I found this little 60s tube amp in a shop called Songbird Music that used to be in Toronto. It used to be a good place to find weird, second hand cast-offs. When I asked about it the sales guy looked at it blankly for a minute then told me it was made by a company called Black Amps in Winnipeg.
The overdrive starts at about 2 on this amp and warms up really nicely. The tone knob does absolutely nothing but, wherever it's stuck, it sounds good so I haven't tried to put a new pot in it yet. There's no getting around it sounding like a small amp but it's a pretty good tone so I used it for a living-room amp. Who doesn't need a tube amp in every room, right? I plunked down the $75 and took it home.
A little research shows it's actually a Pine amp. They were made in Montreal by a company called Pepco. How 60s of a company name is that? They seemed to release products under several different names as many other companies of that era did, before going out of business.
As for this little Pine, it's got everything you want from a small vintage tube amp. Great natural distortion? Check. Mild electrocution if you're touch something metal or forget to stand on carpet? Big check. Chance of getting killed? Well, yes actually. It's got what are referred to as "death caps".
These amps are reportedly famous for having the capacitor inside the amp fail and the whole thing go "live" running the full electrical current through your body. Nice for those who can't afford pyrotechnics.
It's a pretty common thing in amps of the 50s and 60s. So there's a trail of dead bodies in the wake of these amps, right? Maybe it just makes us all feel more like rockstars to flirt with death every time we turn on an old amp. Here's a great link to a video that addresses the legend of death by capacitor.
All that being said, this amp is ungrounded and delivered a pretty noteworthy shock the first time I happened to step onto a heating vent without thinking. It immediately had my undivided attention!
