Fender Pro (or Blues) Junior
Ahhhh, the Pro and Blues Juniors, see these more than any other amp, there are thousands of them out there!
Cheap, small and loud…and lets face it sounds great for the money. Easy to gig and fine for the home, they’ve become the amps that that amp techs love to hate on but for most guitarists out there they do the job perfectly.
The reason techs don’t like them, I think, is that they chew through output valves like crazy due to the insane bias but they cn be a pig to work on. By. now I can get through them quickly but spend most of the time swearing at the Fender engineers.
Here is a picture of the standard Pro/Blues Junior output valves when they come in to me, running so hot the paint burns off and one of them dead, as the engineers wanted them to be:
There are many mods out there for these amps and some companies have come up with drop-in PCBs to fix some of the known issues. I find that they all need a good service to tighten up the cabinet, chassis, speaker and ground point. They benefit from a re-bias to cool them down and always a new pair fo EL84’s!
