Fender bandmaster tube chart professional#

Clearly, Fender’s transition from tweed-covered amps with rear-mounted chassis to Tolex-covered amps with top-mounted chassis – which was also a significant transition in the history of amp design et al – didn’t take us from the former to the more commonly perceived rendition of the latter overnight, and this Bandmaster, along with several of its early Professional Series siblings, displays a fascinating Frankensteinian cobble between tweed and Tolex.įor another perspective on this model’s history, we turned to Paul Linden, an authority on early Fender Tolex amps in general and center-Volume amps, in particular. The closer you look, though, the more the quirks reveal themselves. “This amp has the unique and rare features of the very first brown Fender amps, such as the rough pink-brown Tolex, tweed-era grillecloth, light-brown faceplate with matching color in the flat logo tail, center-mounted Volume controls, RCA speaker plug, and mysterious Pulse-Adjust with a plugged hole.” The amp’s owner – musician and VG reader Tommie James, sums it up. Add to that the illusive feature set of this early example and you’ve got an amp that really sets Fender fans’ pulses racing. The tweed 5E7 Bandmaster that preceded it – the first of Fender’s quirkily appealing 3×10″ combos (profiled here in October ’16) – is a rare and exotic beast in its own right, but the short-lived 3×10″ in Tolex with newfangled front-mounted control panel is utter hen’s teeth. Such is the case with the 1960 “center-volume” Fender Bandmaster, model 5G7. The earliest renditions of our gear icons are often the most valuable, but on many occasions it’s the transition models – those that bridged one era to the next – that elicit the most excitement from real enthusiasts. Controls: Normal channel: Bass, Treble, Volume Vibrato channel: Bass, Treble, Volume, Speed, Intensity Presence.

Preamp tubes: four 7025 (a more-rugged 12AX7 equivalent), one 12AX7.

Fender bandmaster tube chart