Clean Amps

Roland Jazz Chorus.

I find them cleaner than Fender, but that moves you from tube into solid state. Some people find them a little bland, but they have been a mainstay in many studios and albums for decades.

The amp comes with Reverb, Chorus and vibrato effects that are also unbeatable.

Look them up and have a listen.

other good cleans, but are rather expensive include Hiwatts, Milk Man, and Tone King, all three of these run up 1500+, with Hiwatt think The 1975 for cleans, Tone King is popular but i don't have a good idea about who uses them and then Milk Mans were used by John Mayer for a while. Although i don't have any experience with them, from what I've seen PRS has some pretty good amps and thats what John Mayer is using now

in tube amps? apart from big fenders...

vintage Hiwatt... post 72, they were a little dirtier in the early years... power of a marshall, tons of headroom and clarity, a little fender in the mix, but lower harmonic distortion... very fast response but with just enough tube harmonics and compression to give the sound some color and nice sustain.... the 'golden age' hiwatt DR heads are damned clean most of the way up the dial but have a wide 'sweet spot'... the finished design is a really unique design too, not like anything else

AMPEG! They made more than bass amps, guys (and even the bass amps are so well designed that they can easily be dialed in for wonderful clean guitar tones.... great preamps on these guys).... Everett Hull was a jazzer who HATED rock 'n roll and thought tube instrument amps should be distortion free up to 9 or 10! other than the jet and reverboroket (both have killer clean but are light on headroom compared to their siblings, the jet because its tiny, the rockets because some of the engineers slipped a more rock n roll design past 'ol Everett) the rest of the line has fabulous headroom.... my favorites of the Hull era are definitely the Gemini series, especially the Gemini II with the 15".... after Hull sold the company the V series is fabulous though a bit hard to service and prone to failure after 40 years of abuse, people think drive from these amps because the stones endorsed them and they are favored by Josh Homme these days, but in actuality even the VT4/V2 and B25, the smallest ones, have way more headroom than you will need for most gigs and the cleans are sweet and highly tailorable due to the most sophisticated tone shaping and well tuned preamp circuits of the era... at a time when fender was ruining their amp line Ampeg was taking their old aesthetic and applying it to the rock market and while fender's innovations were poorly implemented and fairly superfluous after leo sold, after Hull sold ampeg the engineers really ahd a field day implementing more and more useful and unique features like the active, semi parametric inductor-driven midrange on the Vs.... if they weren't such a bear to keep u with I would still have one.... the reissue V4B gets pretty close to the old V sound and reliability won't be a problem due to age

while the headroom isn't there in a loud situation, vox ac30s have a very nice, highly compressed and colored clean tone when set moderately... depending on the year the response will be slightly different and the headroom will vary, but its a great sound.... and they slide into breakup more easily from a nice clean sound more easily than any other amp

Matchless DC30, EF86 channel.... very similar to an ac30 but the firmer output section makes it punchier even when powerfully overdriven, but the hot EF86 provides some fantastic wide bandwidth clean like nothing you have ever heard... again, you need to be careful setting it up for clean because the amp WANTS TO BREAK UP, but it can be done at band levels in full power mode with the stock rectifier and its so sweet, very unique sound and feel

Sunn... apart from the model T, vintage Sunn amps have huge clean tones that sit between an old fender twin and a hiwatt... they have a very blackface preamp coupled to a hifi output section (basically a Dynaco ST70 power amp design... the early ones actually used Dynakit monoblock hifi amps as their power section, but later they started scratch building them with little circuit revision)

another unheralded knockout gem for clean is the 50s Gibson Rhythm King, it has a mellow, jazzy voice and huge headroom for the era, when its starts to breakup its subtle and you will will still sound pretty clean well up the dial.... its a great tone... the Gibson GA50T is their second cleanet 50s amp and its pretty sweet too.... also ahs a phenomenal trem circuit like the GA40 les paul... but yeah, the old gibbies are mainly low output and have less headroom than their fender counterparts, but the bigger models have a fantastic tweed voice with MORE headroom than their fender coutnerparts.... they are aren't all arounders, but what they do is like nothing else before or since

old magnatones have KILLER clean.... the big ones, the little guys have like ZERO headroom and the big ones are maybe a little more open than an ac30, but man do they sound good... the new ones sound pretty good but sound more modern to my ear... they capture some of the spirit but really crossover into other signature clean tones and have less of the vintage vibe (no pun intended, get it? magnatone invented true stereo vibrato)

in solid state amps the JC120 (asTel_Nobody mentioned) is a benchmark of the solid stte boom, but Yamaha made a bunch of amps in the alte 70s that look kinda like Fenders and share the same feature set and layout as a twin that are some fantastic clean amp that are less sterile than a Jazz Chorus with its chorus disengaged... I'm always tempted to buy one

some rarer amps that really kill for clean are the Vox ac50 and 100, listen to any beatles record between 'For Sale' and 'Help!' to hear the glorious, gooey cleanness! the preamp is like a low gain ac30 into a very obust power section that operates in a hybrid way giving it a mix of ac30 and marshall feel, clean or dirty

the rarest great clean amps are without a doubt the Vox UL series.... another beatles amp as well as being a Zep amp and being the mainstay of Bernie Sumner (joy division, new order) all through his early career, they are a hybrid amp sorta like a musicman, solid state preamp (cribbed from the US Thomas organ made solid state voxes like the super beatle) into a tube power amp, but they are glorious for clean to my ears... sadly few were made and they've become quite collectible often commanding more money than early ac30s

honorable mention to the music man HD hybrid amps I was just talking about, very clean though not my favorite clean sound.... a lot of people really like them though and they are both affordable and indestructible

a lot of these amps are things you only know to seek out and try if you are a total amp nutter like me, but in the search for my sound I tried everything when I departed from fender in the late 90s.... I left out a lot of boutique stuff that's just refined fender cleans (dumble type amps and early mesas come to mind) and another response covered 2 of the most popular modern varieties of that idealized fender sound anyway...

if it was making a loud hissing/snapping/frying-bacon noise? filter caps, normal problem, replacing them ahs NO effect on tone

if it was intermittent it was a cold solder joint or a bad tube

I could go on.... if it was outputting sound at all and powering up though you know the most expensive components, the transformers are okay

I love guys who sell malfunctioning amps because they are electronically ignorant, 9 times out of 10 its a tube or an even cheaper part and if its not? filter caps, still cheap to recap the whole power supply!

doesn't hurt to get it checked out by tech or friend if you don't know what to look for and have it repaired, like stated earlier a lot of problems tend to be an easy fix like when people say a guitar plays bad but all it needed was a good set up

if you respect the deadly power of electricity, can do some algebra and can decipher a schematic then a tech is only needed for catastrophic issues you can't diagnose... and the more you service your amp stable the less likely you will fail to diagnose and repair an unhealthy tube amp....

I would like to throw out there Dr Z MAZ 38 it has great clean and very efficient speakers which project well.

its basically an ac30 top boost, right down to the speaker efficiency, but yeah, they have a slight voice of their own, his other ac30 offerings like the stingray and z-wreck and stuff have more of their own clean sound, butwhen I say ac30 I am lumping in any top-boost style amp and you can lump most of the ef86 channel amps with the matchless DC30, they are all apples and apples

oh, hey, I forgot about the 60s/70s acoustic tuck n roll amps, great solid state clean, direct nd in your face, the sound can be a little hard but for some music its just right... always cool to have one around when recording as an option for cleans

also, my old Selmer Treble N Bass head has a pretty nice clean tone and a lot of headroom... its like a darker voiced Marshall 50 watt with more headroom, a very nice clean sound anywhere from 2 to 6 on the dial... warm, warm, warm, totally unfendery but not as hard sounding as a superlead set clean but a lot punchier in the lows than a vox

also keep in mind that speakers pay into this, celestion style speakers, even the high wattage ones, will break up earlier than the amp sometimes... switching to something firmer will give any amp a cleaner sound! any tube amp with a vintage gain structure run through EVM12Ls will clean up some... if you're playing an old marshall and want its clean sound to come out, ditch that cab full of celestions and try it with EVs or Fanes... David Gilmour is known to make his Hiwatts even cleaner by using selmer cabs loaded with Fane Crescendos, a speaker with very little breakup even when pushed and HUGE power handling, I think they are like 100 watts making his cabs able to take 400 watts, his whole rig is dialed in for clean with effects disengaged and the pairing of those amps and speaker cabs means he can really take some heads off with his clean sound before he's even mixed into the PA