, into that of his band. To wit, in a 2006 poll, BBC listeners were asked to choose the best guitarist to emerge since 1980, and many of the 30,000 who responded picked Johnny Marr.
Co-founder of and co-songwriter in ’80s alt-rock legends the Smiths, Marr became a guitar hero in the U.K. thanks to his jangly style and the fact he and vocalist/frontman Morrisey rendered some of the most critically acclaimed music of its time. Post-Smiths, Marr stayed busy in groups like Electronic, The The, and helped create music with Bryan Ferry, Talking Heads, Crowded House, and many others. More recently, he emerged as a cohort to Isaac Brock and helped write songs for the 2007 Modest Mouse album We Were Dead Before the Ship Sank. His work in that band and the Cribs was laden with Jaguar-through-a-Super-Reverb tones, so it was only natural that he teamed with Fender to create a version of that guitar with his name on the headstock. VG recently sat with Marr to talk about it.
Did you play a Jag prior to getting into Modest Mouse?
I had a green one in the early ’90s, and I don’t really get rid of a lot of guitars, but I got rid of that and wish I hadn’t. I wasn’t really aware of how great they sounded until I started playing with Modest Mouse, and that was just a complete fluke because at three o’clock in the morning on the first night I was playing with them, my Telecaster just wasn’t cuttin’ it, and this beat up, old dusty, black Jag of Isaac’s caught my eye. As soon as I picked it up, it was like, “Where have you been all my life?”
We wrote quite a lot of good songs from then on. I just got this good connection with it, and it seems to do exactly what I need and sounds the way most people think I sound. I’ve not looked back, really; that was in 2005, and it set off this series of events that brought out the obsessive-compulsive in me.
Which guitars did you favor prior to that night?
Most of my work has been with Telecasters, Rickenbackers, and Gretsches, and my tech thinks my rig with the new Jaguar sounds exactly like a cross between a Rick and a Gretsch. I’d say that was pretty accurate.
I went through a period in the early 2000s using an SG exclusively, and I really enjoyed it; I still think SGs are very, very good guitars. But what I’ve done with the signature Jag is try to make it all things to all men and really put it through its paces. Luckily for me, there have been a lot of scenarios where I’ve been able to try it out, like with Modest Mouse and the Cribs in the U.K. and on the Inception soundtrack, so this Jaguar’s been where no Jaguar’s got any business being (laughs)!
Was Isaac’s guitar mostly stock?
No, entirely stock. It’s a ’63, but it needed some love – he hadn’t got along with it! But I just got this great feeling from it. Most players know how if you pick up an instrument, even if it’s in bad condition but it feels good in your hands, you fall in love with it.
What did you change on the signature model?
Essentially, I made it with Bill Puplett, whose been fixing my guitars in the U.K. since 1988. Billy’s a Jedi. I’ve been very lucky to have him as a resource, sounding board, and expert to work with. By now he’s used to my sort of obsessive whims and ambition.
There are so many things I love about the original Jaguar, aesthetically and sonically, but there are what I’d call “unwanted conditions.” The first – and most important – was that the bridge on my favorite old one kept dropping down. With the Cribs, I was playing a lot of fast rhythm parts. Several shows would go by, and I’d start hearing this horrible sort of clicking kind of distortion that sounded like digital distortion to my ears. So I’d pull my pedals apart and go through my cords and get grumpy with my tech… Eventually, I was coming around to the same thing each time – the bridge had gone down. So I got crazy and put Loc-Tite on it, or super glue, or nail polish because of all these old wives’ tales about how to fix it.
Essentially, the problem was one of the things that was so great about the guitar – the transients and the vibrations that traveled through the bridge into the trem beneath it was the cause of the problem. That is, the vibration would turn the screws, no matter how much super glue I put in there, or lock-tight.
I remember being with the Cribs in Australia, and during shows I would take a little screwdriver and, between songs, I would raise the bridge or drop the bridge… that was partly because I decided I was making very good, accurate decisions in front of an audience! It’s true. If you put on a prototype guitar and you’re not quite sure about the neck or the sound, you can make a decision in 45 seconds. At soundcheck or rehearsal, it would take you an hour and a half of headscratching. Nothing focuses you quite like standing in front of 5,000 people!
Fortunately for me, I was trying out all these different Jaguars – mostly ’63s – with bigger necks, smaller necks, darker pickups, brighter pickups, all of these idiosyncrasies I’d be trying in the middle of the set with Modest Mouse or the Cribs, making these very, very quick decisions.
So we ended up trying lots of ways to stop that bridge going down, and ended up with was a very elegant, simple solution – I put screws in it that set inside little nylon “feet” if you will, inside the poles. But leading up to that, we had all kinds of contraptions.
Then, we dealt with the trem system, because the arm on my ’60s ones would just swing around. An engineer friend of mine who is a Hank Marvin freak and always fancied doing something on a guitar, set his mind to doing something about it. Much like with the bridge, we tried all different kinds of systems over a two- or three-year period – locking devices, extra screws again, blah, blah, blah – and we ended up with a very simple solution of putting a bushing inside the tremolo unit that keeps it sturdy. More importantly, it means there’s no play in the trem, because I use the trem a hell of a lot as an expressive thing.
Also very important was addressing the pickup switching, which, to my way of thinking, was problematic because it could be switched off, which was fine in 1962 on a radio date. But in this day and age of jumping around and having band members dive on top of you, it was a real problem! Like a lot of players, I’d find myself hitting those switches and creating silence; you see so many Jag players with duct tape over those switches!
So therein lay one of the biggest problems for me, because I love the look of the tone wheels on the original, and I love those three switches. But when you’re trying to devise the most perfect guitar, technically, and thought about putting the blade switch from a Telecaster to stop from switching the guitar off, but also to enable a real quick maneuver from one pickup position to the next – and I change pickup positions a lot – that was a big jump because it changes the aesthetic. But after 10 minutes – maybe less – of seeing it, I thought, “This is great. It keeps it in the Fender/early-’60s design aesthetic, but technically got rid of the problems.” After putting in the blade switch, I preferred my signature guitar to a vintage Jag, which was really interesting for me because that was when I broke away from the original aesthetic.
Once I had done that, the enthusiasm grew to take on the original tone circuit. I knew that 19 out of 20 Jaguar players just didn’t bother with that system. I fretted over it for a long time and, technically speaking, because I had switched out the pickup system, I needed to find some place to put the high-pass filter switch and where I was gonna put the switch used to change to the rhythm circuit. So that decision was made, and it was to my advantage because you need it up close to you, anyway if you’re like me and use the high-pass filter switch quite a lot. I find that high-pass filter a really useful and very musical design. So it was great having it up closer to me, but the tone wheels drove me mad for 18 months. I’d be talking to other Jag players and wondering what I was gonna do; maybe I’d put a compressor in there, like the Rickenbackers, but then I didn’t want a battery in the guitar, of course, because that’s a sin! Then, through messing around on a Mustang, it struck me that I could use a sideways switch. So, the Telecaster switching system gave me opportunity to put the pickups in series and create a big, thick humbucker sound, and therefore shut up the naysayers who think a Jaguar is just a one-way ride to Treblesville, you know?
So I did that in-series thing and, to my surprise, it was too dark-sounding. Presto! That gave me a reason to put the sideways switch in, instead of the wheel.
I had a hard time letting go of all the original elements, because it was so beautiful. I wanted to keep the chrome and keep it looking like a Jaguar, but it had to have function. After a lot of thinking and OCD, it worked itself out.
Do you have a project in the works that will give us a chance to hear the guitar?
Well, I used it quite a lot on the Inception soundtrack, and we played a concert at the premier that people can see on Youtube. There’s a very Spaghetti-western feature to certain parts of that soundtrack where the Jaguar really came into its own. And I’m recording an album with my band, The Healers, using the Jag quite a lot. I just did a couple more tracks with Brian Ferry, which is nice because we haven’t worked with each other for a long time. I also did an album with Collin Newman, from Wire.
I’m always collaborating; that’s something I’ve done since 1983, when I first started out.
Plans for a tour?
Yeah, I’ll be playing the U.S. in the fall, actually. I was hoping to be playing in the U.S. by now, to try some of the material, but I’d forgotten that when you’re producing a record as well as writing it and singing it, it’s a lot of work. I ain’t complaining – I love it, but I’ve got to get the record finished and recorded.
This article originally appeared in VG June 2012 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Dan Fogelberg’s success as a singer and songwriter far overshadows his reputation as a musician, but the man whose tenor voice and sentimental songs ruled the Adult Contemporary charts in the early 1980s was actually quite an accomplished guitarist. Evidence is on The Innocent Age and Windows and Walls – the albums that yielded his biggest pop hits – where he was the only guitarist listed in the recording credits. One of his favorite electrics, which he owned from the beginning of his recording career, was also one of the rarest of collectibles – this ’58 stereo Gretsch White Penguin.
The White Penguin (Model 6134) was the solidbody version of Gretsch’s electric hollowbody White Falcon. Like all the other solidbody Gretsches of the ’50s, the Penguin originally had the single-cutaway body of the Duo-Jet, with routed mahogany back and a laminated-wood top pressed into an arched shape.
The trim distinguished the solidbody models from each other, and the Penguin had the Falcon’s white finish, gold-sparkle edge trim, gold-sparkle logo and truss rod cover, “Cadillac” tailpiece with the letter G in the center, single-coil DeArmond pickups, engraved “humptop” block fingerboard inlays, and vertically oriented peghead logo with the G flanked by wings. The Penguin and Falcon both had a V-top peghead that no other Gretsches had.
The inspiration for choosing a flightless bird for the model name has never been explained. The incongruity is underscored when the pickguards of the Falcon and Penguin are compared. The White Falcon’s guard depicts a falcon, ready to land, with wings spread and talons open, while the bird on the White Penguin’s guard is standing upright with its wings hanging down at its sides, looking very much like an old man in an overcoat.
This apparent disrespect for the Penguin carried over to Gretsch catalogs. In 1955, the company featured the White Falcon, along with a bevy of other colorful models, in a full-color catalog entitled Guitars for Moderns. The White Penguin was nowhere to be found – not in that catalog, not in any Gretsch catalog that followed. It was mentioned only in a 1958 flyer announcing the availability of stereo electronics and on a ’59 price list (at $490).
With that kind of support, it’s no wonder White Penguins are rare. Estimated production is no more than a few dozen. The examples that have shown up indicate that the Penguin followed the same changes as the Falcon, with pickups going from DeArmonds to Filter’Tron humbuckers in late 1957; inlays going from engraved humptops to the half-moon “thumbprints” in ’58; optional stereo electronics in ’58; Melita bridge to “space control” roller bridge in ’58; and vertical peghead logo to horizontal logo in ’59. When Gretsch’s other solidbodies went from single-cutaway to double-cut in ’61, so did the Penguin.
The Penguin went out of production some time in ’62, the year Fogelberg turned 11. The son of a band director and a pianist, Fogelberg started his musical career with a steel guitar and a Mel Bay instructional book, and quickly moved on to standard guitar and piano. As a student at the University of Illinois, playing at coffeehouses, he met manager Irving Azoff. Fogelberg and Azoff moved to California, but Azoff soon sent Fogelberg to Nashville to polish his songwriting ability. He made his recording debut in 1972 with Home Free, produced by Norbert Putnam and featuring Fogelberg on most of the guitar work. The album stalled at number 210 on Billboard’s album charts (though it would later go Platinum as a reissue).
Also in ’72, Fogelberg ventured to Nashville’s Lower Broadway district and bought this White Penguin from GTR (the original incarnation of Gruhn Guitars). Though sales records no longer exist, GTR inventory lists from 1973 show sunburst Les Pauls for $1,200 and a ’58 Explorer for $1,000, so Fogelberg would not have paid more than $1,000 for the Penguin.
Fogelberg’s guitar had a transitional set of specs (it’s often said that all Gretsch models are transitional). The Filter’Tron pickups are the second version, which appeared in 1958, with “PAT APPLIED FOR” stamped on the center tab (earlier units had no stamp; later ones had the patent number). The thumbprint fingerboard inlays also debuted in ’58, same year that the vertical logo last appeared.
The most interesting (and rarest) aspect of this guitar is the stereo wiring. Gretsch introduced Project-o-Sonic stereo in ’58, featuring Filter’Tron pickups with treble/bass split (rather than the one-pickup-per-channel design of Gibson’s stereo models). At first, the stereo setup was easy to spot; the neck pickup had three polepieces for the bass strings, and the bridge pickup had three polepieces for the treble strings. After a year or so, the pickups were changed to look like normal six-pole Filter’Trons (though a stereo Gretsch could still be identified by an excess of control knobs). Consequently, this is a relatively rare stereo setup on any Gretsch, and exceedingly rare on a Penguin.
Two years after acquiring this guitar, Fogelberg teamed with guitarist Joe Walsh as producer to record Souvenirs. Fogelberg contributed most of the guitar and keyboard parts, including an electric guitar solo on “As the Raven Flies” using the White Penguin. By that time he had modified the guitar, as he later explained in a note accompanying this guitar, “to make it more playable.” He added a Bigsby vibrato, Gibson-style tune-o-matic bridge and Yamaha Rotomatic-style tuners.
Souvenirs yielded Fogelberg’s first hit, “Part of the Plan,” but it wasn’t until his 1981 double album The Innocent Age, that he hit his stride with three pop hits (“Hard to Say,” “Same Auld Lang Syne,” and “Leader of the Band”). By the time of his next album, Windows and Walls, MTV had been launched, providing a 24-hour cable TV outlet for music videos. “The Language of Love,” Fogelberg’s first single from the disc, became his first video, and the featured guitar in the video was his White Penguin.
“The Language of Love” rocks harder than the quintessential Fogelberg tune, and the video opens with the body of the Penguin filling up the screen and Fogelberg playing a screaming lead line. The video is simple, with Fogelberg and his three-piece band performing in front of a white background. It’s the perfect setting for a White Penguin.
Fogelberg died of cancer in 2007. By then, his legacy had been established with acoustic-oriented music, and the guitar with which he was most often identified was a signature Martin D-41. This ultra-rare stereo White Penguin represents another side of Fogelberg’s artistry and also shows that he had an appreciation for vintage guitars throughout his entire recording career.
You can receive more great articles like this in our twice-monthly e-mail newsletter, Vintage Guitar Overdrive, FREE from your friends at Vintage Guitar magazine. VG Overdrive also keeps you up-to-date on VG’s exclusive product giveaways! CLICK HERE to receive the FREE Vintage Guitar Overdrive.
This article originally appeared in VG June 2012 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
A Firebird I in Inverness Green, like this ’64 version, is rare. Add the Maestro vibrato and it’s even more so. A 1965 Firebird II in Aztec Bronze.
Say the words “custom color” to a collector or enthusiast and most will think of “Fender.” But Gibson had its own multicolored baby – the Firebird. Born in 1963 and put to rest in ’69, the Firebird was Gibson’s third full-line attempt at the solidbody market. While it did not do as well as the Les Paul or its younger brother, the SG, it was available in more variations.
While thought by some to be the poor cousin to the late-‘50s Explorer, the differences are greater than the similarities. From ’63 to ’65, it was produced in the “reverse” style, with four variations – the I, III, V, and VI. Common to all were the body shape, neck-through construction, mahogany body, mini-humbuckers, and banjo tuners. The earliest production runs did not have the distinctive logo on the pickguard.
The I and III came with an unbound rosewood neck and dot markers; the I had a single mini-humbucker pickup; the III had two pickups. A combination compensated bridge/tailpiece like that on the Les Paul Junior was standart on the I, and the III had a flat-blade vibrato with the same combination bridge as the I.
Moving upscale was the more deluxe V, which had a bound neck with trapezoid position markers and the deluxe vibrato – the same as available on the III, but with an extended trapezoidal-shaped casing. The bridge was a Tune-O-Matic. The VII was the Coupe DeVille of the ’birds. With white-pearl block inlays on a bund ebony fingerboard, three pickups, and gold-plated hardware, this guitar was no flipped-over Strat, but a real contender in the guitar wars of the early ‘60s.
The line was economically priced with a I being sold for $189.50 and the VII for $445. For those looking for something a little more special, an extra $150 would get you a Duco finished custom color. “Six new solidbody guitars and 10 exciting custom colors,” boasts the cover of the 1963 Firebird/Thunderbird catalog. And just what were those colors? Polaris White, Forst Blue, Ember Red, Inverness Green Poly, Silver Mist Poly, Kerry Green, Gold Mist Poly, Pelham Blue Poly, Heather Poly, and Cardinal Red.
A ’65 Firebird VII in sunburst and a ’64 V in Cardinal Red.
The most common colors are Pelham Blue, Cardinal Red, and Polaris Whtie. The least-seen would have to be Silver Mist Poly, Heather Poly, and Kerry Green. Black is common among other Gibsons but it’s highly disputed in the Firebird line. Why Gibson would not produce a Black ‘bird after finishing other models in black is ponderable.
Our examples carry two of the standard custom colors, the 1964 Inverness Green I and the 1964 Cardinal Red V. The 1965 II finished in Aztec Bronze is a rare find; the color is more commonly associated with the Epiphone line. The 1965 VII has the sunburst finish most often seen on Firebirds. The translucent cherry finish found on SGs is also commonly found on Firebirds.
The Firebird has seen duty with a very eclectic group of players: Steve Winwood in his Traffic days, Johnny Winter with his sunburst V, Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera with a Cardinal Red VII, and Tommy DeVito and Nick Massi from the Four Seasons (shown on the cover of The Four Seasons Entertain You holding a Sunburst VII and II, respectively). Even the Stones’ Brian Jones and Keith Richard have played them.
The original “reverse” Firebirds are a rare breed. As with many guitars at the time of their production, they weren’t overly accepted, but as time passed their true appeal has taken flight.
This article originally appeared in VG Classics #01 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
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1965 Vox AC50 Photo: Val Rothwell, amp courtesy of Jack Wright.
Vox AC50 Preamp tubes: one ECC82 (12AU7), three ECC83 (12AX7)
Output tubes: two EL34s, fixed-biased
Rectifier: solidstate
Controls: Volume, Treble and Bass for each channel.
Output: nominally 50 watts RMS, but upward of 70 watts flat-out.
Where the evolution of guitar amplification in general traces musicians’ needs to be louder, the history of Vox follows, in particular, The Beatles’ need to play louder. And this was a very real need indeed, with thousands-strong crowds of screaming teenage girls drowning out the Fab Four’s live shows with frustrating regularity. Vox founder Tom Jennings and his head engineer Dick Denney might have doubled the power of the AC15 to produce the concert-ready AC30 for Hank Marvin and the Shadows, who performed both as a solo instrumental act and as Cliff Richard’s backing band, but their AC50 was the result of a desperate effort to help the world’s most popular band to be heard.
Virtually running to keep up with the pace of The Beatles’ popularity, Denney developed the AC50 late in 1963 by first modifying existing speaker cabinets, and quickly getting together the amplifier chassis to do the job, rather than the more-intensive R&D venture devoted to the flagship AC30 earlier in the decade. As Denney told author Andy Babiuk in Beatles Gear, “I made up the first one using an AC30 cabinet with two 12″ speakers plus a ‘horn’ speaker for more top end. The horn didn’t fit, so I cut a hole for it in the back of the cabinet. I didn’t have the time to make up a new cabinet, because we had to get them their new amps. There was always a rush.”
As a result, the first AC50s were delivered to George Harrison and John Lennon as custom-made, single-channel heads and modified cabs ready just in time for the band’s Christmas ’64 concerts in Finsbury Park, London. At the same time, Denney concocted the prototype of the AC100, given to Paul McCartney to replace a solidstate Vox T-60 bass amp that wasn’t cutting it, volume-wise. The first production AC50s, which hit the market early in ’64, were also single-channel amps, initially with compact “small box” cabinets, with a larger head shell introduced later in the year. Both had GZ34 tube rectifiers like the AC30 (and Marshall’s JTM45, for that matter). The AC50 head’s initial retail price of just under £100, equivalent to nearly $2,000 today, might make you feel a little better about the supposedly high prices of contemporary “boutique” amps, considering the big Vox’s paucity of features.
The first two-channel AC50s arrived around August of ’64. Rare early examples of this incarnation had the iconic early brown-diamond Vox grillecloth, but by the fall of that year they were dressed in the black-diamond cloth of the outstanding ’65 AC50 you see here. Also gone was the tube rectifier, replaced by more-robust solidstate diode rectification. Otherwise, the two-channel AC50 was much like its single-channel predecessor, electronically, although it split the MkI and MkII’s voice-for-all-seasons preamp into Normal and Brilliant channels, with slight changes in the voicing of the early gain stages of each, to suit bass and lead guitar respectively (much as did Fender’s blackface Bassman head and many Marshall heads). As the conjoined goals for this design were clarity and headroom, Denney used the two halves of a low-gain ECC82 (12AU7) preamp tube as the first gain stage for each channel, with a 500pF coupling capacitor from the Brilliant channel to the next stage to accentuate its highs, and a more-standard .022uF coupling cap on the Normal channel for a fuller, more balanced tone. The former also included a bright cap on its Volume control. Both channels used the same value of 25uF bypass cap around the cathode-bias resistor of the ECC82 – rather than giving the Brilliant channel more crunch with, for example, a .68uF cap as Marshall would use – though the first gain stage in the Brilliant channel was biased hotter. Otherwise, they were identical from here on out.
Next, each channel went on to its own ECC83 (12AX7) cathode-follower tone stack with Treble and Bass controls (no midrange), a useful bid for independent EQ that made these genuine two-channel amps throughout, where rivals Marshall, and eventually Hiwatt, had shared EQ stages. A conventional long-tailed-pair phase inverter continued the bid for a bold, tight tone and passed the signal along to a pair of EL34 output tubes with individual bias-adjust pots that made it easy to balance the bias of mismatched pairs. Interestingly, Vox had used EL34s in very rare early renditions of the AC30, as Jim Elyea examines in great detail in his book, Vox Amplifiers: The JMI Years, though higher B+ voltages and a fixed-bias, class AB output stage (rather than the AC30’s cathode-biased class A design) helped these tall British bottles produce a lot more oomph in the AC50. A MkIII AC50 in good condition, with fresh biased tubes, can be loud. Very loud. Running full tilt, an AC50 in good condition can deliver significantly more than its stated 50 watts, even upward of 65 or 70 watts, and more than that at its peaks. Between the gutsy output stage and the efficient low-gain preamp, these amps go a long way toward their maximum potential before sliding into significant crunch, too. This amp’s owner, Jack Wright, says he gets to the breakup zone quicker with a Les Paul and a treble booster, where he finds it “sits somewhere between a [Marshall] JTM50 and a Hiwatt.” The amp was used on several Beatles recordings of the mid ’60s and can be heard – though barely – on much of the live concert-film footage from the same period that you might stumble upon.
That the AC50 ultimately failed at its goal, one might argue, despite being an impressively loud “50-watt amp” – The Beatles abandoning live performance after ’66 in the face of virtually inaudible stage volume levels – is no judgment on the success of the amp itself, merely testament to the power of pubescent hysteria. Later MkIV AC50s gained a little more preamp crunch and a more traditional mids-forward guitar tone in general when an ECC83 (12AX7) became standard equipment in the first gain stage in place of the tighter, cleaner ECC82. Elyea’s book further tells us that as many as 7,000 AC50s were produced in the JMI years up to the end of the ’60s, with a further 1,200 or so manufactured by Dallas Arbiter and subsequent owners of the Vox brand into the mid ’70s.
This article originally appeared in VG September 2013 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Joe Bonamassa’s latest record, Driving Towards The Daylight, is a return to the blues. After two successful studio albums with the heavy-rock band Black Country Communion, Bonamassa’s latest solo effort explores some of his early influences. While covering Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Dixon, he got help from heavyweight guitarists including Brad Whitford, Pat Thrall, and Blondie Chaplan. But Bonamassa couldn’t have recorded this album without the help of producer and label partner Kevin Shirley. Their unique relationship has produced a great body of work as well as some awesome guitar tones.
Driving Towards The Daylight sounds like you getting back to your thing.
It’s a little bit of a return to the blues, which is always fun. It was about time to stop messing around with the bouzoukis and world stuff, and do a blues record again.
Was that an actual conversation you had with Kevin Shirley?
That was the word. Every record has a word. Ballad of John Henry was “swampy.” Black Rock was the “world blues” thing. Dust Bowl was “Americana.” This one was “blues,” so we tried to make a blues record. It’s fun to play and the material is translating very well live.
When you and Kevin discuss concepts, does it flow naturally, or do you have goals in mind?
We always find ourselves on the same page. That’s why the way we work is so special. He’ll say, “I think we should make a blues record.” And I’ll say, “I was just thinking the same thing.” That’s the beauty of it. When you run your own record company, it’s like, “I’ll do whatever I want!” There’s no committee thinking. There’s no hits. We don’t play the radio game. In spite of it all without a radio hit, we’ll walk into venues with 2,000 to 5,000 each night, going, “This is better than having some kind of radio hit that you have to play every night.” There are a few songs they would be disappointed if I didn’t play, so I get to them, but there’s certainly no career-defining song.
What keeps you on course in terms of the records you choose to make?
I try to make records I know my fans would like. I think I know my fans pretty well at this point; they tolerate a lot of adventurism on my part, with trips to Greece and bouzoukis laid over I-IV-V changes. I think they know me as a person and they know whatever I want to do is something that’s uniquely authentic to myself. They have a good barometer when they smell “the machine” getting behind it, and so do I. When I see that coming down the lane, I pick up my guitar and run the other direction.
Was joining Black Country Communion an attempt at a crossover?
Essentially, what we tried to do was make modern classic rock. It sounds like it was recorded in 1972 with that kind of live-in-the-room feel, with everybody playing great on new songs. We saw there was definitely a niche for that – “new classic rock.” New songs, but they would sound relevant to 1972, as well.
For years, blues purists were saying, “Please stop trying to hi-jack the blues and go join a rock band, because your show is more rock than blues.” Some of the points they made are valid because it really isn’t “blues” by definition, yet it’s categorized as blues. So I gave them their wish, and honestly, it’s a lot of fun! They’re good cats to play with, and good people, and it’s exhilarating.
Staying away from rock, how did you choose the material on Driving Towards The Daylight?
One of the initial songs was Howlin’ Wolf’s “Who’s Been Talking?,” and we basically let Howlin’ Wolf dictate the tempo. At the beginning of the song is a sample from the ’60s, when he went to London and did those sessions; it’s him talking to Aynsley Dunbar. On Robert Johnson’s “Stones In My Passway,” we just wanted to do it like if Lead Belly was alive today, doing Robert Johnson on a 12-string. We’re messing with the traditional structure, but that’s the way I like it.
What’s the difference between the gear you use for Black Country Communion and the gear you use on solo tours?
I bring more stuff for the solo gigs. I have 13 albums to get to. For Black Country Communion, I bought seven guitars. Mostly, I played a couple of my signature-model Les Pauls and my first ’59 Les Paul Standard sunburst. Since then, I’ve purchased two more. On tour, we have two ’59 Les Pauls, a ’60 with a Bigsby, two dot-necks – a ’60 and a ’61 – a ’53 black-guard Tele, a ’54 Firebird, and a ’57 goldtop with P-90s. Amp wise, I’m using two Marshall Jubilees, a Trainwreck Liverpool from 1990, and a prototype from Jim Kelley, built by John Suhr. It sounds freakin’ wicked.
My whole thing is that I just want to be different from everybody else. I don’t want to be lumped in. What I do is different than Derek Trucks. Derek Trucks is different than me. Kenny Wayne Shepherd is different than both of us, and Jonny Lang is different from all three of us.
The people who do the lumping don’t have an ear for nuance…
“Oh you’re a blues guitar player, so you must like Stevie Ray Vaughan.” Well, I admire the man’s music, but let’s not go to the lowest common denominator here and take the Wikipedia definition. There are deeper things. I’m from America, but British blues is my thing.
This article originally appeared in VG August 2012 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Mike Lipe has a wall of gold records. Why? Not because he’s a musical star, but because he’s a star to the stars. A former top builder at Ibanez, his creations have helped Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Andy Timmons, and many others become luminaries on the instrument. Now on his own, Lipe is producing a line of hand-built instruments.
Lipe’s traditional-leaning Maestro is a solidbody guitar that incorporates bolt-neck construction and a Tele-meets-Jazzmaster design. Weighing in at an startlingly light five pounds, eight ounces, its body and neck are mahogany, its fretboard a dark, tightly grained rosewood with large 6155 Dunlop fretwire, a bend-friendly 12″ radius, along with a 25.5″ scale length, and a nut width of 1.70″. The neck is a handful, with a measurement of .90″ from front to back at the first fret, and .99″ at the 12th. The headstock has a 7-degree angle, which allows for elimination of string trees and promotes tone through greater downward pressure on the nut. Hardware consists of Hipshot locking tuners and a solid Strat-style bridge, with black knobs that go to 11. Electronics are two Amalfitano P-90 pickups, complemented with a three-way switch, master Volume, and master Tone controls. The body is stained deep red, while the neck is satin-finished, providing a friendly feel. Lipe does no CNC shaping of necks or bodies, and various neck shapes and fret sizes are available.
The neck of the Maestro has the size and feel of a vintage Precision Bass. Though large, it’s comfortable, and Lipe builds to suit the player’s taste. Finishes are beautifully applied and the woods are gorgeous. Playability is top-notch, facilitating clean bending, and intonation on our tester was spot-on, allowing chords to ring loud and true. The pickups are perfect for the instrument, bringing out the best of its Fender-meets-Gibson nature. The neck pickup offers a clean, articulate tone that’s warmer than most Fender styles, and less muddy than most Gibson-style instruments. The bridge pickup can get downright twangy, but never with harsh top-end. Run together, they produced a grand sound – clear, bell-like, and full. With either amp’s overdriven tones, as well as with dirty tones derived from a pedal, the Maestro worked equally well. No matter the level of drive or volume, the guitar never fed back or lost its character under the weight of heavy distortion.
The Maestro is beautiful, playable, and tonal. Its Fender-style neck and Kalamazoo-style tone woods, pickups, and headstock angle make for a pleasant mix.
This article originally appeared in VG February 2013 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
“Stack-knob” is a catch phrase that for decades has perked the ears of collectors; these relatively rare examples of the earliest Fender Jazz Bass are among the first electric basses to be “collected” instead of just bought, sold, and played! Along with the ’50s Precision, they stand as the ultimate Fender bass – sought for their tone, feel, and aura of cool. Built during the transition between the ’50s and ’60s, they combine the craftsmanship of Fender’s pre-guitar boom period with the modern look.
Nobody knows how many Jazz basses were made before Fender switched to the three-knob configuration, but, as a new and more-expensive model in an era when the electric was considered an illegitimate upstart, the Jazz took time to establish itself as a popular alternative. The number of extant examples is small compared to the number of surviving early-’60s Precisions.
Fender took its time getting a second bass to market. The Precision had been an increasingly familiar sight for about eight years before the Jazz made its debut. Basses from Gibson (the Electric Bass, or EB-1, followed by the semi-hollow EB-2) Rickenbacker (Model 4000), and companies like Kay must have shown Leo and his crew how the market for electric basses was big enough to include a “deluxe” model. Instead of simply updating its one model, as Fender had done in ’54 and again in ’57, it decided to complement the Precision Bass with an upscale sister. Borrowing the new “Offset Contour” body from the Jazzmaster but keeping the long “horns” needed to balance a bass neck, Fender created a beautiful and harmonious design. The pickups were new, keeping the dual polepieces from the ’57 Precision, but with narrower, more-focused field. The stacked knobs gave individual Tone and Volume controls for each pickup – a novel feature for a bass at the time. The three-knob configuration was at the prototype stage, but got the commercial nod, only to be discontinued within two years. A 1960 Fender catalog bound into the July 21 issue of Down Beat shows on its cover what appears to be a three-knob Jazz with a ‘50s-style Fender logo. The bass in the catalog, and the ad in the January ’61 International Musician, is a stack-knob with no logo. Other distinctive “stack” features include the adjustable mute pads under the chrome tailpiece, prominently featured in promotional literature (but eventually removed by most players), the “patent pending” fine print on the headstock decal, and – on the earliest examples – the beloved “’50s bump” on tthe lower cutaway. Fender also promoted the new narrower neck as permitting “rapid technique” – one wonders if a young Jaco Pastorious took this to heart. The original catalog blurb for the Jazz says, “this… is the standard by which others will be compared” and for once a bit of ad copy has held true through the years! The early Jazz is still the standard by which any electric bass can be judged, and most are found wanting.
This article originally appeared in Vintage Guitar Classics No. 2 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
Since 2007, guitarist/vocalist Nick Moss has released five albums on his Blue Bella label, including two live discs. And while Moss still loves his Chicago-style blues, his most recent effort, Here I Am, is an adventurous album. Though it begins with a raucous Windy City-type rave-up called “Why You So Mean,” by the third/title track, it’s obvious Moss is up to something, as “Here I Am” is nothing less than a Led-Zeppelin-style stomp.
“That song was born out of frustration with people writing and talking about what I’m supposed to be,” he explained. “So, it’s a blatant statement from me directly, if they really want to know about me.”
Another song makes a similarly assertive statement. “‘Long Haul Jockey’ is about ****ing, not making love… getting down late at night and ‘driving,’ so to speak!”
He noted the album’s funk-type tunes such as “Candy Nation” and “Caught By Surprise” as being “…just fun grooves to play. I am big fan of all things funk. ‘Candy Nation’ is about America’s fascination with medication and pharmaceutical infomercials; ‘Caught By Surprise’ is about a woman turning the tables on a man and using him for her ill-gotten pleasures!”
A perusal of the track list might lead one to believe there are religious connotations to Moss’ songs, as with titles like “Here Comes Moses” and “Sunday Get Together,” but Moss says he was trying to stay in secular mode.
“‘Here Comes Moses’ is my way of relating that there are a lot of good common-sense lessons in the Bible – I’m no religious zealot – and I even say in the song that ‘I’m not without sin’ – and it seems like there are an awful lot of people these days lacking some damn common sense!”
On the other hand, he noted the no-frills recording style of the instrumental “Sunday Get Together,” detailing how it’s “…my Les Paul Standard with ThroBak PG 102 MXV pickups, going through my Orange Dual Terror, recorded live in-studio with very ambient mic placement. The background chatter was added later; I wanted it to sound like a family get-together with kids running around and laughing, and people eating and drinking and having a good time.”
“Katie Ann (Slight Return)” is a paean to Moss’ spouse and business partner, and it originally appeared on an album a decade ago; he recorded an update, which, as he sees it, validated the addition of “(Slight Return)” to its title.
“I wrote the song in 2001 for Got A New Plan,” he averred. “It originally had a Louisiana swamp blues feel. I decided to re-do it for my 10-year anniversary with Kate. I gave it a Hendrix feel, and just went over the top with guitar layers and feedback swells and the whole nine yards – and it was a blast! Just as Jimi did ‘Voodoo Chile’ and ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’ I called my new version ‘Katie Ann (Slight Return)’ as an homage to Hendrix.”
After the road van, which contained his guitars and gear, was stolen in Montreal in 2008 (where he had played the International Jazz Festival), Moss was forced to “update” his guitar and amplifier collection.
“I lost some really nice guitars, including a beautiful custom guitar made by Steven White, and some nice amps like my ’66 Fender Super Reverb and a very nice ’68 Pro Reverb.”
After the theft, he scored a ’67 Guild Starfire and now also owns several guitars he built himself, along with, “…a couple lawsuit-era Tokais and a great Fernandez Revival given to me by Craig Ruskey, who did the liner notes for Live At Chan’s: Combo Platter No. 2. I’m also awaiting guitars by Kurt Wilson and some amps from Don Ritter at Category 5. I’ve been using them for more than two years.”
Guitars used on Here I Am included an ’81 Burny with ThroBak’s SLE 101 MXV pickups, a custom-built Don Mare with Zepotone pickups, a custom-built guitar with Mare’s Josie pickups, and a Les Paul Standard with ThroBak PG 102 MXV pickups. A Takamine 12-string acoustic is also heard on “It’ll Turn Around.” The slide guitars that are heard were tuned to Open G, and Moss uses a Coricidin bottle for slide. He used a Category 5 Tempest and the aforementioned Orange Dual Terror on most tracks, as well as a Marshall JCM 800.
Here I Am is an ambitious effort that shows just how Nick Moss’ career has evolved.
This article originally appeared in VG September 2012 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
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Nick Moss photo: Jim McKinley.
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Fortunately for me, I was trying out all these different Jaguars – mostly ’63s – with bigger necks, smaller necks, darker pickups, brighter pickups, all of these idiosyncrasies I’d be trying in the middle of the set with Modest Mouse or the Cribs, making these very, very quick decisions.
