bluejimbo's Reviews

A Beast Of An Amp!

This was my main amp for close to 15 years, it was reliable and sounded absolutely killer when cranked up. For my blues/rock/country type set up I’d mostly run it clean with the master volume on full, running both channels and drive it with some sort Klone type OD, some compression and a bit of slap back delay. Plug a telecaster into that and it sounds glorious!

This amp did several gigs a week for well over a decade and apart from the odd blown rectifier valve (3 in 15 years), this amp powered up and rocked the gig without issue just about every time.

I finally had to retire this fantastic amp 2 years ago due to a tragically stupid injury. I had just finished packing up after a rowdy gig. My amp was sitting on a trolley at the front of the stage, when some drunken guy came up to me to say what a great show we’d just done. This bloody idiot tripped over and knocked my amp and trolley off the stage!

The amp still works but there is a distracting rattle sound that several amp techs have not been able to properly fix. You don’t notice it at loud volumes but at quieter volumes it’s too much rattle to play enjoyably.

Possibly the best and cheapest guitar I’ve ever owned.

I bought this guitar about 10 years ago for $400 (AUD) because I needed a Telecaster for a project I was working on. After getting my tech to set it up properly, I was amazed at how good it felt in my hands for such a cheap guitar, (I had always been very dubious about Squier guitars). Most of the hardware on these guitars are fairly cheap and crappy but you take all of that off and you’ve got the bones of a seriously good guitar. I swapped out the pickups (Seymour Duncan Antiquities - 60s Soul), changed the cheap nickel saddles for brass barrels and chrome ashtray, replaced the wiring and pots and added a treble bleed circuit and now this guitar is a twang monster on the bridge pickup and smooth woody jazz on the neck pickup plus everything in between.

Somehow this became my go to guitar for most gigs over the past decade.

A shockingly good guitar for the price.