Valco Supreme Combo

1946 Supro/Valco "Supreme" aka "Chicago 51" model, 1x10 combo (field coil speaker), 2 6V6's, 5Y3, 6SC7, 6J7--those are off the top of my head but I think that's the layout. This originally went with a matching supro lap steel. Features?? at least they have the decency to give you a volume control...two inputs, volume only, not tone control. When they made these things there was no such thing as features, the feature was it amplified your guitar. No features is enough features for me because I don't like features. I use this for playing at home and I'm going to use it for recording very soon. It's got plenty of volume for those purposes, I think these are about 12 or so watts, wouldn't be loud enough for a club gig unless you miked it. In spite of the simplicity, this a very versatile amp, a lot of great sounds in this little box.

pure tone. Fat, warm, and rich. I usually play this at about half volume with a couple of different 60's guitars with single coil pickups. You can get nice vintage Charlie Christian style jazz sounds, Scotty Moore/Carl Perkins rockabilly or just good old blues tones. At half volume, sounds nice and compressed, awesome sustain and doesn't really break up unless you hit the strings really hard. At about 2/3 volume you get some nice tweed style overdrive/crunch, good and thick. This is remarkably quiet considering I don't think it has ever had caps replaced or any kind of service. Very occasionally I get some intermittent static but doesn't happen often enough to really be a problem (could probably be solved by replacing those caps...). 10 inch speaker sounds good, nice bottom end. I don't mind the lack of bass/treble/tone controls, I just adjust all that via my guitars.

Well, considering this is 56 years old and still works I would say it's pretty damn reliable. I replaced a preamp tube after I bought it and it's worked fine ever since, except for occasional static noise. I'll probably have this serviced at some point but it's cool for now. I don't think I would gig with this, it's old and has cloth wiring, paper speaker, etc. and I don't think road abuse would be a good thing.

Ancient history. Valco who?

I've been playing for 11 or 12 years. If something happened to this amp, I'd have to run down another one or some other weird old amp. I love it because it sounds superb, it can do jazz, blues, country, and great, raw rock and roll too. I have some other oddball tube amps but only a few, don't really care for effects too much, if you get a really good sounding amp, effects start to seem superfluous. this is that amp.