Wicked slider Michelle Malone at home with some dear friends: her Supro Super and Dual-Tone amps, and her Dual-Tone guitar.
The veteran singer, songwriter, and guitaristās favorite sound crunchers are a pair of vintage oddballs from the vaults of Valco.
Like a lot of slide players, Michelle Malone enjoys some grit in her tone. And when it comes to gritāalong with glorious midrange, trippinā out reverb, and a blend of snappy response with just a ladle full of sponginess to temper brittlenessāvintage Supro amps deliver better than UPS. So, her favorite amps are a pair of old Supros: a 1959 Dual-Tone and a 1961 Super.
By the way, is there anything cooler in gearland than naming a one-knob amp a āSuperā? It seems audacious until you plug into one and hear the way it breaks up. These amps, with their cute, little stock 8" speakers, bite like baby sharks. But alas, I digress.
On her new album, 1977, named for the year she started playing guitar, Malone really flies her songwriterās flag with tunes that delve into the personal. āNot Who I Used to Beā chronicles her growth as a human, āBuck Knife Manā is a tribute to her father, and āGeorgia Madeā is her grandfatherās life storyāall powered by her clear-toned honey-and-biscuits singing and smartly textured arrangements.
The soaring leads on this release, her 17th studio album, are played by her bandās other guitarist, Doug Kees. But for her brass-knuckled live performances and on her previous albumsāwhich started with 1988ās New Experience and her 1990 major-label debut, Relentless,and have continued through more than three decadesāwhenever a slide comes out of a pocket, itās Maloneās. (You can hear her dig in on the video for āJust Getting Startedā that accompanies this story.)
The Atlanta-based artist already had a rough-talking electric guitar voice when she committed to slide while recording her 2003 album, Stompinā Ground. āI was working on the song āLafayetteā in the studio when I realized it needed a slide part, and no one else was there to put it down, so I did it myself,ā she says. Thus hooked, she developed a notable approach that blends the terse and the languid as she uses her signature Rocky Mountain Slides ceramic model with her Fender guitars or her white Supro Dual-Tone 6-string.
āIt sounds so goodāa little trashy, with awesome mids and just the right break-upābut you canāt turn it up all the way or it craps out.ā
The latter was purchased as a package with her Dual-Tone amp, likely via eBay, in about 2007. The Super came from now-gone Atlanta gear store Midtown Music, which had a reputation among local musicians for its used and vintage equipment. Both amps have quirks. The Super has a 6"speaker, rather than its stock 8". āI blew out the one it came with in the ā90s,ā Malone says. āHaving one knob on this amp is a beautiful thing. It sounds so goodāa little trashy, with awesome mids and just the right break-upābut you canāt turn it up all the way or it craps out.ā The rest of the 5-watt blast box is stock simplicity, with one 12AX7 for the preamp and a 6V6 on the power side.
The Dual-Tone is an oddball. A stock example of this 24-watt, 12"-speaker growler typically has two channels with two inputs each, 12AX7-driven tremolo, 6973 power tubes (which were also used in 1960s juke boxes), a 12AX7 phase inverter tube, and two more 12AX7s for the channel 1 and channel 2 preamps. There are volume and tone controls for each channel, plus the usual speed and intensity for tremolo. Maloneās weirdo example, which she extracted from an āAlabama road case,ā aka a cardboard box, to eyeball during our conversation, has three inputs and volume and tone dials, plus an 8" speakerāalthough itās likely a replacement, since Malone remarks that the cabinet has room for a much larger speaker. It also has just three tubes: a 12AX7, a 6V6, and a 5Y3GT rectifier tube. In that respect, it resembles a Supro Reverb model, but ā¦ no reverb. This isnāt as strange as it may seem, given original Supro builder Valcoās penchant for using whatever was around the shop at any given time to fulfill orders, sometimes causing variations in products sharing the same model name. And recently, a Dual-Tone with the same setup was listed on Reverb.
Malone teams her amps and guitars with a few basic pedals. She uses a Keeley Compressor and a Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster when she plays slide. Her Ibanez Soundtank Delay stays on all the time, and it reminds her of the slightly compressed and enhanced character of the Echoplex she used to carry on the road from the late ā80s to early ā90s. And she also uses an MXR Carbon Copy for a cleaner echo vibe, and an EHX Holy Grail when spring reverb needs to join the game.
āI normally take both of those amps on an average gig,ā she says. āFor larger rooms, or when I need more volume, I'll take along one of my black-panel Deluxes. But as long as you have a good sound engineer, you can turn up these little Supros and youāre golden.ā
Michelle Malone - Just Getting Started [Official Video]
See Michelle Malone make her vintage Supro amps, and her Dual-Tone guitar, howl on slide as she performs āJust Getting Startedā from her 2018 album, Slings & Arrows.