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George Alessandro

@alessandroamplifiers

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The Official Instagram Page of Alessandro High-End Products. Southampton, PA

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Alessandro is known for its high-end amplifiers and products, but started as a vintage amp repair specialist nearly 40 years ago. We never stopped repairs and still specialize in vintage repairs and restoration. Although Philadelphia is far from the hub of the Music Industry, we are equipped to receive amps via UPS or FedEx and deliver the world’s finest services for collectible vintage amplifiers. We have most of the parts needed to restore and tonally optimize the finest vintage amps. Knowledge and experience, decades of servicing, owning and dealing in vintage are available for your aging gear.
Message us to schedule service. by @alessandroamplifiers

Some Blackface Fender comparisons this week.
4 vintage amps just serviced and a couple reissues that we hand-wired for comparison. All are loaded with SC64 speakers except the vintage Princeton Reverb.
The Twin Reverb is for sale and just came off the stage from the Buddy Guy celebration at Radio City Music Hall last week, message us if interested by @alessandroamplifiers

What a beautiful celebration for Buddy last night. At 90 he still has it. Happy Birthday Buddy. by @alessandroamplifiers

Wednesday Jam.

#saxonweiss #guitar #musician by @alessandroamplifiers

1979 Dumble ODS 50 that we serviced and resold recently.
This was an interesting one and not quite as vintage as the amps we normally specialize in. After the service and retube, it needed to run into a 4 ohm load to operate properly. As a 1x12 combo, it was 8 ohms. We searched for months to find a real 4 ohm EV12L to no avail. I even considered reconing one with a custom 4 ohm voice coil, but it really sounded great with 2 12” speakers, so I built a custom extension cabinet for it. As that 50 year old buckskin suede Dumble used is not to be found, I actually used a real buck hide. I am nearly certain Dumble built this with an extension cabinet when new, but over the last half century they were separated. Although it is not a perfect match, I felt sonically it mated harmoniously. There is the original EV12L in the combo and I put our Eminence made Neo SC-X speaker in the extension cabinet. John Mayer has been using these speakers in his 2x12 cabs we made for him for well over a decade with his Dumbles, so I knew they paired well.
We tried to let the amp’s beauty come through on the video, but in the room it was really special. A few seconds into the video, we hit the foot switch and kicked the overdrive in.
I was fun to have this Dumble in for a while. I got to spend a lot of time listening to and looking into this amp. This is definitely the era I prefer of Dumble’s designs. Its cleans are the big Fender sound that Fenders can not even do and the built in overdrive takes it up a notch.
Having a built-in overdrive in the 70s was really world changing. Today we use petals and effects in front, so it’s not really a positive to have it inside the amp anymore, but what this amp does, showed how dialed in he was at that time. by @alessandroamplifiers

The original “Amp Pirate”
As the story goes, Jim Marshall made his first guitar amps using the Fender Bassman 5F6-A schematic. This video shows an original Bluesbreaker 4x10 and a Bassman style amp comparison. On paper these 2 amps are basically identical, the schematics are the same.
The legacy of the Marshall amps lie in 5454 miles, the distance between Fullerton and London. If Jim was in the USA, he may have ended up being the first Boutique amp company. Because he was in England, he used the parts readily available to him, many coming from Radio Spares, the Radio Shack of London. Using the same values but British parts, the first Marshall’s were born. The dramatic difference in those parts, differentiate the final voicing and performance between the otherwise identical amps.
By the mid to late 60’s, the Marshall amps did evolve into their own, but these early examples are an American design, reborn in London.
I also want to give credit to Howard Dumble for one of my favorite terms “Amp Pirate.” Art inspires imitation, but a copy is a copy. by @alessandroamplifiers

‘64 Bandmaster just serviced an up for sale. It is actually a white amp but has been sprayed black at some point in its life. I don’t have time to try and clean it, so all serviced as is for $1750 or $2500 with the Bassman 2x12 by @alessandroamplifiers

Here are a few Black Face style amps to compare.
The vintage ones have all been serviced by me.
I dial in all the amps to sound good with that track, usually volume about 8 and tone controls dialed in from there.
The Super Reverb is for sale, $1500 and has the AZZ mod to the left channel. by @alessandroamplifiers

Had a run of historic vintage Fender amps through the shop for service recently. Thought it would be fun to record and post them to hear how amazing and different these are. by @alessandroamplifiers

20 years ago I built what is one of the finest guitar amps ever built. No quality components were spared at the time. I always built high-end, but for those who wanted the next level, we offered upgrade options. This amp not only has the Black Gate capacitors, Riken Ohm audio grade resistors and Audio Quest Functionally Perfect Solid Silver wire, but the client opted for the solid silver chassis upgrade. The chassis acts as the ground plane in these amps, so going from the silver plated solid copper to solid silver, is a functional upgrade. There is 4 pounds of silver needed for this chassis because of the density of silver. This was a reasonable upgrade at the time for $2000, but since silver has gone up 10x, today that would be $20,000+ to do. That is the true definition of “cost of diminishing returns”.
This amp went 20 years without service or tube replacement. It was definitely in need of power tubes but the vintage 5691 preamp tubes were still operating perfectly. We did opt to upgrade the tired coupling capacitors to what I did not have available then, solid silver foil caps. This took the amp to the next level of dynamics and transparency.
It was good to see this beauty again, but off to is owner it goes. by @alessandroamplifiers

Saxon got to sit in with EJ at the Grove in Anaheim. So bummed I missed it live because of a family situation but he made me proud.
Gotta love the playing as well as the tone, Crossbred combo come through on stage as well as home and studio. by @alessandroamplifiers

The legendary 5F8-A, high powered 1959 Tweed Twin just serviced and restored.
I am still shocked to see how “techs” service historical and extremely valuable amps like this. Luckily I have the parts, knowledge and experience to restore vintage amps like this, but it still saddens me to see the butchery done to them. I don’t understand why owners do not seek out the right people to service these vs just letting any shop work on them. This would not happen to antique violins or cars, or even people, would we not all find a specialist doctor if we were sick or aging?
Anyway, this particular amp must have been played a lot in its 67 years of existence. It is the first tweed that I have seen that every one of the yellow Astron coupling caps was leaking DC voltage beyond usability. Because of this amp’s extreme value, sometimes we can excuse a tiny bit of leakage, but not one of them could be used safely. The coupling caps are critical to the sound of an amp, putting modern caps in this is NOT an option. I have custom caps made for our Alessandro amps and they have the vintage tone, so when restoring a vintage amp, they sound authentic. There is a lot to being a specialist, including the passion and reverence for vintage. by @alessandroamplifiers