NAD and detailed review: THAT Brown panel 6G7 Bandmaster

Gassage

Most amps have one trick.... loud, warm, punchy, clean, dirty, sparkly: pick one and the amp will do that thing brilliantly and the other things badly. 

This (rehoused, admittedly,) 1962 brown Bandmaster 6G7 combo, 3x10 Jensens, 5881 power tubes, all electronics original, has the irritating habit of doing all of them simultaneously. It is punchy and brash and in your face, then turns around and serves you warmth like your nan's kitchen on a Sunday. The brown panel era of Fender knew something the rest of the industry has spent six decades pretending to rediscover.

I have owned a lot of amps. Some good, some fucking amazing (mostly Hiwatts and tweeds), some mediocre (Marshalls), some that I should have set on fire and pushed off a cliff to spare future generations. The Bandmaster is not one of those amps. The Bandmaster is the kind of amp that makes you understand why guitarists who lived through the early 60's talk about Fender with the slightly faraway look of men who have been somewhere the rest of us have only read about. It is loud; it is punchy in a way that punches things. It is warm in a way that makes a Strat sound like it just had its first whisky and is feeling like another double Laphroig

Pedals..... Christ, the pedals. I have a chain of carefully curated, slightly precious bits of boutique witchcraft that has spent years being moderately tolerated by every other amp I have owned. The Bandmaster welcomes them, stacks them and asks for more. The and they sound on this amp like a Russian novel reads: dense, layered, faintly menacing, beautifully resolved. The 5881s give you headroom for days, then break up with the kind of late-period grace that lets every overdrive sit exactly where it wants to.

Now..... The harmonic vibrato/trem. This is where words start to fail even me. Fender's brown-era harmonic vibrato is not vibrato in the sense the rest of the industry uses the word. It splits frequency bands and modulates phase/amplitude relationships between them- which is engineer-speak for: the amp does something to sound that should genuinely carry parental guidance for wanking rhythm.. Hit a chord with the speed at four and the intensity at six and the amp does a slow, three-dimensional thing to the harmonics that is, I'm sorry, openly erotic. I sat there for forty minutes playing the same chord change. Ali came in to check I was alright and I had to explain I was being intimately serenaded by 1962 American engineering.

Drop a Van Amps Reverb-O-Mate in front of it, dwell at three, mix at four, and the whole thing tips into god territory. The room dissolves. you are not playing a guitar anymore, you are being played by it.

Verdict: criminally good. 

Doulin

Just to be sure about your thoughts then to avoid any confusion, youur a fan then?

jokes aside lovely thing and a very happy NAD 

Gassage

Doulin said:

Just to be sure about your thoughts then to avoid any confusion, youur a fan then?

jokes aside lovely thing and a very happy NAD 

Many thanks. It will sit well with the Hiwatt and 5G9!

Petepassion

Lovely! HNAD

TheMarlin

I had my eye on that. D’oh!

MikeP

Glad you wiped it down before the pictures...

The brownface pro been for sale a while is a lot more but seems a fair price and with the original jbl etc. 

MikeP

How loud actually is it when it breaks up or are you using an attenuator?

Gassage

MikeP said:

How loud actually is it when it breaks up or are you using an attenuator?

So, after 4 (loudish) it just saturates more- but bung a Klon or a boost and it's stellar at 3 (totlerable)

uncledaddy

I've owned and built a few brownpanel amps, and they all seem to sound best when pushed a bit. At low volume they seem to sound a bit flat and most of them don't have onboard verb to sweeten things up, but the swirl off a 310 is like nothing else!

gubble

How well does it fit in the boot of a Porsche?

john_r

Congrats on a fantastic amp, I used to own a late 60 brown super, used it with a Van Amps Sole mate reverb in front and it was the sound of perfection, mind you mine wasn’t in as original condition as yours! Still my favourite of the vintage amps I’ve owned, and I have had a few.