Fender amplifier

The early K&F and Fender amplifiers relied upon vacuum tube circuitry, with solid-state models appearing in the late 1960s.

The first amplifiers made in-house by the Fender Electric Instrument Company were a significant step up in size and function to the small, nameless amps that preceded them, however, they didn't have technological advancements such as circuit boards in their designs.

This phase saw the company drape their amplifiers in a cloth covering, which consists of varnished cotton twill.

The amps made during this period were a considerable leap forward for Fender, and they are often praised for their sound and their circuitry.

At the beginning of the "tweed" era, Fender constructed many of its cabinets in "TV front" style, amps which bore a strong resemblance to TVs of the time.

An even rarer feature were the vertical, narrow black lines, which separated knob groups in the control panel.

All of the Silverface amps generally had blue labels on the face plate, but in some rare exceptions (such as the Bronco) the colour was red instead.

It was initially priced to compete with buyers in the so-called boutique amplifier market who were seeking more distortion than any previous Fender had ever offered.

It is believed that high list prices, and deviations from established Fender amplifier designs, swayed many buyers away from the Prosonic.

The amplifiers were naturally given traditional Fender model names, the earliest including 'Dual Showman', 'Twin Reverb', and 'Bassman'.

The amplifiers were mainly designed by Robert "Bob" Rissi, Sawa Jacobson and Paul Spranger, who came up with the novel idea of making a heatsink to operate like a chimney to achieve increased and non-restricted airflow.

pickup, and another former Gibson employee, Richard Chauncey Evans, were hired to help in designing the latter series, which consisted of an 'SS-1000' preamplifier head and 'XFL-1000' and 'XFL-2000' self-powered speaker cabinets.

The head featured three cascadable channels, a "Dimension V" oil can delay effect, reverb, vibrato, and a fuzz.

Fender's early transistor amplifiers had an extensive marketing campaign but in the end they proved to be a major disaster.

Many key executives of Fender had resigned after the CBS purchase and quality control of the PCB-constructed amps was rather sloppy during this time period.

[citation needed] Reputedly many of the early solid-state amplifiers failed simply because employees didn't bother to clean up the soldering machines or attach the semiconductors properly to their heat sinks.

The infancy of semiconductor technology also meant that many designs failed due to thermal runaway caused by insufficient cooling or lack of knowledge concerning "safe" power ratings of transistors.

The cascaded effects from all this created a very poor reputation for the transistor products and the entire solid-state line was already discontinued by 1971.

[citation needed] One well known player who took to the Fender Solid State amps was Jan Akkerman who used Super Showman full stacks during the early years of his band Focus, favouring their clear sound.

Fender was now competing with manufacturers who were more in tune with the market; specifically, many guitar players were interested less in "cleanish" country amp and instead wanted more versatile tone controls and, perhaps more importantly, greater amounts of distortion.

This market was dominated by companies such as Marshall and later Mesa Boogie—both of which had gotten started modifying Fender amps (the Bassman and the Princeton, respectively).

[citation needed] These amplifiers didn't yet render obsolete the Silverface series and manufacturing of both co-existed for years.

Also, existing Silverface Princeton Reverb and Deluxe Reverb circuits were offered in a slightly modified Blackface cosmetic package from roughly 1978 to 1982, the difference from the 1960s versions being that the model designation on the faceplate did not include the word "Amp" after the script typeface model name, as the earlier versions had.

The styling didn't become consistent until the early 1980s, at which point all these designs were already discontinued to make way for the very similar looking "II Series".

Design-wise the tube amplifiers were quite different from their predecessors, as the active tone controls and blending distortion circuit had been removed and the latter feature replaced by a crude version of the channel switching concept.

The tube amps in the series feature hand-wired eyelet board construction and are also becoming sought-after collectors items, due to the design and build quality.

It was released in 2007 along with a PC software package to allow it to emulate a wide array of pedals, stompboxes, and amplifiers.

The G-Dec won high praise at the time but its effects, based on three-decade-old MIDI technology, were rapidly outdated.

In 2017, the Mustang GT series was launched, with Bluetooth capability and wi-fi for over-the-air software updates, with a modernized look and smartphone-enabled functionality through the new Fender Tone app.

At the same time, Fender re-released a number of classic amplifiers such as the Bassman and Bandmaster, to high praise both from the music press and the public.