Fender Blues Junior

Since November 2008 I’ve been using the Fender Blues Junior as my ‘small’ amp. It’s a fantastic little thing that looks great, and sounds just as good.

It’s a 15watt all-valve combo with a single channel, that can deliver beautifully clear clean sounds, and wonderfully crunchy blues-rock drive. It utilises 2 EL84 valves in the power amp, a trio of 12AX7′s in the preamp, and you also get spring reverb at your disposal.

As I’m normally used to amps with atleast two channels, this has led me to think about how I approach playing with this amp. With the amp set to a driven sound I can clean the sound up by rolling the volume down on the guitar, and when the need arises, I can then increase the volume on the guitar for a bit of blues-y dirt!

This is a great amp to use as a foundation for a selection of pedals. There’s no effects loop, which may turn off those with bigger boards, but I like to keep things more simple with this amp, using overdrive, wah, delay and a handful of modulation effects, and these work well straight into the input. It must be said that simplicity is order the of the day here, but it does it’s job very well.

One of my favourite things about this amp is the FAT switch. In a nut shell this is a boost switch on the amp control surface, and is also switchable via a supplied footswitch. You’ll find no increase in gain when it’s in use, but there is more volume and the tone thickens up nicely. The boost is sufficient enough to be a practical solo lift mid-song, however you need to be aware of when you’ve used as there’s no indication on the amp or supplied footswitch whether you’ve actually got the boost on. It’s one of the few things I would really like on it that I feel it’s missing.

The Blues Junior weighs like a valve amp should, but the quality of the amp is such that it’s worth lugging it over distance. The volume that it kicks out further proves the worthiness of the junior – it’s fantastic! It can hold it’s own in rehearsals and pub gigs with no problems.

Overall I’m chuffed with this amp. It’s served me well in lots of different scenarios and really sounds great.

This is a regular stock item in the Amusic store, so either go down and check one out, or buy online @ www.amusic.co.uk.