Fender Excelsior Custom, ca 2012

I attended an excellent jam in East London regularly across  autumn 2021 and my pro friends in the house used two of these amps.  I got some good airtime myself through the amps on those nights and reflected on why things had sounded so good. After all, it was the same me, my trusty Tele and a cable.

I concluded it was the amps so I looked out for one and found this quickly and cheaply on reverb/com.  It needed a little work as the output tubes were slightly noisy.

It has guitar, mic and accordion (?) inputs, and controls for volume and tremolo speed.  it had a dark/bright switch which can easily be replaced by a variable resistor to give a very useful tone control (the smaller middle knob).

It delivers 13 watts from two 6V6 tubes through a 15-inch speaker in quite a heavy and very stylised mdf housing.  Extremely basic but quite brilliant, it’s now my go-to  amp for smaller gigs.

Find yourself one if you can…