Fender Cyber-Twin

With an amplifier heritage that predates their guitars by several years, Fender have more of a reputation to live up to than any other amp manufacturer. The Cyber-Twin represents the company's first foray into the digital modelling arena, although Fender are quick to point out the Cyber-Twin isn't a DM amp as we know it. They claim instead to have created an entirely new concept: the cybernetic amplifier.
With a cabinet closer in size to a Deluxe, and relatively lightweight despite two Celestion G12H-100 loudspeakers, the Cyber-Twin is more portable than most 2 x 12 combos. The chassis follows the same open-ended, wedge shape design as the Dyna-Touch models, but inside things are very different.
There are four main PCBs, which are double-sided and through-plated, and the component count is very high with several expensive-looking microprocessors in evidence.
The front panel is where the Cyber-Twin's dual nature is immediately evident. The left-hand side is more or less traditional Fender, with a single input jack followed by nine knobs. But move to the right and, aside from a traditional jewel mains indicator light, you're confronted with a large display panel surrounded by buttons and dials that announce Fender's arrival in the digital age.
On the rear there are a few more surprises such as the stereo pair of balanced line-outputs and a SPDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) output. Then there's the MIDI IN, OUT and THRU sockets as well as jacks for the amp's two (supplied) footswitches and two assignable controller pedals. Clearly, this is not a regular Fender amplifier.

In use
Once switched on there's a delay for a few seconds while the Cyber-Twin's two GT12AX7 preamp valves warm up and the digital stuff initialises. But we confess we didn't notice this the first time - we were too busy watching the motorised knobs rotate! Self-twiddling aside, this portion of the control panel looks disarmingly conventional. The knob on the far left is a trim control, used to set up the optimal input level with a small LED display, and isn't motorised: just set it and forget it. Then we have gain, volume, bass, mid, treble, reverb and master volume. These controls all have their positions memorised as part of a patch, with the clever exception of the master volume - setting this control determines a maximum level, which can then be altered by remote control, using either an expression pedal or a MIDI continuous controller.
Did we say MIDI? Oh yes. The Cyber-Twin has a MIDI implementation that would put some keyboards to shame. Virtually every parameter can be accessed, either with an assignable controller pedal, or from, for example, a sequencer. There's a four-channel footswitch and a separate reverb/FX toggle switch included, but to explore the fun of real-time remote control further, or to access more than four presets, you'll need to buy the appropriate gear. This makes perfect sense to us: how many players bought MIDI rack set-ups with trillions of patches, only to find they only needed three or four sounds for everything?
The right-hand side of the front panel is where the Cyber-Twin's digital control resides. Initially a little daunting, the functions are easy to understand after a brief read of the comprehensive manual. The four buttons in a vertical line next to the master volume are the 'quick access' channels: once you have a sound you like, hit Save and store it to be recalled, either by one of these buttons or the four-button footswitch.
The actual Save button is one of four in an arc on the left of the display. The other three call up the onboard tuner and noise-gate functions and allow you to tap in a tempo for delay and modulation effects, like tremolo. Under the display are three small knobs, which access the three most important functions in any FX patch - just like tweaking the knobs on a stompbox, and very straightforward to use.
The large dial is for data entry and the four buttons on the right of this access editing functions for amp models, FX and utility functions like MIDI mapping and so on.
Fender have organised the Cyber-Twin's monumental range of tone into three banks. The Fender Custom Shop consists of 85 permanent patches complete with effects; Your Amp Collection is a permanent non-effects set of 35 amp models. You can take your pick from either of these two banks, change them to your heart's content and store your patch in the Player's Lounge bank, which has up to 85 slots available. The actual amp models read like a Fender hall of fame. From Tweed Champs to modern incarnations like the Prosonic and Roc-Pro.
Although Fender doesn't like the Cyber-Twin being compared to a digital modelling amp, this is one area where both are similar: you're presented with someone's interpretation of a particular amp, and it's up to you to decide how valid it is. Comparison is always purely subjective, and full of variables. We A/B'd the Cyber-Twin's Blackface Deluxe offerings with three real Deluxes - two original sixties models and a re-issue - and came up with four distinctly different sounds! However, with a few easy changes it was possible to make the Cyber-Twin sound as close to all three as made no difference. What is clear, however, is that without any extra ear candy to bolster things, the Cyber-Twin can sound as sweet or as wild as any real amp in its library.
Talking of candy, the cleverest bit of Fender's digital effects suite is that reverb doesn't form a part of it. Fender amps are almost synonymous with the reverb effect and the Cyber-Twin places this logically as part of the amplifier model, with inboard and outboard spring types available, as well as a selection of room, halls and plates. Reverb aside, there's all kinds of fun to be had with delays, choruses and wah-wahs (touch and manual), as well as wackier stuff like ring modulation and harmonising. We just loved the tape echo delay with bucket loads of analogue warmth and a wow/flutter effect that perfectly captured the old WEM Copicat - Hank Marvin fans, this one could be perfect for you!
If there's an effect you want that the Cyber-Twin doesn't have, then plug it into the send/returns, which can handle balanced or unbalanced, mono or stereo, and high or low-level signals.
Fender have gone to great lengths to give the Cyber-Twin the ultimate in live or studio flexibility. As well as a stereo pair of balanced, speaker compensated line-outs which can be summed to mono, there's the SPIDF, which can either output the direct guitar signal or the full effects-laden amp sound direct into your sound card. But if that sounds like overkill, the Cyber-Twin can still be used conventionally, and with a stereo power stage delivering 65W RMS per channel, there's plenty of power.

Verdict
We've seen a lot of high-powered digital amps lately and that word 'awesome' is beginning to get somewhat overused. But if ever an amp deserved exclusive rights on that word, the Cyber-Twin is it. Considering the almost limitless number of parameter combinations, the digital implementation is very well handled - dig as deep as you like, or simply turn a knob. And with its comprehensive MIDI spec, the control possibilities are endless.
The price puts it in a different league to most amps of this type, and because digital technology is relatively cheap and chip improvement so frequent, there's bound to be another 'awesome' amp appearing very soon.
Whether today's kids will look back at the Cyber-Twin in 25 years time with the same fond respect that we have for the Bassman or the blackface Deluxe, only time will tell. However, innovation is the name of the digital game, and at least for the time being, the Cyber-Twin reigns supreme.

Fender California Fat Tele

One of the best Teles in to come from the Fender stable hails from both California and Mexico
One of the latest Teles in to come from the Fender stable is the California Fat Tele.

Bearing a 'made in the USA' decal the Fat Tele is built in both Fender's California and Mexico factories with vintage-style components and an alder spread body.

With its six-saddle bridge and vintage machine-heads the Fat Tele looks every bit like your standard model. But what makes it stand out is the five-way selector switch (instead of the usual three) and the neck humbucker.The tonal variety that this provides is extremely impressive.

You can use the standard Tex Mex bridge single-coil for that classic country Tele twang or switch to the full humbucker for warm Gibson-esque tones. The in-between positions offer you a selection of both pickups together, in-phase or split humbucker tones.

Construction wise, the usual exceptionally high Fender standards have been maintained, from fret placement and levelling through to the neck join and finishing.

Playabilty is also exceptional with the conventional neck profile and pleasing radius eliminating the choking and fret buzz that can sometimes be a problem with fixed-bridge guitars.

Overall, the Fat Tele is a versatile, classy instrument with great tones, great looks and that all-important Fender USA authentication.

Fender US Stratocaster Deluxe

'Noiseless' pickups and subtle, cool, retro looks

Over the years, Fender have made several attempts at designing a Strat with that bit extra, but the results have often floundered in the market place. Maybe a reflection on the quality of the US Standard - many players believed it needed no upgrades.
Recently, Fender has adopted a more practical approach to their customisations - just look at the success of the Roadhouse and Lonestar Strats. So what have Fender added to this recipe?
A translucent ivory finish shows off our guitar's grainy ash body, while pink and green abalone inlays are subtle, yet classy. But that chrome Fender logo is the absolute dogs proverbials.
But it's the Fender Noiseless pickups which separate this guitar from other Strats. Although designed to sound like 50s and 60s pickups, they're actually stacked humbuckers.
Aged parts complement the brown shell pickguard whilst the pickups themselves bear the inscription 'Noiseless'. Whilst at first I wasn't so taken by this, I must admit that the script - similar to that of the Danelectro logo - has a retro cool about it and it didn't take long for them to grow on me.
The tuners are of the Fender Deluxe locking variety and work reasonably well with the American Standard trem which goes down dangerously close to slack.
Virtually every guitarist has played a US Strat by now, even if only briefly on a Saturday morning in the local music shop. The neck is a comfortable medium 'C' profile and the jumbo frets and sleek finish make it a dream to play. The trem arm stays where you put it, unlike some cheaper systems and the trem itself feels smooth and machine-like in operation. The action's not as low as some might like, but intonation is impeccable and chords stay in tune wherever you find yourself roaming on the fretboard.


Copy-cat Strat
There's one thing missing from this Strat's sound... noise. Whilst the humbuckers attempt a Rory Bremner-worthy impression of single coils, there is a little more bass and mid than usual. This is less noticeable on clean sounds which are twangy and bright, but further up the gain scale it becomes apparent that these are no ordinary pickups.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing though. The bridge pickup alone sounds stronger than usual on overdriven sounds and the in-between settings are still vibrant, with a little extra bass.
It will be mine...
What you're essentially paying for here is a US Standard with upgraded pickups and better looks. Whilst the pickups could be retro-fitted, the finish, inlays and logo could not. So really it's a matter of whether or not you like the look of the guitar. And you can't put a price on beauty.
Don't make the mistake of dismissing the Deluxe as a simple souped-up Strat; it's much more than that.
I've been playing this guitar for a while now and I think it's really grown to like me. It seems to appreciate my individual playing style and that's why I'm never going to giving it back...

Grandfather of Rock and Roll: Fender Telecaster Guitar

Leo Fender's Telecaster guitar and Precision bass changed the face of popular music....

One evening in July 1951 a solitary light burns in the otherwise darkened Fender workshops on Pomona Avenue. Leo Fender is working the night away, oblivious to the family dinners and other everyday activities going on across the rest of Fullerton, Los Angeles.

Leo is fiddling yet again with the string-length of his new baby. On the bench before him sits a prototype guitar which, in a few short months, will go on sale as the Fender Precision bass. We know now that it was to be his most revolutionary product, but Leo was unaware of this as he carefully screwed on the latest new length of neck to the scarred prototype body.

The coming sound of rock and roll would have been impossible had Leo not toiled on that night and many other occasions. Bearing in mind the non-musician Leo's own taste in music - singing cowboys The Sons Of The Pioneers are said to have been his favourites - then maybe he would have consigned the prototype instrument to his trashcan, given what it inevitably led to.

Fortunately for us he persevered. And if Fender's idea for a bass guitar was new - not to say downright shocking - the idea of an amplified bass was somewhat longer in the tooth. Gibson, Rickenbacker and Regal in the 1920s and 1930s had toyed with electric double-basses, though none was commercially successful - not least because of poor amplification. Makers knew bass players wanted louder instruments, but couldn't find a solution.

In the late 1940s Everett Hull at Ampeg had better luck when he amplified the existing acoustic double-bass, concocting a microphone that fitted inside the pointed spike or peg that supports the instrument at its base. This 'amplified peg' gave Hull's company its name (Ampeg) and the scheme proved a moderate success.

Four-string guitars already existed, but these 'tenor guitars' were quite different in purpose to bass guitars. When tenors had first appeared in the 1920s they were aimed primarily at encouraging players to move from the old-guard banjo to the newly popular guitar. The idea of a fretted bass wasn't new, either. Ancient multi-string fretted bass instruments had been around at least as far back as the 17th century, while at the beginning of the 20th, Gibson made a small number of their upright four-string fretted Mando Bass.

There's even evidence of an actual electric bass guitar pre-dating Fender's Precision. Paul Tutmarc, a Hawaiian guitar player and teacher based in Seattle, Washington, set up a company called Audiovox to manufacture a variety of electric instruments, including an electric bass guitar, in the 1930s. This was an astonishingly early electric bass guitar design, and Tutmarc must at least be noted as a man with remarkable foresight, if little commercial luck.

Of course, none of this detracts from the huge significance and importance of Fender's introduction of the solidbody electric bass guitar in 1951, as well as a fine new bass amp, the Bassman. But there were few well-known players of the P-Bass in its early days. No one knew quite what to do with the bass guitar, and the role of bass guitarist did not yet exist. Lionel Hampton's jazz band used a Precision, and an otherwise bemused critic admitted that the outfit's bass guitar was a "sensational instrumental innovation". But it wasn't until later in the decade and the arrival of rock'n'roll that electric bass found its true home. A key moment came with the 1957 Elvis track Jailhouse Rock where Bill Black, previously a double-bass player, is clearly audible on Fender bass. Everybody, let's rock! Jamerson, Sting and all the other P-Bass greats were just a pluck away.
Leo Fender had set up his Fender Manufacturing company in 1946, at first making electric lap-steel guitars and small amplifiers, surviving near-crippling cashflow problems to come up with an astonishing six-string solidbody guitar four years later. Early versions were called the Esquire and then the Broadcaster, but of course we know it as the Telecaster. It was the world's first commercially marketed solidbody electric guitar.

Leo had started work on the Tele design in the summer of 1949. Early prototypes borrowed the three-tuners-a-side peghead design of his lap-steels, but the production version had a smart new headstock with all six tuners along one side, allowing strings to meet tuners in a straight line, removing the need for the traditional angled-back headstock. The simple, effective instrument with its basic, single-cutaway solid slab of ash for a body and separate screwed-on maple neck was geared to mass production. The body was finished in a yellowish colour known as blond.

Fender's new solidbody electric guitar was unadorned, potent and ahead of its time. As such it did not prove immediately easy to sell, as Fender sales head Don Randall found when he took some samples to an instrument trade show. He had to suffer other companies laughing at the plain new Fender solid and calling it everything from a canoe paddle to a snow shovel. But Don and Leo had the last laugh when a few short years later these same companies were falling over themselves in the race to get a solidbody on to the lucrative new market created by Fender.

Early Tele men included the remarkable West Coast session man Jimmy Bryant, but again it was rock and roll that eventually provided the guitar's natural habitat. Take a listen to 1950s records by the likes of Luther Perkins with Johnny Cash or James Burton with Ricky Nelson to hear the new solidbody Fender in ear-bending action. The Shadows' Bruce Welch also favoured it as a rhythm guitar.
After a couple of false starts the Telecaster name was on headstocks by April 1951, and Fender's premier solidbody electric had a permanent identity, and a price of $189.50. During October the new Precision Bass joined the line, for $10 more than the Tele. Translated into today's money, that means you'd need about £910 and £960 respectively.

The Telecaster and Precision were typical of Fender's early products in that they had an elegant simplicity and were geared to easy, piece-together construction. Leo would always opt for function over looks. When I was researching The Fender Book back in 1992 I interviewed Leo's second wife, Phyllis, who'd lived with him for the last 11 years of his life. He loved cameras, she told me: "He'd sit in his room for hours playing with his cameras, then he'd go outside and take pictures of trash cans. I'd say, Honey, why are you doing that? Oh, I was just trying out these lenses and filters. So why not take a picture of a tree? They were just something to photograph, he'd tell me. They were near the back door and I didn't have to go far. Convenient, you know?"

Pre CBS Fender Precision Bass from 1964

Take a good long look at the Fender Amp in this video, as you will never own an amplifier quite like it. Unless you have a lot of money. They just don't make them this anymore.

Fender Re-Issue Reverb Hacks

This article explains how to tweak the Fender Re-Issue Reverb units to sound more like the old vintage units.

Warning: Tube equipment contains very high voltages, often several hundred to over one-thousand volts! Do not attempt anything described here unless you have training and experience working on tube electronics. Also, doing what is suggested here WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY. I suggest only modifying equipment which is out of warranty.

Ok, now that the warnings are out of the way, lets proceed.

First, we'll talk about tubes. The original Reverb used a 6K6GT as the driver tube. This tube is long out of production, but is similar and pin-compatible with the 6V6GT which is what Fender puts in the re-issue. The 6V6 is a more powerful tube, and expects a lower transformer impedance than the 6K6. Luckily Fender used a transformer which is essentially identical to the original (13K primary). So the first thing you want is a new old-stock 6K6GT. These tubes are luckily not an audiophile or common guitar amp tube. Changing this tube will lower the amount of drive to the reverb spring, widening the range of the "dwell" control. The drive will be a little smoother, softer without the tendency to plink so much.

The other two tubes are usually a Sovtek 12AX7WA and a Chinese 12AT7. Both are OK tubes, but you can improve these by changing them. I'd start with the 12AX7. Ideally, you would want to get a genuine NOS 7025. These are rare and expensive though. I've found that the 5751, especially GE are excellent in this application and many others. The 5751 is a shock-resistant military dual triode. They are usually completely free from microphonics. They have a gain of 70 vs. 100 for the 12AX7, and for military use are rated only for 280 volts. They sound very smooth and clean. Some can be noisy, but most are pretty good. The 5751 are readily available as well.

The Chinese 12AT7 isn't too bad a tube. But, again nothing beats good old USA (or English, German, Dutch) stuff. The ultimate 12AT7 are Mullard gold pins. The GE's sound good, and the Phillips ECG work well in this application too.

The other tweak requires opening the unit, and removing the tone control PCB. Behind the volume control pot is small 250pf ceramic capacitor. Change this to 390pf, I've tried as high as 470pf. Changing this cap will definitely change the character of tone. I suggest starting with a 390pf film or silver mica cap. See how you like it. To my ear, the sound becomes a bit richer and fuller. Be careful soldering in a new cap. They didn't leave a lot of room, and you don't want to short it to the pot supports.

While you have it taken apart, you might want to check the reverb pan. I've seen a number of these where the springs have come unhooked, or improperly hooked in transport. That's why you should always, always, lock the spring down when you move the unit. You also may want to try a 3-spring pan instead of the stock 2-spring. The 3-spring isn't the vintage sound, but it will make the fullest, lushest, most church-like reverb sound. I put one in my Deluxe Reverb amp, and I really like it.

What the heck is a Fender "Bright switch?"

The "bright" switch on every vintage Fender amp is a switch that puts a small value capacitor (100 picofarads in tweed amps, 120 picofarads in the blackfaces, and 47 in most Deluxes) across the volume control, from input to output. Since higher frequencies see a small capacitor as an almost dead short, the high frequency signal bypasses the volume control altogether. The lows and mids get attenuated by the volume control, but the very highs go around the volume control through the capacitor without much attenuation. We hear this as bright. For this reason, the control is more effective as the volume control is turned down and conversely, the "bright" switch will have hardly any effect when the volume is turned up. If the volume is all the way up, it will have no effect whatsoever.