Three little brute combos by Fender and Danelectro.
Delivering dirty brujo tone is not simple. Just grab a ouija board and ask Hound Dog Taylor or Pat Hare. Or, if communing with the spirits in a literal way isn’t your thing, check in with Patrick Sweany. He’s easy to find since he’ll be on the road for most of November and December touring a double-bill with fellow Nashville-guitar sparkplug JD Simo. And when he’s at home … even easier, since he holds down the Monday early evening slot at Music City’s indie mecca, the 5 Spot, with the Tiger Beats, a blues tribute band he co-fronts with McKinley James, who was profiled in last month’s PG feature “10 Young Guitarists to Watch.”
Sweany swaps the ouija board for raw-speaking amps and a ’90s Epiphone Riviera with gold-foil pickups, plus a sawdust-and-blood voice that would make Howlin’ Wolf cock an ear, as a means to conjuring the dirtiest, deadliest tones of primal electric blues—like those found on nascent recordings by the labels Chess, Cobra, and King. Or, for that matter, on Sweany’s own catalog of a dozen albums, including 2018’s Ancient Noise, where his abilities as a songwriter propel the blues form into the present, leaning toward the future.
But enough about Patrick. This is an amp column, and when he turned up at a recent Tiger Beats gig to talk gear, he brought three Clydesdales with him: a vintage ’60s Danelectro Explorer, a Fender ’57 Custom Pro-Amp, and an Excelsior from Fender’s Pawn Shop series. What do his favorite amps have in common?
“A 15" speaker with an alnico magnet is it for me,” he says, “and 15 to 20 watts is my sweet spot, where the amp breaks up and still has some bottom end. I’m a fingerstyle player, with a thumbpick and two finger picks, so compression is the devil. Amps with 10" speakers are too harsh, which can work for playing lead like Freddie King, but when I was trying to find my sound, 15s were the answer. It’s very full and rich.”
All three of his amps are in harness, but only the Fender ’57 Pro-Amp has the microphone for this gig.
Sweany says his signature sound crystallized when he got the Danelectro, which is a quirky beast. Unlike some earlier Explorers, this model has its tubes and transformers on display, enclosed by a cage at the rear top of the amp. Better yet, that cage flips open, which means the amp—with its array of two 6L6 tubes, a 6FQ7, a 12AX7, a 12AU7, a 6AU7, and a 5Y3GT, plus heavy transformers—can be its own workbench while remaining plugged in. Explorer amps came with a single Jensen C15N speaker. Sweany’s is all-stock except for a recapped power supply, and amp tech Kyle Wierzba cleaned it up and restored it to original spec.
While the Dano Explorer isn’t worth a fortune, Sweany values the amp enough to keep it at home or nearby, so it doesn’t join the Pro or the Excelsior on tour. “If you’re a piece of my equipment, you’re not in a comfort environment,” he says, laughing. “You’re a shovel handle.”
His favorite road amp is his ’57 Custom Pro, a killer reissue I had the pleasure of reviewing for PG in early 2017. Sweany’s first chance to play through the model was while filming a demo for Fender with Laur Joamets. “They gave it to me after the session,” he says. The amp has a thin tweed cabinet and is inspired by Fender’s famed 5E5A circuit. It’s got a 12AY7 and two 12AX7s preamp tubes, two 6L6 power tubes, and a 5AR4 rectifier tube, and it is a loud 26 watts. As a shovel handle, Sweany’s Pro has not led an easy life. After it died on the road, Wierzba replaced the transformers with Mercury Magnetics, swapped the caps, and installed reissue GE 6L6 tubes, along with some lesser maintenance.
I’m a fingerstyle player, with a thumbpick and two finger picks, so compression is the devil.
And finally, there’s the Excelsior: a 13-watt tiger that emulates the look and sound of Valco-type late-’50s/early-’60s circuits. Sweany had his eye on the Excelsior the minute it was unveiled in 2012. It’s got two 6V6s and two 12AX7 preamp tubes. It has the simplest control array of his troika, with old-school mic, accordion, and guitar inputs, a bright/dark switch, and volume and tremolo dials. But this Excelsior was modded by Nashville amp builder Mickey Sandora, who added a tone stack with more headroom and bottom end, activated by a toggle switch.
In addition to tremolo, another thing these amps have in common is an absence of reverb. “For a long time, I didn’t use reverb—just tremolo, which is another important part of my sound,” Sweany says. But his Tiger Beats compadre James’ Fender Super Reverb always sounds so damn good that it wore him down. His team of plough horses now have a partner: a Strymon Flint. And you’ll hear them all when the Tiger Beats finish their debut album of original music that’s in the works.
PATRICK SWEANY "Up And Down" **OFFICIAL VIDEO**
Hear the nasty old-school sound of Sweany’s Danelectro Explorer amp in “Up and Down,” from his most recent album, Ancient Noise.
How Indigenous’ Mato Nanji gets roaring Hendrix-inspired tones from his Fender 75s.
from his own heart or from that of the Nakota Nation, to which he belongs.
“I learned a lot about guitars, amps, and pedals from my dad," Nanji explains by phone from his home on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, where he grew up and still lives—at least when he's not touring the world with Indigenous or as an essential performer on the Experience Hendrix Tours. His father, Greg Zephier Sr., was also an accomplished guitarist and a member of the band the Vanishing Americans, who opened for Bonnie Raitt and other notables.
“My dad would bring home new gear and new music all the time, and once he brought home a Fender 75 and said, 'Hey, check this out,' and I was hooked," Nanji says of his favorite-model amp. “It sounded different from the other Fenders we had: a little darker, a little warmer, a little fatter, and bigger."
Currently Nanji owns two 75s: a 1x15 combo and a head, which he uses to power a Fender 4x12. “I had a 1x12 combo first, but I got the 15 because it has a little more kick with a bigger low," he relates. “Sometimes I use both of my 75s in the studio along with my Super Reverb, with its four 10s. The combination of all three is really awesome."
The 75 series has more functions than typical early '80s Fenders and were among the last designs for the company by famed engineer Ed Jahns, who spearheaded Fullerton amp building before Paul Rivera took the reins in 1982. Both men had a similar bent for innovation, and their designs are sometimes confused for one another's.
Jahns designed the first Fender amps with push/pull tone controls and was also behind the legendary 435-watt Fender 400 PS. The 75 was made from 1980 to 1982 and can scale down to 15 watts with the flip of a toggle. The faceplate controls, from left to right, are a bright switch, a volume dial for the clean channel, treble, mid, and bass EQs—all with pull-out boost, a lead drive dial, reverb, a lead level, and a master volume. The tube array is three 12AX7s, two 12AT7s, and two 6L6 power tubes, but the rectifier is solid-state. The combos came with 8-ohm Electro-Voice or Fender Blue Label speakers made by Eminence. These amps aren't as collectible as many vintage Fenders, despite their sonic virtues, and can be found for $500 to $1,300, depending on condition.
Nanji likes to use only the lead side of his 75s and sets the dials on 5—all the way across. “Right in the middle is where the sweet sound is," he notes. “I like to keep the core tone clean as much as I can, and then use a few pedals to overdrive it." Although a TS808 is his longtime go-to, he also favors a Mojo Hand Tone Factor and a vintage Fuzz Face for snarl options, and a Prescription Electronics COB (Clean Octave Blend) fuzz for more radical colors.
To hear Nanji's potent tone in full, listen to “C'mon Suzie" from 2003's Indigenous. In addition to his 75s, that track features the rotating sound of a Leslie cabinet—like Hendrix used on “Little Wing." (Onstage, Nanji gets that swirl from a Tinsley Audio Sir Henry pedal.) The guitar on that song is the one that's always over his shoulders: a '60s reissue Stratocaster, which recently got a Custom Shop neck that was a gift from Nanji's Hendrix tour compatriot, Kenny Wayne Shepherd.
The fat, gorgeous guitar tones on Indigenous' “C'mon Suzie" are among Mato Nanji's favorite sounds that he's recorded.
That first time I heard Nanji live, he was using his 75 head on two 4x12 Fender cabs, but in recent years he's relegated his 40-year-old amps to the studio. On the Hendrix tours, he powers up the Marshall JCM800 that's provided. “Everybody says it's really loud, so they block it off with Plexiglass, but I can't tell when I'm onstage and feeling it," he says, chuckling. Just before touring stopped, he'd been using a Legacy Steve Vai signature head—a gift from Carvin—with Indigenous, for its reliability and the Marshall-like tone of its EL34 power tubes.
But he's lost no fondness for his 75s. “I'm in and out of the studio working on songs as much as I can, although the studio where I work is shut down a lot, and there aren't many alternatives in South Dakota," he relates. “But I'm pretty close to finishing an album that I'd like to get out next year."
With Public Enemy, guitarist Khari Wynn uses a Marshall, but a humble Fender workhorse helps carry his own transcendent compositions.
If you've seen Public Enemy on tour over the past two decades, you've heard Khari Wynn breathing fire through a Marshall stack. In fact, you can hear him on the band's new album, What You Gonna Do When the Grid Goes Down?, on the apocalyptic songs “Grid" and “Rest in Beats." But these days, when he's at home in Memphis gigging or cutting tracks, Wynn relies on a workhorse favored by many players, from pros to weekend warriors: a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe.
While the 40-watt combo introduced in 1996 is common, the sounds Wynn creates with it for his own musical projects, including Energy Disciples and the New Saturn Collective, are anything but. (See this story online to listen.) With a Les Paul or a Strat, a handful of effects, his Deluxe and, most important, his wide vision of music, Wynn creates soaring, textural, atmospheric compositions—with room for free-flying improvisation—that evoke the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Sun Ra, Sonny Sharrock, and other proponents of sonic liberation.
“What I'm looking for is warmth, presence, the ability to cut through in an arrangement, and a balance of the proper amount of lows, mids, and highs," Wynn says of his quest for meaningful amp tone. “With my Les Paul, the amp's clean tone has a really nice full voice, and with two channels, when I want to get gritty, I can set the amp for a gainy rhythm sound and use the other channel for a loud, distorted overdrive sound for solos. With the Strat, it's got that classic top end that really pops out in recording. And because the amp's clean tone is so rich, it can be bright but it's never too brittle."
Before acquiring his Deluxe a few years ago, he'd bought a 1970s Fender Twin from a friend who'd given up performing. “The trouble is, those old amps are kind of sensitive," he says, “and I was carrying it all over town, to different stages and studios. It got to the point where it kept blowing fuses and was having other problems."
Get an earful of Khari Wynn's transcendent playing and composition on “Infinity Bridge," a Mahavishnu-inclined tune played by his group Energy Disciples.
The Hot Rod Deluxe was part of the gear at his friend Michael Joyner's Slim Bloke Studios in Memphis, and Wynn connected with the amp while cutting tracks there. After he told Joyner how much he enjoyed its sonorous tones, Joyner offered to trade the Deluxe for Wynn's troublesome Twin, which Joyner thought he could repair, and sweetened the deal with a couple hundred bucks.
Wynn says the late '90s Hot Rod Deluxe is stock, which means it's got two 12AX7s in the preamp section, a pair of 6L6 power tubes, and a 12AX7 phase inverter tube. The cabinet—all pine—is inspired by the look of Fender's 1950s narrow-panel tweeds, as is its top-mounted, chrome-plated chassis and chicken-head knobs. The interior has printed circuit board construction, and the rectifier, reverb driver, and effects loop circuits are solid-state. The speaker is a 50-watt Eminence Legend, although models more recent than 2010 come with Celestions. And there's a footswitch for the channels.
The Hot Rod Deluxe has had several iterations since its 1996 debut. Wynn's is first generation, and the latest, the Hot Rod Deluxe IV, has three switchable channels. Photo by Miz Stefani
Wynn complements his Hot Rod Deluxe and guitars with just a few stompboxes, but, as you'll hear online when you check out his performance of the Mahavishnu-like “Infinity Bridge" with his Energy Disciples, he wrings a maximum of sweet soaring sustain and colorful tones from his setup. (Dig his artful use of low, sustained feedback—psychedelically panned in the mix—as the bedrock for a transitional passage starting at 1:43.) His pedals include a Seymour Duncan Twin Tube Classic, a Line 6 DL4, an Ernie Ball wah, and a Fulltone Deja'Vibe, but primarily he relies on his amp's own capabilities for grit and sheen.
The more a piece of gear gets used, the more it reveals secrets. And Wynn says he's recently discovered a new layer of tone within his Hot Rod Deluxe. Listening to a recording of a September 2020 livestream gig, shot at a large venue in Memphis, with fellow Bluff City guitarists Andrew Saino, Eric Mackey, Angelo Earl, and Joe Restivo, he heard something akin to an upper octave tone in the hot channel of his amp. “It's got a great classic fuzz thing happening when the overdrive channel's really opened up," he relates. “It's like back in the day when Jeff Beck would step on a Tone Bender or when Jimi would just hit that sound. It sings."
Khari Wynn makes this new Public Enemy track, “The Grid," rock. Dig his post-Hendrix riffing—replete with wah-wah—from 2:27 to the song's epic finale