I bought this amp in April of 2025 from an older musician, who lived about a two-hour drive away from me in Akaa. I quickly turned it on, verified it had sound coming out of it, paid 800€ for it and took it home. Quite expensive, especially for me, but he had assured me that apart from the power switch it was all original and functional, so I thought I wouldn’t have to put too much money into fixing it up.
I also bought a PA cab from him, that proceeded to die on me within a minute. (a sign of things to come?)
At first it seemed to be functioning fairly well. I played with it a few times and then took it to a gig with me. After driving for about six hours, setting everything up and playing one chord, the bugger died on me. I wasn’t thrilled.
I took it to a tech (Nalle at Tube Sound Turku) and started waiting for the bill. About a month later I noticed a video on his Facebook that had a familiar faceplate in the thumbnail.
I opened the video.
“So today we’re working on a late 70s Silverface Fender Bassman 50. A fine amp, except…”
(camera pans to show the inside of the chassis)
“...what is THIS?”
(there is cardboard inside the chassis)
This time there was thrill, but not exactly a happy one.
He then proceeded to point out other nice surprises, like a faulty power tube, a missing fuse, broken resistors with wrong values in the grid, you get the jist. He seemed equally amused and annoyed.
Fuckin’ cardboard.
I got in touch with the seller and informed him that I wasn’t too pleased about the state of the amp, especially considering the fact that he had said that only the power switch had been swapped (that was broken as well and needed to be swapped again), and that the amp would be otherwise original. I had never gone back to a seller to complain before, but seeing that it wasn’t even close to original, barely functional and potentially dangerous, I thought he should discount the price a bit because he hadn’t been honest about the amps condition. After a while of negotiating he said he’d call me back.
Then my phone rang again, it was his son. He started out asking questions in a somewhat normal tone, but proceeded to start yelling and insulting me within the first minute. After a while of trying to explain my case to him, whilst receiving nothing but belligerence, cursing, and thinly veiled threats in return, I told him that he had no business calling me and speaking in such a way. He got defensive and said basically “I can do and say whatever the fuck I want - just because you’re speaking perfect finnish by the book doesn’t mean I’m any lesser than you!”. I countered by calmly stating that I was speaking pretty normally, and that it sounded more like some of his insecurities coming out. He then got really angry, said “if this whole fucking system is up to me, you won’t get anything but scabs in your ass” and hung up.
He was probably about 20 years older than me, and sells trading cards for a living. A grown man, supposedly.
I haven’t received the scabs yet.
A minute later his father got back to me, told me he’d refund me 100€ and apologized for his son. I accepted and said I hoped I wouldn’t be hearing from his son again, to which he assured me I wouldn’t.
Following this whole ordeal, I decided that I might as well have it modded to sound a bit better for guitar. Some changes were made in the preamp and phase inverter to move it closer to Brownface spec, the bright cap was swapped out for a 250 pF and the slope resistor was swapped to a different value to bring out more mids.
After all the hassle the amp came back sounding great! You can now play with it too (without dealing with all that shite) through the NAM captures I took!
You can find more captures with my preferred settings and pedals in front of it on my Patreon!
