Fender: The Tweed Legacy
| Posted in Guitar
At last, in line with ‘reliced’ guitars, Fender have brought out some artificially ‘reliced’ amps. Actually, that’s not true, this is a real 50′s Fender Tweed Deluxe which has obviously seen some good days on the road over the best part of its 50 plus year lifetime.
Leo Fender started using the yellowy tweed covering on the amps made in his radio shop in the late forties, and it was used all the way through the following decade. The best sounding amps form this period are the ‘narrow panel’ design (like the one pictured) made from 1955-60. They have more powerful circuits and are the ones desired by collectors today.
The most popular model was undoubtedly the Deluxe, a 1 x 12, 12W beauty that is one of the best sounding guitar amps ever made, although more famous is the 4 x 10 Bassman, originally a companion to the Precision Bass but discovered to be a classic guitar rig, used by players like Keith Richards and Bonnie Raitt and widely considered to be the amp that Jim Marshall based his first designs on.
To buy an original tweed amp now would be a risky and expensive business; it’s would be nearly sixty years old, the capacitors and the transformers may have been replaced at some point and probably the speaker as well. You’ll also need a step-down transformer, there were no export models in those days.
However, Fender have re-introduced the tweed covered amps and there’s plenty of choice; the ’57 Champ, ’57 Deluxe and ’57 Twin, the Blues Deluxe and of course the ’59 Bassman. The circuits may have been updated and some may have modern features but at least they’re safe to plug in!
If you bought a Fender Tweed amp today, it would take some years and some serious usage before it looked like the one above but you might just want to put the time in.
Tags: Amplifiers, fender