Manzanera onstage with his longtime collaborator Andy Mackay, who is also his creative partner on their new album, AM.PM.
AM.PM, the intriguing all-instrumental release from legendary guitarist/producer Phil Manzanera and equally legendary saxophonist Andy Mackay, is full of unexpected twists and turns. “Somebody said to me recently, ‘I can tell you what it’s not. But I cannot tell you what the hell it is,’” says Manzanera. “And I quite agree. I listened to it and I’ve got no idea what’s coming next. I played the backing tracks once and I could never play it again. I’ve got the chord progressions…. Where did they come from? Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift. There’s a visual aspect to it, to where you’re listening to it. It’s a wonderful, very different experience.”
Manzanera and Mackay have a telepathic working relationship, which shouldn’t be surprising, given they’ve made music together for over half a century. They first connected in 1971 as part of art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, alongside singer/songwriter Bryan Ferry, synth player Brian Eno, bassist Graham Simpson, and drummer Paul Thompson. Roxy Music went on to influence the sound of popular styles that later emerged, like new wave and glam rock. While the band members went their separate ways in 1983, Manzanera and Mackay worked together in various projects, including the Explorers, who were active in the late ’80s.
Mackay also played on Manzanera’s influential solo debut Diamondhead. And in addition to his solo career, Manzanera went on to perform with prog-rock cult heroes 801, has done session work, and, in 2006, began a collaboration with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, producing the latter’s solo album On an Island and playing onstage with Gilmour for several years, being a part of the Live in Gdańsk concert recording. Roxy Music reunited in 2001 and have toured sporadically since. On March 29, 2019, Roxy Music was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, only a few months later the Covid pandemic set in, paving the way for AM.PM.
Manzanera Mackay - "Blue Skies"
“During lockdown, everybody was sort of stuck at home, and most musicians, artists, and photographers were wondering ‘What the hell can we do?’” says Manzanera. “So I was in my garden shed thinking, ‘I need to do music to get through all this.’ I reached out to Tim Finn, the singer from Crowded House and Split Enz, and we started writing songs—loads of songs. And then halfway through, I thought, ‘You know what, I’d like to do something crazy. Nothing to do with songs and structures and stuff like that. I’ll ring up Andy, I’m sure he’s not doing anything [laughs]. I’ll tell him, ‘Get off your ass, we’re going to do some music, and it’s gonna be crazy music. I’m just going to do random stuff, send it to you, and you do random stuff, then send it back to me. We’ll just have no rules, no structure.’”
Music by Painting
With a nebulous concept guided by a “no rules” approach, AM.PM slowly developed over the course of two years. A diverse cast of musicians—Anna Phoebe on violin, Seth Scott on flute, George Goode on tuba, Paul Thompson on drums, Yazz Ahmed on flugelhorn, and Mike Boddy on bass/programming/keyboards—was recruited. They did their parts remotely, sending tracks via email. Manzanera would select and layer bits and pieces into Logic, improvise to it, and then send the updated files to Mackay for his input.
“Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift.”
“It’s like a sort of call and response, but via Zoom, email, or phone. It was a good starting point for me on some of the songs—the ones with the violin, tuba, flute, and the flugelhorn,” says Manzanera. “Those were methods of initiating a track by saying, ‘You just improvise whatever you feel comfortable and I will then make a track out of it.’ I didn’t want anything particularly complicated. What I wanted from them was the beauty of their instrument, the tone of their instrument. And then I wanted to hear that set against the beauty of Andy’s sax tone or combinations of my guitar against a bit of tuba or French horn. It was a series of experiments. I thought, ‘Well, I haven’t heard this before with me, or with me and Andy, so let’s have a go and see what happens.’”
To get what he envisioned out of the musicians, at times Manzanera had to push them far beyond their comfort zones. Classical musicians are among the most highly capable of instrumentalists, and can often read even the most ink-filled pages of music with ease. But if you ask them to improvise, that skill set is sometimes out of their wheelhouse and they’ll freeze up. “I asked the guy who played some tuba to come and play a little bit at the end of one Finn/Manzanera song, and he’d done that. But he played the part very rigidly. Not ‘rigid,’ but you know, the way it was meant to be played,” recalls Manzanera. “And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, can you now just improvise for one minute. Do whatever you like. Just play whatever you like, I will make a track out of whatever you play.’ Obviously, most classically trained musicians do not like to do that because they like to see dots.”
Phil Manzanera's Gear
Phil Manzanera plays his beloved Gibson Firebird VII onstage with Roxy Music in 2022.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Guitars
- 1964 Gibson Firebird VII
- 2001 Gibson Black Les Paul Custom
- 2001 Gibson Les Paul Custom Gecko
- 1983 Fernandes Strat
- 1951 Fender Telecaster
- Gibson Les Paul Studio
- Fender Strat
Amps
- Two Cornell Voyager 20 heads (main and spare)
- Fender Blues Junior (for solos, with an SM57)
- Universal Audio OX Top Box (stereo return configuration, adding room and ribbon mic modeling on a Fender Bassman)
- Grossman FATBOX isolation cabinet (with a Celestion G12M, with an SM57)
Effects
- Two GigRig G3 controllers
- Two TX RX boxes
- JAM Pedals RetroVibe
- JAM Pedals Harmonious Monk
- JAM Pedals Wahcko
- JAM Pedals Fuzz Phrase
- Fulltone OCD
- TC Electronic Polytune
- Eventide H9
- Strymon TimeLine
- Catalinbread Topanga
- DigiTech Whammy
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Super Slinky (.009–.042)
- Dunlop Custom Roxy Music Tortex Standard
- Vovox Sonorus Cable
The tracks on AM.PM aren’t beholden to traditional concepts of form, like intro, verse, and chorus. Rather, everything just evolved organically. “You give into the structure that exists there,” explains Manzanera. “You look at it—and you can, because if you work on Logic on a computer, quite frankly, you can have a visual view of the thing. You can color up certain sections. You can say, ‘When it goes into the purple, I’m going to play whatever, and when it goes into blue, I’m gonna just go like this.’ So it’s not painting by numbers. It’s music by painting.”
“I tried to send my Firebird to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license.”
Manzanera’s primary brush was the trusty red Firebird VII that’s been his main guitar for decades. “It’s been my signature guitar, if you like, since I bought it secondhand from an American guy in London in 1973,” he says. “His parents had bought it for him from the factory in Kalamazoo, in cardinal red, which was a custom color. It was the color of a Ford Galaxie ’60s car, because Ray Dietrich, the guy who designed the Firebird, used to design cars. Gibson hired him because he was a car designer and they wanted to compete with Fender. He came up with the Firebird, but obviously it wasn’t as successful. But I loved it because it was red. The pickups are pretty unique because you’re not allowed to use that kind of metal—god knows what’s in it, it’s probably killing me or something. The wood you’re probably not allowed to use. In fact, I tried to send it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license [laughs]. It’s banned! I don’t know what kind of wood it is because it’s been painted red on top. I said, ‘It was made in America. What do you mean I can’t send it back to America?’”
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game.
Partners in Crime
The back-and-forth between Manzanera and Mackay was relatively frictionless— without many, if any, disagreements. “We’re like mindless people,” jokes Manzanera. “The thing is that we have played together on and off for 50 years. I like what he does. He likes what I do. I find the spaces around him, he finds the spaces around me. It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here. We’ve made lots of music, we’re just trying to do something beautiful that satisfies us. We’re simple players. We’re not jazzers; it’s not about technique.”
AM.PM was still a work in progress when the Roxy Music 50th Year Celebration tour suddenly popped up in 2022. Manzanera and Mackay got detoured from AM.PM and had to divert their attention to bringing their chops back up to speed for the shows. Manzanera says, “Me and Andy spent ages practicing. So at the end of the tour, I thought, ‘Why don’t we just go into the studio straightaway and finish off that instrumental album now that our chops are really sort of up to speed.’ So me, Andy, and Paul went in for just three or four days and finished the album off, capturing that moment in time. It was trying to incorporate stuff that maybe had been played by humans and by machines, but then coming back and putting humans on top of it again. Of course, now I haven’t played since we finished it, and I’m rubbish again [laughs].”
“It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here.”
Beauty in Simplicity
Most instrumental albums released by guitarists will bludgeon you over the head with nonstop 6-string in every nook and cranny. But Manzanera’s never been about guitar pyrotechnics. And his “technical limitations” turned out to be a blessing, in a way, because it led him to explore a more probing and introspective guitar style. “The great thing is that I wouldn’t have played anything more [on AM.PM], because my technique is limited. And I wanted it to be limited because I wanted to enjoy playing music for the whole of my life. I didn’t want to learn everything. And quite frankly, I haven’t learned a lot,” says Manzanera, laughing. “I tell my younger self to ‘Put your batteries in, mate,’ because you should have actually learned a bit more technique.”
While Manzanera loves hearing other people play virtuosic guitar, that’s not the path he chose. “I just want to place notes and hear musical sounds,” he says. “This might be sacrilege to a lot of people, but scales are sort of a dangerous road to go down. I know you’re meant to do it. But I don’t do it. And you know, Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave because he is incredibly good technically, and when I hear him play, I think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
In the early days of Roxy Music, Manzanera mixes it up with Bryan Ferry—and a goldtop Gibson Les Paul.Photo by Ebet Roberts
Expect the Unexpected
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game. “When Boddy was mixing it, there was this really annoying sound from the drain pipe outside so he recorded it and added it into the track,” says Manzanera. “So I said, ‘Let’s call it ‘Music for French Horn and Drain Pipe.’” That track was later released as an additional album track along with “Lady of the Lake,” an adaptation of a Schubert classical piece.
During the late ’60s, prior to Roxy Music, Manzanera had dipped his toes heavily into improvised music, and that forward-thinking approach permeates AM.PM. “What’s sort of interesting is if you’re working individually like this and you’re not all in the room playing, you haven’t got that possibility like, say, the great Miles Davis with his fantastic quintet. Where you’ve got five incredible musicians and they are sort of improvising, and calling and responding to each other,” says Manzanera. “But because I loved all that kind of music and the whole influence of improvisational stuff in the ’60s, I’m comfortable with that. I embrace that kind of thing. So, when I’m not having to work within song structures, this is the nearest I get to being in that kind of Miles Davis free world.”
“Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave…. But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
“Blue Skies,” the album opener, and tracks like “Ambiente,” immediately strike a nerve with some jazzy, jagged dissonances not dissimilar to what you’d hear in Davis’ music. But Manzanera hears things differently. “You know, dissonance is not necessarily dissonance to me,” he explains. “After all a lot of the music making is a series of choices. ‘Do I do this? Or do I do that? Okay, if I do that, what do I do next? And then, is that it? Do I stop there?’ And all those choices come from your musical DNA—all this music that you’ve listened to. In my musical DNA, I’ve got Captain Beefheart, I’ve got avant-garde jazz. And obviously, mine is different to Andy’s and it’s different to Paul’s. So it’s the way people interact together sometimes. Even though they might play simple things, it adds up to something more than just one person’s idea.”
Full Circle
Having achieved legendary status, at this point, Manzanera can make music without worrying about having to cater to corporate overlords. “It means, I’m able to put out albums like AM.PM,” he says. “It’s all cottage industry, we don’t have multi-nationals with us. We’re free and that makes me happy. The whole point of being a musician was to be free, not to be told what to do by some global company. It’s the hippie thing, I guess from way back in the ’60s. We got brainwashed by that [laughs]. ‘Hey man, I just want to be free.’”
Manzanera’s Failed Audition … for Roxy Music!
Brian Eno was already an established figure in Britain’s avant-garde music scene when he decided to begin writing pop music and form a rock band. He had already found singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry and saxophonist Andy Mackay, and they had been working on demos for about nine months when they put an ad in Melody Maker, a now-defunct music magazine, looking for a guitar player and a drummer. Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson, answered the ad. However, Manzanera failed the audition.
“I had a terrible cold that day, but actually, we got on really well, and I thought these guys are really special and different,” recalls Manzanera. “But they were kind of looking for someone with a famous name to help launch the band. They got a guy called David O’List, who had been in a band called the Nice—who toured in America already. They were on the famous tour with Jimi Hendrix and stuff, and early Pink Floyd—and they thought, ‘Right, actually we need to go with the name.’”
While disappointed, Manzanera didn’t really argue with that decision. “When I heard he got the gig, I thought, ‘Well, fair play, because he’s great.’ I saw him play at the Albert Hall with the Nice. This guy’s really good,” reflects Manzanera. As time went on, fate slowly intervened. “Things [with O’List] didn’t work out because, I think, on the first tour that he did in the States, he’d been spiked with some acid so he was just like ‘away with the fairies.’ And they couldn’t cope with his not turning up on time and things like that.”
When Roxy Music brought Manzanera back into their world, it was somewhat on the sly. “They said, ‘Oh, do you want to come and mix the sound?’ And I said, ‘I’ve got no idea how to mix the sound.’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, Eno will teach you.’” And when Manzanera turned up to the rehearsal room, mysteriously, there was a guitar lying around, and they asked him to play. It was, in effect, a secret audition.
“That was a good idea,” says Manzanera. “I probably would have been nervous. But then, you know, I joined, and then a week later, we signed the first contract. And a month later, we were recording the first album, six months later it was number four in the charts. So I was just in the right place at the right time. You know, lucky them because they could have not had me [laughs]. You gotta laugh really. It’s fate.”YouTube It
Phil Manzanera is a proponent of the “less is more” approach. Throughout AM.PM, the guitar is used as only one piece of a bigger compositional puzzle. In the haunting “Newanna”—written around violinist Anne Phoebe—the guitar is used very sparingly in the opening section, mostly to add to the mysterious vibe. After a long and simmering buildup, 6-string finally features more prominently, with Manzanera’s bending phrases starting around 3:42—more than halfway through the track. Yet here he still plays minimally and tastefully, displaying great maturity and patience.
Follow some super-hip players and studios on the cutting edge and you’ll find a host of meticulously crafted boutique amps. And for the various flavors of road-dogs, there’s also the emerging force of modeling units that emulate everything under the sun.
Then there are the players who have to go to the source and are doing the tone-gods’ work by keeping vintage amps in the game. (There are a lot of us, and we take our work seriously.) At the highest level of stage and studio, you’ll find the elite vintage models—the tweeds, black-panels, plexis, and all their pals. Those amps command their fair share of literal and digital ink. Then there are the oddball selections that some new player will bring to everyone’s attention.
But there’s a less-hyped flavor of vintage amp that actually shows up much more often than those rare gems. These are the everlasting classics you’ve seen about a million or so times played by bands in every size of stage and lining the walls of your favorite studio. They’re the perennial workhorses whose reputations thrive because of some formula of tone, consistency, reliability, and—maybe the most important variable—price.
Brooklyn-based amp-repair guru Pat Kauffman operates Patrick Kauffman Electronics out of Main Drag Music, where he also teaches amp-building workshops.
Here are six of these vintage models, all priced to fit in a gigging budget, coming in right around $1,000 or less as of this writing. With a trio of experts on hand, here’s an idea of what makes each of these amps tick all these years after they were first introduced.
Silver-Panel Fender Bassman
A drip-edge era Fender Bassman head.
Photo by Pat Kauffman
The Fender Bassman is, of course, one of the most classic amplifiers. The tweed Bassman circuit is one of the most copied and modified circuits of all, serving as a platform for so many designs to follow, most notably Marshalls, as well as a couple more on this list. By the time the silver-panel era began, first with the drip-edge years starting in 1967, the Bassman circuit had evolved from those early days through the also highly coveted black-panel era.
“The silver-panel is not that different from the black-panel,” notes Brooklyn amp-repair guru Pat Kauffman, “and you can easily modify them to black-panel specs—they’re the same transformers.” Both eras kick out 50 watts—though there are quite a few variations, such as Bassman 100, 135, and more than a few others, we’re simply talking about the “Bassman”—and host a tube set that includes a pair of 6L6 power tubes, a trio of 12AX7s, and an ECC81.
“I think the right person can get their own signature tone from these, and it’s not gonna be one that will come from a Fender, it’s not gonna come from a Marshall.” —Jeff Bober on the Ampeg Gemini
This era of Fender Bassmans deliver plenty of headroom, but unlike the Fender “reverb” amps, Kauffman points out there’s an extra gain stage, which he says “gives it a little more grit that makes them kind of unique.”
Jeff Bober, former PGamp columnist and cofounder of Budda Amplification, adds that the silver-panel Bassmans “compress earlier, which might be a little opposite of what they were going for, so you can push the front end a little easier.”
Even better, Kauffman points out that they’re “easily serviceable. That’s key number one—all the parts are available.”
Ampeg Gemini
This Ampeg Gemini II combo includes a 15" speaker.
Photo by Pat Kauffman
If you feel like you’ve seen an Ampeg combo in most studios you’ve ever entered, you probably wouldn’t be exaggerating. And there’s a good chance that a lot of those were an Ampeg Gemini or Gemini II, offered starting in the mid ’60s, with a few variations over its life, from 22 to 30 watts, with speaker offerings ranging from a single 12" to a 15", and in later eras with more watts and more speaker configurations.
Because of their size, these are less common on stage than they are in studio, but Bober—who is a proud native of Ampeg’s hometown of Linden, New Jersey—says of the Geminis as well as the smaller, and also very cool, 12-watt Ampeg Jet, “They have their own unique sound, they’re not all that loud to start with so if you’re in a situation where you can crank an amp a little bit, these are really good to do it.”
Jeff Bober founded Budda and EAST Amplification and was the author of PG’s Ask Amp Man column.
These full-featured combos have onboard reverb and tremolo, and they use a set of 7591 power tubes. Bober points out these are “more of a hi-fi-sounding, very full-bodied tube” that he describes as “somewhere between a 6V6 and a 6L6 power-wise, but with a different tonality.” He adds, “I think the right person can get their own signature tone from these, and it’s not gonna be one that will come from a Fender, it’s not gonna come from a Marshall.”
While these amps are known for their reliability as well as well as their unique sound, Kauffman points out that the phase-inverter tube, a 7199, has gotten expensive in the modern market: “A lot of times, they’ve been changed out to different tubes, or they have a little converter adapter in, so that’s something to look out for.”
Traynor YBA-1 Bass Master
With two inputs per channel, it’s easy to “jump” channels with a patch cable to extend the voice of the Traynor YBA-1.
Photo by Thunder Road on Reverb
Beloved by both guitarists and bassists, the 45-watt Traynor YBA-1 circuit was the company’s first offering in 1963, when it was called the Dyna-Bass. By the next year, it was retitled the Bass-Master and the title stuck. While the company didn’t have the name recognition of a Fender or Ampeg, they developed an underground reputation that is still going strong. In 1969, Traynor provided the backline to 1969’s Toronto Rock ’N’ Roll Revival concert, where the Plastic Ono Band recorded their Live Peace in Toronto 1969 live album, and which was later celebrated in the 2022 documentary REVIVAL69: The Concert That Rocked the World.
The YBA-1’s simple 3-band EQ control set and 2-knob “range expander” make for easy tone-sculpting, and jumping the channels with a small patch cable opens its voice even wider. Kauffman calls the amp a “Bassman on steroids.” He points out that some models use 7027 power tubes—“basically a beefier 6L6”—and others use 6CA7s, plus a pair of 12AX7s and an ECC83. These amps are easily modified to replicate a JTM45 circuit, which is a popular change for some, but many players prefer to keep them unchanged.
“People who are Traynor fans are Traynor fans. They’ve either owned one and sold it and regret it, or they own three of them.” —Blair White on the Traynor YBA-1
Bober says that the YBA-1 is “built as good as any Fender or eyelet-board kind of design. They have probably the biggest transformers for their power rating of amps being built at that time. They’re very clean circuits, great pedal platforms, and they sound great.”
Blair White, owner of Nashville’s Eastside Music Supply, has witnessed the cult of Traynor firsthand and says, “People who are Traynor fans are Traynor fans. They’ve either owned one and sold it and regret it, or they own three of them.” Despite their reputation as well-made, reliable amps with a great tone, White notes that they’re still easy to get a hold of: “I don’t know if it’s just because it was not Fender or Marshall, but for whatever reason, you can still find those for $600 or $700.”
Sovtek MIG
This Sovtek Mig 100h is the high-gain member of the Mig family.
Photo by Brent’s Gear Depot on Reverb
Built in Russia by New Sensor starting in 1991, this head, which came in 50-, 60-, and 100-watt models, is another spin on the same tweed Bassman formula that begat the JTM45 and the Traynor YBA-1. Running a pair of 5881 power tubes and a pair of 12AX7s, the MIGs featured a solid-state rectifier and a slightly slimmed-down control set from the Bass-Master, with two independent volume controls (non-jumper-able), a 3-band EQ, and a presence knob.
In an A/B comparison with the modern EHX MIG 50, where both sound identical (or close to it), JHS Pedals’ head honcho Josh Scott has gone on the record and called the MIG 50 his “favorite amp in the history of the world.” The modern ones tend to come in a little less expensive than the vintage models, which Bober points out have an “iffy” build quality thanks to their Eastern Block components.
“They have a cascading input, so there is an extra gain stage like the JCM800s.” —Pat Kauffman on the Sovtek MIG
Kauffman agrees, “They’re a little awkward to service. A lot of the hardware is kind of cheap, so you’ll often find the jacks busting and the pots busting.” You might want to look out for a deal if you’re considering a vintage model, which could be well worth your time. Kauffman adds that the MIGs have their own cult and calls them “fantastic-sounding amps. They have a cascading input, so there is an extra gain stage like the JCM800s, so they kind of have this Marshall sound but a little more rounded.” If Scott’s comparison tells us anything, the modern version is also worth checking out.
Music Man HD-130
The powerful Music Man HD-130 in its oddball 2x10 form—that’s a lot of power to push through two little speakers!
Photo by Main Drag on Reverb
When Music Man amps hit the scene in the mid ’70s, they were unlike anything Leo Fender had set out to do with his previous designs. Gone was the simple, efficient circuitry of his earlier work. Instead, Music Man amps featured a hybrid solid-state preamp and tube power amp, with the clear target of maximum headroom.
The HD-130 was the most extreme of Music Man’s offerings, delivering a sizzling 130 watts via four 6CA7 power tubes and available in both head and combo form. (If that sounds too extreme, you could get it shrunk down to a small 2x10 combo… but with no less wattage!) The master-volume control set features two channels each with a 3-band EQ and a bright switch, plus combo models and some heads included reverb and tremolo.
Blair White, co-owner of Nashville’s Eastside Music Supply, is so passionate that he spoke to PGwhile movers were loading the store’s gear into their new location!
“Those amps are punishing!” says White. “They’re probably the most bang for your buck that you’ll get as far as power and wattage. Their unique formula certainly got the attention of some major players, and Mark Knopfler, Robbie Robertson, and Johnny Winter all counted on them at some point.”
These days, Kauffman says they remain quite reliable, but issues can arise with modern tubes. “They use high plate voltages, which tends to eat new tubes,” he explains. “If you get the electrolytic caps replaced and have the tubes biased correctly, they really should be reliable. But if you’re having a problem, it’s usually cooking power tubes because they’re a new set.” He adds that, while tube supply changes, he currently finds JJ EL34s to hold up well against the HD-130’s high voltage.
Peavey Mace
The 160-watt Peavey Mace promises extreme volume with high clean headroom plus onboard distortion and phaser.
Photo by Free Lunch on Reverb
No list of great-value amps is complete without a Peavey. Of course, their broad range of models over the years made it hard to decide which to include. At a whopping 160 watts, the Peavey Mace made the cut, if only for sheer power. It’s another hybrid amp, combining a whopping sextet of 6L6s in the power section with a solid-state preamp in both head and 2x12 combo form. Their clean headroom puts them in a class with the HD-130 and also put them onstage with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington.
The Mace is less common than most of the others on this list, but late-’70s models are fairly easy to track down. Bober says, “If you want loud and clean, those are great amps.” But he notes that the Mace is “not the most accurate pedal platform. Drive or overdrive pedals tend to try and push the front end to get more juice, but things that have IC chips in the front end don’t respond the same way, they don’t agree to being pushed to their limits, and they don’t generate the same harmonics as a tube does.” The Mace has both a normal and effects channel, which includes distortion and reverb, as well as an onboard phaser.
Kauffman reports from his work bench that the Mace is “great and reliable.” He explains that these amps were built on a printed circuit board, and he tends to see bad solder joints when they come in for service. That’s nothing to be afraid of though. “If you have one,” he says, “you could get it cleaned up, change the electrolytic caps, and have it resoldered, and you should be fine.”
At 160 watts, you’ll want to make sure you have your earplugs handy.
