Gear In-depth & Longer Blogs — Watkins

See this amp for sale (or quite possibly sold) and the full set of detailed photos here. Only ten of these 'Black Star' Westminsters are thought to have been produced in the late 50s. So-called because the cabinet had a black with white stars covering - long gone on this one, sadly - see below for what it should look like (image courtesy of the peerless vintage hofner site). Unusually, this 14w Westminster is powered by a pair of EL90 (6AQ5) valves, giving it a warmer, mellow sound. According to the late great Charlie Watkins, this made it 'popular with jazz players' at the...

Or a journey from "Yet another overdrive pedal" to "This pedal has inspired me to play guitar more than any other I've bought in recent years"...   When Gurus’ headman Chicco informed me that their next pedal after the Echosex 2º was to be a twin overdrive pedal based on a classic Marshall valve amp, I wasn’t exactly overawed. “Yet another overdrive pedal,” I thought to myself as I tacked a couple onto our re-order for yet more stock of the fabulous Echosex 2º LTD. Named the 1959 after the legendary Marshall, and Double Decker because it sports dual channels. The...

We found all sorts of things we'd forgotten about, and fell in love with some new things that we'd never used before. Pete from Teleman and Ben from Elephant Disco came down to help us get organised and so huge thanks have to go to them for kicking us into action. It's a facebook post so hopefully most of you can see it, but if you can't and you want to see pictures of a lot of vintage gear then give us a shout. We also made a load of video demos (thanks again to Pete for the great guitar...