Ted’s twin, nestled in the bed of its heavy-duty flight case.
I’ve been wanting to tell you about the beautiful 1966 Twin Reverb I owned for 30 years. It was a find. I bought it for about $400, including a flight case, in the late ’80s, when I started to play in clubs and felt the need for more volume and headroom. I knew it was old, but had no idea that it was a ’66 until I brought it to the shop to have the pots replaced, caps tested, and a general check-up.
Until then, I had never heard of Fender’s “transitional era,” the time from roughly late 1964 to early 1966 when Fender Musical Instruments’ ownership passed from Leo Fender to CBS. “Too bad it’s not a ’65,” several other players told me when I shared the story of my acquisition. “In ’65, Fender made really great Twins. The CBS stuff is hit-or-miss.” As far as I was concerned, my Twin was a hit. It could punch through my band’s wall of sound and took to pedals wonderfully, yielding all kinds of gnarly noises with a Tube Screamer and a RAT, and creating open, spectral spaces with a DigiTech PDS 1000 delay and Boss CE-2 Chorus. Eventually I paired it with a 50-watt Marshall Super Lead and a channel switcher, so I could have the best of both classic-tone worlds. (Yes, I threw my back out a lot in the ’90s.)
I’m good at ignoring gear snobs, but given how great this Twin was for recording and gigs, I was puzzled by its second-class status. It was only after an onstage mishap that I learned there was more to this amp than my cork-sniffing friends knew. One night, mid-gig, my Twin simply went silent. I learned that the output transformer had blown. Bad caps? An overload? I dunno. But when I took it to my local amp resurrectionist, he started probing around inside and informed me that my Twin was essentially a ’65 in ’66 clothing—right down to the Fender Musical Instruments lettering on its black panel. All the components—including the factory-installed JBL D120F speakers—were the same as he’d seen in most ’65s he’d worked on, and he told me that during the transitional era, many of Fender’s products were made exactly as they’d always been. It was only after the CBS ownership was firmly established that the company shifted to a more cost-conscious style of mass production, with resulting compromises in quality. (In 1985, Fender employees bought the company and restored its reputation.) I felt like I’d lucked out a second time.
At 85 watts and two channels, any Twin is a monster tube amp, and it’s hard to imagine just how loud and clean one can get unless you’ve opened a Twin up all the way. (I only did that once, just to see what it could do, and regretted the ringing it left in my ears for days.) With tremolo and the reverb that defined what the word means in a Fender, the Twin is the sound you’ve heard and loved on myriad classic rock, jazz, blues, and R&B records. I confess that I’m no longer sure what replacement transformer my amp tech installed, but the sound remained the same.
Like it says, “Fender Musical Instruments.”
Since I’ve always had a player’s, rather than a collector’s, mentality, eventually I did alter the amp to fit my shifting tastes. I needed to replace the caps at some point, and when a speaker burned out, I put Celestions in both slots—a 30- and a 35-watt, because mixed-wattage speakers were kind of a trend at the time, so I figured I’d try it. The amp still had an absurd amount of headroom, but just a little grit, which is what I was looking for. I last used it for recording an early ’70s psychedelic-rock tone for an album I was working on in 2017, and just before the pandemic I sold it for $1,500. In the case, it came close to 90 pounds, and I just didn’t want to cart it around anymore. If it was a mint ’65, the asking price would have been around $5,000, but I felt I'd gotten more than my money’s worth.
“I’m good at ignoring gear snobs, but given how great this Twin was for recording and gigs, I was puzzled by its second-class status.”
The moral to this yarn is simple: Don’t turn your nose up at gear that doesn’t fit a trope, because you might be pleasantly surprised. Also, if it sounds great and does the job for you, what else really matters? It’s good stuff! Now, are you ready for the story of the ’68 factory-painted cherry sunburst Les Paul Standard I picked up for $650?
- More Twin-Taming Techniques ›
- Ask Amp Man: Taming a Twin Reverb ›
- Ask Amp Man: The Early-’70s Silverface Fender Twin Reverb: Dud or Dynamo? ›
John Bohlinger, Andrés Segovia would like to have a word with you.
Back in their day, recordings of music were a way to promote sheet music. Labels released recordings only after sheet-music sales slowed down on a particular song. That means that until recently, a large section of society not only knew how to read music well, but they did it often—not as often as we stare at our phones, but it was a primary part of home entertainment. By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language. Music is probably the most common language on Earth, yet I bet it has the highest illiteracy rate.
As a lifelong professional musician, it’s surprising—and, frankly, a relief—how infrequently I read staff music. Though I read chord or Nashville number charts often, staff rarely comes up, usually only in sessions where a producer/writer/artist has a particular melody or gang riff. I feel a deep shame when I have to read music; I do it about as well as an out-of-shape guy with no training runs a marathon: slowly, painfully, maybe not making it to the finish line.
I learned everything I know about reading through junior high school orchestra, where I was a crappy violinist. So, you can chalk one up to the Montana public school system. Although at times I’m ashamed of my poor music-reading skills, it’s not that big of a deal. When I’m faced with a written staff full of sharps and flats and weird time, I just ask the keyboard player to play the tricky parts slowly. If there’s one player in the band that can read well, it’s usually keys; they mostly grew up with formal lessons. If I hear piano play the part while I read along, the dots and squiggles on the staff start to make sense.
“By today’s standards, written music feels like a dead language.”
I bet most guitar players feel conflicted about reading music. We all want to learn as much as we can about guitar, and obviously some of that information is going to escape us if we can’t read it, even with tabs and guitar-nerd videos just a few clicks away. But maybe our lack of formal training is the source of our superpower. I suspect that the reason guitar has been the driving force behind most popular music for the past 65 years is because the instrument invites exploration. The more you mess with it, the more you discover. That’s the addictive quality of guitar. That’s probably why most guitar players would rather make stuff up than read what somebody else wants them to play. When you have that many people experimenting and creating, art takes a big step forward.
By contrast, classical musicians are not about innovation or taking chances. They are more about interpretation, virtuosity, and a reverence for tradition. The majority of classical music played today was composed in 1600 to 1875. New, experimental classical music is a hard sell. People want to hear the classics, like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.
It’s a strange dichotomy: classical players tune by ear but almost never play by ear. Ask a seasoned orchestra player to improvise and most of them will get a little panicky.
Guitarist: Let’s jam in E.
Orchestra Nerd: What do you mean?
Guitarist: I’ll play something, you play with it. Just make up a melody.
Orchestra Nerd: What melody?
Guitarist: Just make one up?
Orchestra Nerd: What do you mean?
It goes on like that until they nervously decline.
Guitarists are, for the most part, fearless about exploration. Just look at the instrument itself. Most violins built anywhere in the world today look pretty much like the ones built in the 16th century in Italy. By contrast, guitar designs are as varied as car designs—maybe more so. Go into a big music store and you can play a gut-string, flattop, archtop, Les Paul, Tele, Strat, Jaguars, PRS, Flying V, Explorer … and that’s not even getting into the weird ones. Eddie Van Halen could not find a guitar that could produce the music in his head, so he built it. The point is, guitar is an instrument of improvisation—no rules in how you play it or how you build it.
Maybe this is just a way of justifying my shortcomings or making the most of my laziness or lack of brainpower, but I think there’s an upside to being musically illiterate. As the mighty EVH said: “You only have 12 notes, do what you want with them.”