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| Here's a Gibson Falcon GA-19-RVT amp, which has spent some 46 years in southern Queensland. The amp was sold new in Ipswich, and was less then 100km from there when I purchased it in mid 2009. Other than the addition of a step-down transformer permanently screwed into the cabinet interior, the amp is completely original, right down to its dual footswitch, arrow knobs, Jensen 12" speaker, and carry handle! Like the venerable Fender® Princeton Reverb®, this vintage Gibson amp has a pair of 6V6 output valves feeding a single 12" speaker. It's 5Y3 rectified for nice natural 'sag' when needed, and gives out around 15 watts or so. It has the rough brown 'tree bark' Tolex which was only on the 1963/64 amps. It also has the red arrows on metal inserts on the knobs, and the Jensen CR12 speaker carries the date code of 220407 (220 = Jensen, 4 = 1964, and 07 = 7th week of the year), so it's an early 1964. When the amp arrived at Grouse Guitars, it was very dusty and obviously hadn't been used for many years, so it went straight to a tech for a thorough going-over, with the usual standing order of all Grouse Guitars amps to simply do everything that needs doing, irrespective of cost. The amp has now returned, with the tech writing in his report; "I was amazed to discover that when I cleaned about an inch of grime and dust off the tubes they ALL TESTED GOOD. So no new tubes were necessary. I replaced all the signal caps with Philips electros and the power supply caps are now all Sprague Atoms. I checked all the resistors and the value drifts were within spec so I left them alone. It powered up first time and sounded great straight away. Very low levels of hum and noise. Reverb and Tremolo work great and the footswitch also works. I think you will be very impressed with this little amp." And I am! I have gigged it, and been very impressed with the sound. It's surprisingly bright, and is not a very 'gainy' amp, which means it really responds well to having the mild boost of a good distortion pedal or even a straight boost pedal if using single-coil pickups. I used my Barber Electronics Tone Pump very subtlely, using barely any distortion and mostly a mild input boost. It also really liked having my Z-Vex Super Hard On in front of it for live blues style gigs. The amp sounds particularly good with humbuckers driving it (ain't that strange with a Gibson amp!), and has really nice reverb and tremolo. It's incredibly quiet on idle, due in no small part to the 6EU7 pre-amp valves that Gibson used. These are a high-grade 12AX7 in effect (with a different pinout, so don't interchange them!), of higher specification for use in vintage tube condenser mics and the like. I will supply a set of four perfect spares with this amp, as these can be quite expensive and difficult to purchase. The supplied valves are all USA-made RCA, and have been tested with very good readings. The amp has two inputs (they differ in gain, with the top left input being the loudest) but the really cool thing is the third jack socket to the right of the inputs, which is a 'monitor' out. This is a direct out from the pre-amp (complete with the beaut reverb and tremolo) which can then be fed into a power amp for larger gigs, or even direct to the FOH for big gigs. Truly an amp that can cover small gigs and home recording right up to whatever size you want, without having to mic it. Controls (left to right) are Volume (they call it 'loudness'), Tone, Reverb, Tremolo depth, and Tremolo speed. Both reverb and trem are controllable by the original double footswitch. Check out the 'more pictures' link below to see this amp in detail. The amp measures 56cm(W) x 47cm(H) x 27cm(D) and weighs 16kg. Sold to Jacob
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