davepepper's Amp Rig

Bought this with a view to putting better electronics in it and doing some work on the frets/fretboard etc. One of the cheap pots didn't work. Fender would have been happy to fix it but was going to replace with better ones anyway so told them not to bother. A little rubbing down of the fret edges and crowns was enough to fix the "scraping" when string bending - which would have gone away over time anyway. Set up out of the box was pretty good. Everyone seems to complain about the tuners but for the money it's a detail. And frankly, after tweaking the trem and changing the strings the standard tuners on mine stay in tune pretty well. Potential buyers should be aware (if planning to mod the guitar) that there can be compatibility issues like thinner body (requiring non-standard trem block) and the pickups not having the same pole spacing as Fenders. Neither is the tremelo cover bolt pattern the staggered Fender standard - so you can't just buy one of the Fender sets if you want to change the pickup covers, knobs and trem cover. Wiring is very basic. Selector switch is awful. Pickups sounded a lot better than I was expecting TBH and I got some good tones out of it out of the box - but of course the ones I put in afterwards (Lace Gold) were a lot better - but also cost more new than I paid for the actual guitar. Much nicer with the completely smooth neck than the stickier gloss neck on the Classic Vibes.

This is a great amp but not very practical compared to the more recent smaller versions. Mine is an original 70s model and does NOT have the stereo input options or loop inputs found on later versions. It DOES have the original spring reverb. Cross-plugging inputs isn't an option. It's big, loud and only does stereo with its own inbuilt effects. Chorus has one setting. Vibrato is adjustable. Reverb is great. Distortion is a waste of time. I pair this up with an AC30 to blend different sounds. I live in Denmark and they aren't all that in demand here, so I got it for a lot less than a JC40 would have cost new - so if you can get one cheap, great. But for full price it's too much amp for most people. Nice to have but there are better options out there for most players.