Fender Princeton '65 Reverb Re-Issue

For at least two decades, the pros in Nashville played through Deluxe Reverbs and the pros on the West Coast played through Princetons. It has been said, probably by Fender's PR department, that sixty per cent of all the guitar parts recorded in the 1960's and '70's were played on a Strat through a Princeton.

Every now and then Fender changed the exact features, look and sound of their amps, kinda like Ford changed the look of its car models each year. The current line-up has the '62, '64, '65, and '68 versions. This is a darn good comparison

   

of all of them. Listen through headphones.

I did, and in the end I went for the '65 Reissue https://uk.fender.com/products/65-princeton-reverb the '62 and '64 are £2,000+ hand-wired, so out of my self-imposed budget. The '65 had the sound I wanted. It has a 10-inch Jensen speaker, a 15W amp (the manual says 15W, the marketing says 12W), an actual analog spring reverb unit, and vibrato. There are two inputs: on the left for single-coils, on the right for humbuckers. The one on the right takes out 6dB, which may not sound like a lot, but it reduce the input signal strength to a quarter of what comes from the guitar. I'm plugged into the right-hand side. Flip the switch on the back and give the valves a minute to warm up.

The usual remark about valve amps is that 1 is silent, 2 is not-quite-there, 3 is too loud, and after that it just gets more saturated and distorted. I can play the Princeton at 4-5 with the guitar at 6-8 and it's on song and bedroom-level. Which is what I was looking for, and tested for when I tried it out at GuitarGuitar in Epsom.

If you have ever tried more than two perfumes from Guerlain you will know their perfumes have a very similar base they refer to as 'guerlainade', which is a secret like the recipe for Coca-Cola. On top of that they put this or that scent to get Habit Rouge, or Jicky, or L'Heure Bleu, or whatever else. But all their perfumes are instantly recognisable as Guerlain.

That's what happens when twiddling the dials on the Princeton, or indeed, putting pedals in front of it. Changing the bass and treble does not change the underlying sound, it just makes it more or less bass-y and more or less treble-y. Turn the guitar volume pots to 10 and turn the amp down to 2.5 to keep the volume polite, and it sounds more or less the same as turning the amp up to 10 and the pots to 2. High guitar and low amp is a little finer-edged and high amp and low guitar is a little rounder. It's still the same underlying sound. As it is when using the reverb or the vibrato.

The '65 starts clean and stays clean. Feed it some pedal distortion, turn the volume up and the distortion cleans up. Turn the volume down and there's this nasty fizzing that happens with all amps. It took a little experiment to get a good setting for some of the distortion effects in the Helix: guitar around 7-8, amp at 4. That also sounds good clean. Those pedal distortion sounds are quite liveable at bedroom volumes. Same trick as before: turn up the distortion effect to get the sound, feed it into a compressor - I've used the Deluxe Compressor effect - to attenuate it to bedroom volumes. I have very high thresholds so the compression is barely noticeable.

It makes my PRS McCarty 549 SE sound like an electric guitar. Which the Katana never quite managed. I always wanted to tweak the sound from the Katana, but I plugged in to the Princeton and that was it. That was the sound. It's like my 594 and the Paranormal finally met the Right Amp. Even the bridge pickups sound good through it. It is "next-level hi-fi" compared to the Katana's "superior transistor radio", and so it should be for the price difference.

Getting a valve amp is definitely part of the electric guitar experience. You may prefer the sound of a Marshall, or a Vox, or a Soldano, or whatever else. Test it at the seller's palce to make sure that it comes on song at a level your neighbours will tolerate.