OVERDRIVE- CATALINBREAD Formula 51 Foundation Drive ___NEW___ Fender Champ?

CATALINBREAD| FORMULA 51 FOUNDATION DRIVE 

$180.00 USD

In the 1940's Fender started out by taking small amps made for a small PA and converted it to be used into a guitar amp. Eventually he was making so many changes to suit the buyer that he decided to make his own taking the best ideas from the mods. The first was called the Champion 500. That morphed into the first Fender Champ (tweed) by 1948.

At this time there wasn't anything made to check out and compare to see what would make a guitar amp a guitar amp. The key was to simply get a guitar louder. So loud and clear was the goal. Trial and era was the only tech or for that mater science to it. The first amps of any kind were meant primarily to plug in a mic to get a speakers voice loud enough to talk to a crowd. Note 'talk' not sing. A lot of nasty distortion that added nothing good was in all such systems. Getting out the worst distortion still left some. Today we find that sweet, smooth and musical. But in the early days it was more like a cheap, noisy fuzz box kind or dirt. Amps from 1940 were total shit compared to how they were in 1948. Noisy, buzzy with unusable dirt that could only be tamed by turning the amp down to much lower volumes than one needed.

The Champion is a 4 watt amp with an 8" speaker. When one thinks of dead cool old 

Fender Tweeds one is talking about amps that came out in 1955 not this take on a 1951.

CONCLUSION

If you think this pedal sounds like sh@t you are damn right, LOL. If you think 

it would make great interesting and new sounds you are also just as right.  

Keep in mine that it was not clear even to Leo Fender that the world 

wanted amps made that were consciously dirty. 

That idea really did not get truly started until around 1970. In fact the first 

deliberately dirty amp could be argued to be the 1974 ...50 watt Plexi 

Version 2 of the model 1987. The reissued 1987x is a good 9.5 out of 

10 at nailing that amp. 

 

the fine print

In the 80's I had a gig as a product specialist with Ibanez  so I got a chance to meet and talk to close friends of  Leo Fender meeting  them at NAMM via product Specialists for Fender .

 Product specialist are a niche club that love gear no matter what brand. So we share info and praise what we like even if what we like and hate is or isn't the brand we work for.  Like any of us Leo  took pride in creating  things better. He was always torn by what we liked and indeed did not like about his products. It is hard to please oneself and harder still to please others at the same time.  So he was not  likely to sell you anything he thought sounded like crap even though you might like it better. For example he liked PU's that could kick butt. He hated them if getting that meant choosing gain over tone. He loved the '74 Strat  PU but hated all after it as he found it nasty. The '74 was his highest gain PU that he liked. It was also Hendrix's favorite. I do not know specifics on his favorite amps but I do know he never brought up anything made before '55.