DAN AGOSTO: Hi. I’m Dan Agosto. Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. We’re taking a look at the Fender Reissue Twin amp, designed just like the twin reverb of days past, of legend some may say. It’s a two-channel amplifier meaning that two separate channels. It’s not like a switching channel so you have your normal channel and you also have here the vibrato channel.

We’re plugged into the vibrato channel because it’s basically same as the normal channel but it has the vibrato and the reverb on it as well. Each channel has two inputs. You can plug in two instruments or more into this amp and it’ll be fine. It can handle a lot of watts, a lot of head room on the preamp. This thing will not break up so it’s known as a clean amp.

On both of these channels, we have three-band EQ (treble, middle, and bass). We also have a bright switch that -- we’ll see what that does when we start playing through it. On the vibrato channel, we also have reverb knob, there’s a spring reverb in there, and also two knobs for the vibrato and that’s for speed and intensity, and that’s sort of like a tremolo effect it has to do with volume, and those can be turned on and off with a footswitch. That’s the only to turn them on and off, so when you get the amp and you don’t have a footswitch you’re not going to be able to hear either the reverb or the vibrato. It doesn’t come with the footswitch. We happen to have one so we’re able to use that and we’re able to show you what it does today.

So, it’s a pretty straightforward amp. It’s very old-fashion design. It’s heavy. It’s got Jensen designed speakers in the back. There’s also an external output so you can put a -- it’s for a speaker output so you can put an extension speaker or cabinet on here, and then there’s of course a footswitch jack, and in the back there we’ll be able to get through all the tubes. Each preamp channel has three preamp tubes, one of them I believe is the rectifier for each channel so at least two 12AX7’s and four 6V6’s in the power amp section, and those are all Groove Tubes from Fender.

All right, so let’s see how this amp sounds. Right now we have it mic’ed up, standard setup, Shure SM57, about an inch, inch and a half form the grille cloth, and an AKG C414-XL2 about a foot and a half to two feet from the grille cloth and that’s set in cardiod pattern. There’s no filter and no pad on that. So let’s see how this sounds. I’m playing with the Gibson Historic Black Beauty. This is set right now on the neck pickup.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

So it’s very loud actually. Me, sitting here, it’s just as loud as most amps its size, and the volume right now on this channel is only set a little below too. That’s kind of where we have to keep it for recording purposes because it can get really loud and actually start to distort a more sensitive mic like our AKG. I mean we could use the pad but going above that level is pretty ridiculous in lots of practice situations, so this is a really good live amp if you’re loud on stage, especially for jazz players because it doesn’t really break up that much. So let’s listen to a few other things on this. I’m going to try the treble pickup on here.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

So there’s still a lot of bass even though we’re on our treble pickup. A lot of warmth to this amp. It doesn’t sound as warm as an older one would but I believe that’s just because we have to break these amps in. All amps have to be broken in to really start sounding like an old amp. You cannot just make an old amp unless you actually put it through the rigors that a player would actually put it through. So, let’s see what we can do with our sound. Let’s try the bright switch. Actually let’s go back to regular knob bright and listen to our neck pickup again.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

And we’ll try our bright switch.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

So definitely more click on that sound. Let me go to the treble pickup, switch back to our normal setting.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Not too dissimilar from the neck pickup in bright setting. Let’s see what it sounds like in the bright setting on our neck pickup -- or our bridge pickup, our treble pickup.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

So there’s a lot of sparkle on that setting. It’s a little too much for me. I’m actually going to turn off our bright, go back to our regular, and maybe just bump the treble up a little bit on the amp.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Maybe bring out some of that bass.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Bring down some of the tone on my guitar.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

All right. Let’s set that back to midnight and we’ll take a listen to our effects on here. Now first of all, you’re going to need a dual footswitch for this, so that needs to be two separate little switches on the box. One of them will turn your reverb on. Now, I happen to know that this amp, I don't think the reverb’s working right because if I turn it on, you’ll see what happens.

[DAN AGOSTO ACTIVATES REVERB TANK ON FENDER TWIN REVERB]

You get a lot of noise. Even if we have our reverb turned all the way down, you still hear there’s noise so there’s something wrong with this particular one. This is right out of the box from the factory so let’s hear how it sounds.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

That’s on fire. Well let’s see if we can get more soul sort of by turning it around too.

All right. So you got a good amount of control over this. Let’s turn it up to 9 or 10. We’ve got a very long reverb.

So that’s a very rich lush reverb, and it gets very wet when you turn it up all the way. I would turn this reverb back down normally to drive the tremolo and leave it there a little bit, but since we’re getting the noise I’m going to turn it off. And so the other switch on our footswitch is going to turn on our tremolo. Let me actually have the intensity very high. I’m going to turn it all the way down right now and keep the speed around where you want it turned down, so here’s our sound without the tremolo.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Turn it on.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Okay. I don’t hear anything just yet. Turn up the intensity just a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Let me turn up the speed and the intensity a bit more so we’re on three right there. You can barely just hear it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

Now we’re starting to really hear that tremolo.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

All right, let me turn up the speed a little bit lower and turn up the intensity to 8.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

I actually want the speed up on there.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

There we go.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE FENDER TWIN REVERB]

All right. So we got a nice vintage-ey tone, nice for ballads and things like that. So this is the Reissue Fender Twin. It’s a classic amp, got tons of headroom, tons of gain, will get so loud before it gets distorted. So if you’re looking to get some distorted tones out of this without totally blowing out your ears, get a distortion pedal to play with it. You’re also going to want a two-button footswitch but otherwise it’s a classic amp, great tube tone, great tube sound for pop music, jazz music. It’s got a lot of different tones inside it as well, and thanks for checking it out here at Gearwire.Com.