Joe Bonamassa and Fuchs Audio have just unveiled a signature tube amp that promises much of that holy grail Dumble amp tone without the astronomical price.
A 100-watt combo built by Andy Fuchs, numbered and signed by Fuchs and Bonamassa, the JB-ODS adds reverb to the classic Overdrive Special recipe, and shaves a whole lot off the price. A Dumble in the wild is a six-figure guitar amp. This is $3,999, a high-end guitar amp but sensibly so.
“It’s not $175,000, which is a big deal,” says Bonamassa. “Not everybody has $175,000 for an amplifier, so here we go.”
Bonamassa says he got the idea for the amp about two years ago. He wanted a bougie runaround amp he could throw in the back of a cab and take around New York. Nothing too heavy. But something with a bit of guts, too. Andy Fuchs of New Jersey-based amp brand Fuchs Audio Technology picked up the phone.
“I called Andy and I said, ‘Andy, I can you build me an amp? I’ll send you a speaker. I’ll send you a speaker – I’ll send you a Celestion speaker. Can you build me a 100-watt combo so I can drag it around in New York City if I have a sit in or something like that?’ And he built me one of these ODS models,” says Bonamassa. “And, to be honest with you, it blew me away. And everyone who hears it and is around it goes, ‘What is that amp?’”
What this is is a serious amp. It’s go two onboard boosts for a start. One bypasses the tone controls. The other keeps them in play and hits the front end harder. It has selectable mids.
There are all kinds of EQing options, such as the Deep switch for fattening up your single-coil tone, the 3-position Bright switch, and three-position EQ switch that offers two EQ settings plus the option to bypass them. It has an effects loop you can use in series or parallel. The 16-Bit Spin Semiconductor reverb is "the finest modern digital reverb available".
Under the hood, you'll find Ruby Tubes selected JJ's. The amp’s circuit has been engineered to maximise dynamics. And Bonamassa has road-tested it.
“Some of you have seen this amplifier onstage in California, maybe here in New York when I was sitting in last year with Oz Noy, with Will Lee and Steve Ferrone,” he says. “We’ve been beta testing them, and used it in a session with Marcus Miller.”
The speaker Bonamassa speaks of is one of his signature Celestion JB-85 12” drivers (the same speaker that’s in his Fender signature amp, the High Powered Tweed Twin), and it sits in a white pine cabinet, covered in black tolex.
There’s nothing that you really need other than a cable and a good guitar, and there’s so many different settings
“It really, really sounds great,” says Bonamassa. “And to be honest with you, it really does tick all the boxes. The great thing about it is it’s really a plug-in-and-play amp. There’s no real pedal needed. There’s nothing that you really need other than a cable and a good guitar, and there’s so many different settings.
“I mean, we just have settings set that you can play around with this thing. It’s very much like an ODS, like an Overdrive Special, in the sense that there’s so many different sounds that you can kind of elicit from it, but it’s really got a great combination of sounds, and it’s got reverb.”
The Fuchs JB-ODS is available now, priced £3,199/$3,999. Head over to Joe Bonamassa for more details.
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