Fender

Est. 1946 Website ↗

About

Fender's tube amplifiers are as foundational to American music as its guitars. From the tweed-covered combos of the 1950s to the blackface classics of the '60s, Fender amps defined the clean, chiming sound at the heart of rock, country, blues, and surf music.

History

Leo Fender began building amplifiers alongside his early lap steel guitars in the mid-1940s, and by the 1950s the company's tweed-covered combos — the Deluxe, the Bassman, the Champ — had become standard equipment for guitarists across genres. The tweed Bassman's tone-stack circuit was so influential it was later used as the starting point for Marshall's own amplifier designs in England. In the early 1960s Fender introduced the brownface and then blackface cosmetic and circuit revisions, producing the Twin Reverb, Deluxe Reverb, and Princeton Reverb models whose built-in spring reverb and vibrato became the clean American amp tone that generations of players have chased ever since. CBS's 1965 acquisition of Fender brought silverface cosmetics and cost-cutting circuit changes through the 1970s that diluted the brand's reputation, but the 1985 employee-led buyback and the founding of the Fender Custom Shop in 1987 restored the company's focus on its classic designs. Fender has since reissued its most beloved blackface circuits nearly unchanged, while also developing modern digital designs like the Tone Master series, which uses amp modeling and a neutral power amp to faithfully reproduce classic Fender tones in a lighter, more reliable package.