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Weird Amps Nobody Remembers
- Thread starter Pablo504
- Start date
I remember some now, after giving it some thought.
-Galanti Minuteman: a little, 5 Watt guitar amp with a 12" speaker. Probably really meant to be an accordion amp. Actually sounds very nice.
-Newsom: a tiny sub-5W amp with a 6" speaker and several different types of inputs. Probably originally a powered speaker for a film projector. Sounds terrible.
-Sound Projects: another 5W wonder. A lap steel amp from the 1930s. Sounds... okay, I guess.
-Electar: a lap steel amp from 1936 made by Epiphone before they were owned by Gibson. Vastly underpowered for its size.
-Rickenbacker M8 and M11: These were almost exact copies of Fender's early Champ and 5C3 Deluxe amps. Ric never made a ton of amps so you seldom see these around.
There are others I have in various states of disrepair. I wish I had as many obscure bass amps as I have guitar amps (Bass is my principal instrument. I can play some guitar but mostly I just like repairing the amps.) but there weren't as many underground bass amps to be had as there were guitar amps. My bass gear is, for the most part, run-of-the-mill stuff.
Premier, at least the guitars and basses, is what Multivox morphed into in the 1960s.
I used half of one for a head. By the time I had graduated high school I was playing a "Bogder" -- Bogen/Fender hybrid my Dad had custom hand-wired; scratch built the thing. A cabinet maker from the church I attended at the time hand-built me what basically was a Dual Showman cabinet loaded with two 15" Misco Red Line speakers.
My first "rig" was a Macintosh hi-fi amp, part of a tandem used to power some Paul Klipsch (not Klipschorn) stereo speakers. Probably no more than twenty-five watts, but it sure seemed loud at the time.
I still have all of these. I'm keeping the Bogder and its cab, although the cab likely will never leave my house prior to my death. The Macs need a new home. @agedhorse , are you paying attention?
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I raise my hand to that 100w still have it in a closet
Plenty adequate...18w
Oh, I see. Half as loud as a 180w amp. Ought to be enough.
These amps were designed in the early 90’s for those looking for that huge Marshall crunch without the tremendous volume. Primarily for the home studio before the age of modeling and online effects. Actually quite good and when you activate the second tube these amp really break up beautifully.
Passinwind
I know nothing.
- Dec 3, 2003
- 23,077
- 46,033
- Disclosures
- Designer/Toaster Tech @ Passinwind Electronics
Yep. I had this beauty for a number of years as well, which was much more fun with guitar:
I did in fact pay $5.95 for it back in the mid-80s and it worked fine as-is, although I ended iup modding it in a few different ways over the years.
I dunno how weird it is, but I've never ever seen another one. It was an Ibanez 15" combo that would tilt back. So it was like a pentagon shape, not a rectangle. Made it hard to carry since it had that big hump for the tilt. Sounded ok, I guess. Forget where I bought it or what happened to it, but never EVER see Ibanez amps anywhere
Teisco
made
my first bass amp 1 knob 5 watts if you were lucky ( not mine but like it
my second amp 20w
found it
made
my second amp 20w
found it
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Gibson Thor: weird preamp tubes, 100 watts was optimistic with only one pair of power tubes.
My first bass head was a Road 220 Bass. I bought it for $150 off ebay and it was a beast. It had a weird setup: I believe you could switch between two EQ sections, and maybe also an effects channel? You needed a footswitch to take advantage of this feature which I never got around to before selling it. I couldn't find much information on it because the name is very hard to Google but apparently they were the first amps that KISS used.
(pic taken from Reverb, but this what mine looked like).
(pic taken from Reverb, but this what mine looked like).
I saw a Frank Zappa concert in my city, he had the entire stage set up with Road amps. This was two days or so before Bongo Fury was recorded.
I built a little Heathkit AM radio in like '68 that I kept glued to my head right up to high school.
My first decent bass amp is one I don't think I ever saw anyone else playing, a Yamaha B100 with 215 cabinet that I bought in '75, iirc, and took with me on the move to California. It took up just about all the space available in the car. But it sounded pretty good and was loud enough for anything I'd want to take on at the time. Some years ago my keyboard player was cleaning out his gear closet, and now I have another one in storage, sentimental I guess. (Not the cab, though, I'm long since through schlepping a fridge around.)
With distortion circuit!
My first decent bass amp is one I don't think I ever saw anyone else playing, a Yamaha B100 with 215 cabinet that I bought in '75, iirc, and took with me on the move to California. It took up just about all the space available in the car. But it sounded pretty good and was loud enough for anything I'd want to take on at the time. Some years ago my keyboard player was cleaning out his gear closet, and now I have another one in storage, sentimental I guess. (Not the cab, though, I'm long since through schlepping a fridge around.)
With distortion circuit!
My first amp. Early 80s. JMF Spectra 312. Apparently made by Dean Markley. Googling it all these years later, it had cool features. Semi-parametric mid, built-in compressor, master volume so you could get some distortion. 150 watts with a 15. It sounded pretty good as far as I remember, but I didn’t have much of a frame of reference.
I loved my Standell Artist 30 rig, which I got in 1969. Very rare indeed. The head was a 2 channel preamp, the cabs were 150 watt powered 2x15's that you could cascade off the preamp to your heart's desire. There was also a guitar version with reverb and I think tremolo in the preamp, and 2x12 powered cabs. This is my 3 cab rig, so 6x15's, 450 watts. I got this after a couple of weeks of shoot outs with an Acoustic 361 stack with two cabs, and I personally much preferred the direct-firing 15's to the folded 18's in the Acoustic rig.
