New (old) amp
Monday December 11, 2006 – 12:44 pm
Herschel got me the nicest early Christmas present! A new (old) amp. I love it. It’s a ~1975 silverface Princeton Reverb, modded up somewhat… it’s got a 12" speaker instead of 10", and they got rid of the vibrato tube, so the speed and intensity knobs now control presence and master volume instead. It sounds sooo tasty with my 335… all I have to do is turn every single knob up to 10 except the last one, master volume. I plug in and start to play and the thing just jams, like it wants to jump up and hug me! I think it makes you play a lot better when the amp isn’t just sitting there staring at you, looking bored. My old amp (which I still have) is like that, just too much amp for me I guess. Too loud and too many knobs, I can never get the same sound twice. The Princeton gives me just 2 or 3 great sounds that are super easy for me to find… you got the clean sound, the reverbed one, the chimey one with presence turned up, the slightly dirty overdriven one. Also it’s about 3/4 or 4/5 the size of the Hotrod, so it’s a whole lot lighter and easier for me to carry.
I don’t think this is a particularly collectible amp or anything, compared to a pre-CBS one… but I’m not a collector, I have no idea about that crap, I just want to play with it. Do not care whether the Fender logo has a tail or not. Do not care if silverface Princetons are intrinsically gay. I think it’s pretty, it matches my blue guitar! Plus, I like how it’s all point-to-point wiring, no fuckin’ around with circuit boards. I’ve had more problems with that on the Hotrod… it was making really awful random noises, sharp bursts of static, like "KKKKKK!!!" I couldn’t use it for shows until I got it fixed just before I left Chicago… had to get it re-soldered in 3 places. Those things are such a pain in the ass to fix, you have to tear the whole thing apart just to get the stupid faceplate off. Ugh. And that awful noise traumatized me for life on that amp; I do not trust it for shows, much less touring. I did use it at the Bert Jansch show and didn’t get any weird godawful sounds, so I guess it’s fixed for now… I’ll hang on to it in case I need a higher-powered amp for some reason, then maybe sell it eventually.
December 11th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
you’re right — this amp is almost certainly NOT collectible; it’s kind of a one-of-a-kind mongrel amp, which is kinda what makes it so cool! (and so affordable, too! a nice li’l trade — g’bye fender twin II, hello princeton! yay!)
for those out there who are even more gear-geekified than me, you might be interested in this li’l guy’s very strange pedigree:
indeed, the blue sparkle cloth puts this particular princeton as between 70-75 — they discontinued the blue tolex in 1975. (and as edith pointed out, it doesn’t have the fender "tail" logo, which rules out anything 1973 or before.) but the chassis code on this amp places it around 1978, as does the fact that it’s got the pull-boost volume pot. kinda weird, but given the fact that this amp has been HEAVILY modified (replacing the 10" speaker with a 12", pulling the vibrato tube and re-soldering to add a master volume control) makes it more believable that someone actually dropped a 1978 chassis into an old 1974/75 cabinet (maybe because they were less concerned about cutting a bigger hole in it?)…
ah, well. it all adds up to an amp that ain’t worth too much dollar-wise, but is absolutely PERFECT for ms frost. and hell, that’s what counts…
so the big question is: what’s his name? Prince? li’l Bluey?
December 13th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
The intricacies of naming an amp are as complex as fixing one I would gather.