Hi guys,
I havenT been around for a couple of years. Glad this forum is still in existence.
I'm currently having an extremely heavy case of GAS with some headache about which amp I should shoot for.
Although I'm quite familiar with various amps and tones making a descision isn't easy. Especially when you don't have the chance of having both amps duelling at your home.
I lend me a friend's bassman for a couple of days but it starts flapping and humming past 3 on the volume, so it's in a badly serviced condition. The tone up to 3 is fantastic.
I play a 63 Strat. a 69 Strat. a 69 Gold Top with P90 and my only new toy a Mexican Thinline. My main player is the 63 Strat, but I use the 69 too.

My style is playing pretty much clear with a naturally handmade sustain. No pedals no nothing. I might buy me some pedals one day, but that's an other story.

My playing style is influenced by Hendrix, Peter Green, Billy Gibbons, Albert King and Albert Collins just to name those who influenced me most.

I used to play a mid 70ies Silverface Twin w. JBL for a couple of years, but switched to a music man hybrid until I got rid of it in favour of a juicy mid 70ies Vibrolux. I play it since 20 years plus. I got me a Hot Rod Deluxe Special Edition w. brown tolex and a Jensen Speaker about 5 years ago which still looks like brand new.

The vibrolux is a sweet amp but has a flabby bass. I don't know if that is tube related or just it's typical character. You get used to sounds, especually when the progression sound change is slow.

I test played the bassman and the hot rod side by side yesterday and was extremely delighted by the bassman's touch sensible dynamics and headroom.
Those 4 tens really fill the room gently.
The hot rod did quite fine but was stiffer in dynamics. It is a reliable amp w. a huge bass tome that I use to keep on 1 or even less.

Sorry for my ramble.
My question is mainly bassman (REissiue MOdels) related.

1. Which period of the bassman (rewissiue) production is considert as the best or better one?

2. Are there various different bassman models available?

3. Which new AC 30 is the ONE to buy?

What do you think about my choice AC30 and Bassman to suit my style and what do you think would be the tonal diffenernce between those two amps in regard with my stayle and guitars?

Thanks in advabce

I have a Tweed Bassman reissue amp and mine is a 1994. I bought the amp used for my collection and I found it online at a shop in NC for a good price. When I got the amp it was in great condition and totally stock except for having an adjustable bias pot added. It had the Russian 5881 output tubes and Chinese 12AX7 preamp tubes. My amp has the very nice Eminence 10 inch replica speakers. The sound? not so hot. The amp had the plug in solid state rectifier replaced with a tube rectifier but I'm not convinced it helped very much. The amp seemed to be very bright and rather hard sounding.

I switched the output tubes to some JJ 6L6's, Groove Tubes 6L6GE's and now finally a set of the Shuguang 6L6 "coke bottle" tubes(best).

I did some looking around at the circuit and I found that the B+ was quite a bit higher than what a vintage 59 Bassman would have at least as specified. So what I did was experiment with the power supply first where I tried some different rectifiers finally settling on one that lowered the B+ to right where it needed to be. I think mine is an RCA 5U4B but I'd have to check.

The reissue(mine anyway) has an extra filter cap in the power supply all the way at the preamp end of things. I snipped that one out so that I have the stock Bassman value.

All was well and the amp sounded really pretty nice but then I came across some other ideas in Kevin O'Conor's book "The Ultimate Tone Vol 2" where he talks about doing a few mods to the reissue Bassman to get it to sound more like an old amp. One of the mods was to do a "cut" control instead of a presence control. I didn't do it as shown but instead used a couple of orange drop caps and a 500K resistor across the phase inverter to cause the amp to roll off some highs, PERFECT!

This amp sounds absolutely GREAT for blues and blues based rock guitar, stunning! I also rewired the cabinet so that I can use a 2 ohm THD Hotplate attenuator to control the volume as needed.

With the "cut" wired into the circuit you can set the controls with the pre to taste and then treble and mid are all or nearly all the way up, bass on about 3 and presence on about 7 for a great tone. Using a TS808 Tube screamer is particularly good with this amp. I need to grab a few tracks and put them up so that you can hear them to see if you like the sound.

I think that the reissues can be a killer amp and a real bargain when compared to something vintage. And I don't feel guilty at all about making a few tweaks to the circuit. I don't really believe any of the nonsense about circuit board construction vs a tag board(Fender construction is NOT point to point) but experimenting to get exactly what you want is fun and very rewarding and the results will be killer.

as of 199? a guitar magazine rated a kendrick 4x10 bassman reissue as best .

the old 5f6a bassman circuitry is hard to fault . this guy eats this stuff up and has cool ideas,
http://www.lynx.bc.ca/~jc/fenderAmps.html

I've been going over some speaker info lately so if you have any questions about tose now is the time to ask because I will have forgotten this stuff in no time at all . I'll come back in a while with some general info .

I had a great opportunity to do some testing of the speakers in my Bassman RI vs the newer Jensens as used in the current Bassman, Super etc. I had a reissue Super Reverb in for a repair and I had it set up for testing right next to my Bassman so it was very easy to hear the differences between the speakers. I patched between the two using each amp to try each set of speakers. I liked the ones in my amp a lot better. They had a treble that was much less spiky and much warmer than the Jensens. While they both sounded similar I felt that the tone of the newer Jensens was much harder. They were much more similar than different but again I prefered the Eminence version.

Better still is a Peavey cabinet that Myles has used with an old 50 watt Marshall top of mine for the last 15 years or so, it's and excellent combination even though it looks a little odd. It's their tweed covered Classic 410E which is nice and can probably be had for a song.