For players used to really big sounds, compact high-gain tube combo amps sometimes seem to demand too many tradeoffs to make the convenience and portability worth it. If you’re used to pushing air with a 4X12, the relative lack of clarity and punch at high volumes and low headroom that you get from a 1X12 can feeling like you’re missing an arm—even if it’s still really dang loud.
With the Machete—Fender's newest addition to their Pro Tube series of amps—the aim is dish blisteringly aggressive tones from a 50 watt, dual-channel combo without sacrificing the range players get from big cabinets. And Fender achieves a lot of this versatility by making it one of the most tunable amps the company has ever built.
Bullitt-Head
The Machete is styled like a ’60s muscle car, with a sleek, black vinyl covering and a grey vinyl racing stripe that looks like it was fashioned from a steering wheel grip. 50 watts of dual-6L6GC power are pumped through a single 12” Celestion Vintage 30 speaker, which is mounted in the combo’s semi-open back cabinet. Instead of using a back panel that extends halfway down the back of the cabinet, Fender opted for a gap that’s only about four inches tall, which seems to serve primarily as ventilation for the amp’s dual power tubes. The preamp is driven via five 12AX7 tubes and a 12AT7 that works as a phase splitter to keep the preamp’s signal tight and focused.
The Machete’s two channels each have dedicated three-band EQ, preamp gain, master volume, and Notch controls. The Notch control is designed to sweep through a wide spectrum of midrange settings, enabling you to more precisely tune the amp to the guitar that you’re using. For example, if you’d like to add a little more raunch and midrange presence to your single-coil equipped guitar, moving the Notch knob up will get you there. Guitars with heavy natural mids like a humbucker-equipped Les Paul can be made sharper and crisper with a less aggressive notch setting.
The Clean channel’s preamp gain and volume controls double as Pull Bright and Pull Gain Boost features respectively. And players who use active pickups can breathe a sigh of relief with the amp’s 6db input attenuation switch, which helps keep the signal clearer for low impedance signals. The digital reverb is controlled by a single control for both channels. Finally, a control for setting the level of speaker damping sits near the end of the panel, and it’s one of the real keys to the Machete’s performance—making the amp feel and sound tighter and punchier, or more loose and harmonically driven depending on how you set it up.
The Machete's features don't end on the front panel. There's an effects loop with individual send and return level controls on the back panel, which can also be set as a switchable lead boost by connecting both the jacks together with a patch cable—adding up to 12db of gain when engaged. Pressing the PA Mute switch disables the tube power amp output completely, giving the player the option of using their favorite power amp if they choose to. There's also an XLR line out jack, which enables you to run the Machete directly into a mixing console, along with cabinet emulation via a small switch next to the jack. The amp can also be controlled via MIDI, and there’s a four-button footswitch for channel switching and engaging the boost on channel one, effects loop, and reverb.
Top Gear
To put it succinctly, the Machete isn't the type of Fender amp most Fender-philes will expect. It has a great clean channel, no surprise give its family heritage. But the overdrive capabilities are about as far from the sparkly, low gain, super-clear snap that put the Bassman and Twin Reverb on the map. The Machete really enjoys living on the edge of thick, molten gain and meaty, defined grit.
Clean things first, though. The clean channel’s tone is clear, even and not a bit over-compressed. At its essence the voice is akin to a Twin Reverb with more midrange presence and a softer attack. But you can get a lot of range out of the super-sensitive controls, and even the slightest movements of each of the EQ knobs had a rather substantial effect on the tone. A Gibson SG’s neck pickup initially sounded way too bassy, but one slight adjustment of the Bass control was all it took to tame it. Most amps in my experience would have taken a much more dramatic adjustment.
When I felt like the tone wasn’t as cutting as I liked, careful adjustment of the channel's Notch control let me set the midrange curve with ease. The amp's Damping control, also came in handy when I wanted to add or subtract presence in the high end. Moving it towards Loose gave the highs more bite and lent some sag in the mids, and further adjustments towards Tight dulled the high end and tightened up the lows.
Lest you have any doubts about the amp's onboard digital reverb ( or questions about why Fender would forgo one of their most famous trademarks—deep and rich spring reverberation—for a digital replication) the reverb is spectacular, with a very wide, expansive and all-encompassing if you need it that way. It will fill the room for atmospheric tunes like Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien” with the control set at just 10 o'clock and beyond that you can get into deep space realms that are great for Adrian Belew’s volume swells on King Crimson's "Matte Kudasai".
Ratings
Pros:
Super-smooth voicing. Sensitive controls. Great reverb.
Cons:
Expensive.
Tones:
Ease of Use:
Build:
Value:
Street:
$1,900
Company
fender.com
The Machete's second channel is what really sets it apart from the rest of Fender's amp line. The near-fire-breathing, muscular gain is a real surprise, and there's more than enough gain on this amp to satisfy the most demanding metalheads. I never really needed to move the Gain control past 11 o'clock for stuff as heavy as Alice in Chains riffs. Gain settings higher than three o'clock give the distortion an almost a square-wave, fuzzy quality that’s perfect for smooth and aggressive Santana-style lines. The tightest and most focused high-gain sounds come from keeping the control below the 12 o’clock setting. This is most definitely not an amp for a kid that expects bone-crushing metal rhythms from diming the gain.
Channel Two also is much more sensitive than Channel One to adjustments of the amp's Tuning control—an indispensable tool for getting different tones without having to touch any of the other controls. After setting all of the EQ controls and Notch control at noon, the Gain at 10:30 and dropping the Mid knob slightly, I had a killer hard rock rhythm tone to build upon. But moving the Tuning knob closer to Loose added much more bite and snarl to the high end while loosening up the lows and mids—effectively browning the sound. Turning the control the other direction tightened up the tone, though I needed to add a little high end via the EQ section in this instance. The sound and feel are not the same as the high-end bump you get from a looser speaker setting. But finding the right balance between speaker tuning and EQ will really help open up your guitar’s voice.
The Verdict
Fender's sleek 1x12 Machete combo has a lot to offer players who need to move between crystal cleans and bristling gain and favor a more modern voice in general. The Tuning and Notch controls make the amplifier a much more sensitive and versatile machine. And while the amp can go completely over the top with its overdrive, it’s smooth, harmonically rich, and big at moderate settings. And given that all this comes in a beautifully built and killer-looking combo that you can get in the trunk of your car, this is an amp that is arguably much, much more than the sum of its parts.
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Wind Me Up
The N7 screams late ’80s/early ’90s stripped-down, hot-rodded shred machine, with a bare wood finish, floating tremolo and careful attention paid to serving up as much unrestricted access to the upper frets as possible.
The body itself is comprised of aged alder, and feels really great underneath the fingertips. The two-piece alder body is sanded and sculpted to perfection—it’s light and beautifully balanced. The body also has a DIY look that’s a nod to the guitar that Bettencourt himself built out of spare parts over 20 years ago and which inspired the original N4. One of the more unique aspects of the N7 is its strange neck joint, which is actually an old design developed by luthier Stephen Davies in the early ’80s. Instead of a joint with a straight, square edge, the area is cut with a half-circle shape, and the neck is attached via five bolts that run along the upper edge. It looks quite futuristic, and provides a rock-solid connection between the alder body and the 25.5" scale maple neck and doesn’t obstruct access the higher frets.
A gorgeous ebony fingerboard with 22 frets tops the bare-finished maple neck and there’s a Buzz Feiten Tuning System treatment to ensure that tuning and intonation are as accurate as possible. The strings are anchored by a set of Grover 18:1 tuners and an official Floyd Rose locking vibrato system in a seven-string configuration.
Nestled underneath the strings you’ll find two Seymour Duncan humbuckers—a Duncan '59 in the neck and a Distortion in the bridge, which has a noticeably different tonality than the Bill Lawrence L500 in the bridge position of the N4. A single volume control and a three-way switch control the overall output of the pickups, but I wasn't too impressed with how the volume control felt as I moved it up and down. There just wasn't much in the way of resistance.
Get The Funk Out
If your proclivities lean toward shred, the N7 is really hard to beat. The supreme comfort and great neck feeling that made the N4 such a knockout shred machine are all present in the N7, but this guitar has a slightly warmer, more organic tone.
The N7 is one of the most comfortable electric guitars that I’ve played in recent memory. The feel of the neck alone—with its smooth, unfinished feel and pinpoint accurate fretwork—made it difficult for me to put it down. After saddling up with a 2011 Mesa/Boogie Dual Rectifier Multiwatt into an Emperor 4x12 cabinet, I dug deep into the heavy rock—belting out quick, palm muted triplets, peppered with slinky legato runs. The N7 is designed for this type of work.
It feels fast, but tone is also tight and focused. Even with an emphasis on the low B string, it retains top end bite. Seven string guitars often suffer from loss of high end, which is why a lot of builders choose bridge pickups with a high amount of treble response. In this case, the very present-sounding highs of the renowned Duncan Distortion fit amazingly well with the N7’s low, guttural range. And the pickups’ tightness in the bass response meant that the lows didn’t get at all flabby, even at very high gain settings.
Moving up to the higher fret ranges was the real treat, though. While the Stephens cutaway took some getting used to, it felt like a well-worn pair of Chuck Taylors after a while. I’ve been so used to having to reposition my thumb slightly when I approach the upper registers of the neck, but the Stephens neck joint makes it so the neck feels as familiar as the zones lower than the 12th fret. As I reached for some classic Satriani and Vai licks, I just kept feeling like there had to be some kind of catch for this level of playing comfort. If you’re a shred fiend, this guitar can be a real asset and has the potential to improve your accuracy, vibrato, speed, and touch.
Ratings
Pros:
Exceptional feel and quality. Full, robust tones with great balance.
Cons:
Expensive, no tone control.
Tones:
Playability:
Build:
Value:
Street:
$2,699
Washburn Guitars
washburn.com
Bettencourt is known for being one of the best shredders that rock has ever seen, but what’s really made him a hero among many guitarists is his incredibly distinctive, funky style. He’s as comfortable with cleaner and low gain tones as he is with ones soaked in molten distortion, kicking out funky rhythm work with a very interesting, almost percussive style. When I delved into some Curtis Mayfield-inspired backing grooves, the N7 pulled it off with a brilliant full range that had all of the bite and power that Bettencourt’s tone is known for.
Kicking in the bridge pickup, I was treated to a full and funky clean tone. Both of the pickups engaged together yielded a large, all-encompassing clean that was bold and brash but warm as I picked through some Randy Rhoads-influenced classical arpeggios. I really would have liked to have had a tone control of some sort, as one of the best applications of a seven string guitar is for jazz rhythm—it can sound really great by applying moving basslines on the low B string. Alas, while the ’59 is a great pickup, the only way to tame its treble was to drop the control on the amp and it would have been so much more effective to do it from the guitar itself.
The Verdict
In the ever-expanding universe of shred-friendly guitars, the N7 is a bright star. Washburn’s USA Custom Shop really outdid themselves with this one, although they already pretty much had the formula down pat with the N4. The natural texture doesn’t feel cheap and unfinished. Instead it enhances the sense that you’re playing and exceptionally well-made guitar. This level of craftsmanship comes at a premium price. But if you’ve got the scratch and want a shredder’s delight that can cover the lowest of tones, it should be near the top of your list.
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Okay, let’s move on. Many of you base buying decisions on our reviews, so we’ve revised our ratings system to be more practical. Many products received 3.5–4.5 picks (out of 5) under our previous single-score system, which was useful for ata- glance summations but also obscured some nuance.
For instance, how should a reviewer rate an affordable guitar that has a few minor cosmetic flaws but sends everyone who plays it to tonal heaven? You guessed it—they average what might’ve been a 3-pick rating for build quality with a 5-pick rating for tones, and end up with a 4 or 4.5. And when you average assessments of playability, innovation, feel, build quality, and bang for the buck, you inevitably end up with a score that can seem like we’re treating manufacturers with kid gloves. We’re not. But while some people want to see us ruthlessly bash a product in a cathartic rant that they must believe will somehow rain vicarious vengeance down upon companies that put out crap 20 or 30 years ago, the truth is that these days CNC construction and the ease of internet research—for both builders and consumers—has exponentially improved the overall quality of products on the market today.
So, while you or I may pick up a guitar or plug into an amp or pedal and immediately know it’s not for us, these days that’s usually due more to whether it fits our style and level of pickiness than whether it truly sucks. We also go to great effort to make sure each product is reviewed by a player who’s part of the target audience. We don’t send jazz archtops to metalheads, and we don’t send high-gain amps to blues dudes.
Anyway, our new rating system includes brief summations of a product’s pros and cons, as well as pick ratings (0–5) in four categories—Tones, Build, Value, and Playability (for instruments) or Ease of Use (amps, effects, and other devices) or Versatility (pickups). Items with a total of 18 or more picks (out of 20) win our coveted Premier Gear Award. We think you’ll get more out of this, and we welcome your feedback. Pick a platform—any platform—and write us!