Fender Blues Jr combo amp

[kiteman]

I found a good deal at my local music shop (mom-pop shop) for this amp. A Fender Blues Jr combo amp for $399. I got the discount because it was on the floor.

This amp is 15 watts into 12" speaker and uses three 12AX7s and two EL84s. It has a spring reverb, master volume, bass and treble with mid control, and pre-gain volume. And a boost button.

How does it sound? *****in'! Crisp and crystal clear. Turn up the pre-gain and push the boost button and you got *****in' distortion.

15 tube watts don't sound like much? According to the manual here, it's 15 watts MINIMUM and the speaker is rated at 50 watts so when you're going to jam, you will.

[aeolian]

Nice deal. Blues Jr is a really good amp for a decent price. I played one at a store once and was quite impressed. I did not buy it because I was not in the market for an amp at the time.

[markb]

I used one as a gigging amp (no drums in that band) for about three years.

It was good out of the box but improved a lot with a set of JJ tubes. Apart from this I made no other changes to the amp.

I found the best way to use it was to raise the master volume to full and dial in the gain for my volume level. This gave the power tubes a chance to open up and allowed me to control overdrive from the guitar. I found the fat switch of little use but some people leave it on all the time, at least the boost is not excessive. In smaller rooms I used a tube screamer for drive but mostly it was tele>cable>BJ. The BJ takes pedals very well, all my drives worked nicely with the exception of my Rat. That just didn't chime with the amp's natural drive.

The reverb was poor compared to any other Fenders I've used but was OK at around 2-3 on the dial for filling out the tone. For deeper ambience I used an Ibanez analog delay, again with great results.

It was loud, 15 watts was OK unmiked in an average sized English village hall. The Blues Junior is one amp I'd buy again without hesitation if I saw one used for a good price. In fact using two together would give a huge sounding rig and still be lighter than the Vibrolux I used to haul around with me. Some users report that running two BJs side by side gets rid of the slight boxiness of this amp. I never found the tone overly boxy.

[Tone2TheBone]

I don't like the preamp gain on my BJ. It's too Fendery but I'm a Marshall dude. Totally different type of OD.

Having said that I like mine too. It's very Fender sounding for being an EL84 driven amp. It sounds wonderful in clean mode! It takes pedals well and makes my POD 2.0 sound like an orchestra. *thumbs up*. Congratulations on your score.

[sumitomo]

Yea good buy,I hear Ruby makes a reverb tank that just plugs in and opens a new relm with this amph,Ive been G.A.S. in for one so Ill see the rest of yall on ebay.Sumi

[kiteman]

Yea, I jammed on this amp and tried several of my pedals and it took my pocket pod and rp300 very well. I was able to control the volume and the gain to a comfy level with the pedals.

Playing straight to the amp I have to crank the volume some so I can get the tone and what a tone I got.

Turning the gain all the way and controling the volume gave me some jammin' distortion. Playing clean jams too. Not a bad for a stock amp at all.