Fender Princeton (Blackface)

- Controls for volume, treble, bass, speed, and intensity
- Analog tremolo
- 2 inputs
- 10 inch speaker
- watts
- All tube circuit
- Tube rectifier
- Red Jewel light


UTILIZATION

Hard to find a more usable amp anywhere. Not even a standby switch, just flip it on and you’re good to go. Like most old fenders, here isn’t a whole lot you can do to make it sound bad short of dialing a frequency out completely. I picked one of these up after getting tired of moving lugging my Bassman down icy steps in the winter. The tiny combo sounds incredible and is a lot easier to move. Never had any reliability issues whatsoever. Could be a little louder, but then again, it is what it is.

SOUNDS

Sounds just fantastic. I plugged it in and had to buy it. I’ll be honest, the built in trem (incorrectly termed vibrato) is probably the coolest sounding thing on this amp. It just shimmers and sparkles in a really musical way that I’d never heard replicated before. It’s more of a glassy fender clean than a warm or round sound. Sag from the tube rectification is really evident at higher volumes, and really brings a lot to the tone. It’s worth mentioning that with single coils you are going to have a hard time pushing this amp into overdrive even with the volume maxed out, it’s more of a clean platform.

OVERALL OPINION

It would be difficult to ask for more in this tiny amp. Sparkly Fender cleans, incredible sounding tremolo, tube rectified, and as pretty much as portable as it gets. For reference, mine is a 1964. I wouldn’t say this is the be all and end all of amplifiers. For what it is meant to do, it’s great, but I’d be surprised if that is all you need out of an amp. The Princeton Reverb models seem to have exploded in price, so this is a much more reasonable option (and arguably a better sounding/more pure circuit). The blackface ones sound killer, but keep an eye out for a silverface with vertical lines down the front panel, it’s supposed to come pretty close.