My Unhealthy Relationship with a Mediocre Mid-90s Amp
When Nostalgia Decides to Derails My Quest for the Perfect Sound.
I love new gear. Sometimes I think I might even love shopping for new gear more than I like playing around with it. For decades now, I have had a bad case of GAS (gear acquisition syndrome - for those of you who don’t spend much time on forums). Buying, selling, fixing, and flipping. I love it all! I’m a regular on the local classifieds. In fact, I personally know most of the other regulars. I’m also a “Preferred Seller” on Reverb. While I always have a list of pieces of gear I want to try out, I’m also a sucker for a deal, whether I need it/want it or not. I really just enjoy the game of buying and selling.
In a recent conversation, a friend of mine mentioned that gear flipping is my equivalent to “gambling” because my entire gear collection (minus my 1996 Les Paul Studio Gem) is up for sale if I see the money. Even if I know I’m going to regret it in the morning. And, to an extent, he’s right. When you get caught up in the excitement of buying and selling gear at a rapid-fire pace, you undoubtedly sell something you will truly miss.
My biggest gear regret is selling a 1976 MusicMan HD 130 2x12” combo. The amp came into my life in the late 90s when it showed up in a trailer full of donations for the thrift store I was working for at the time. The insides were rusty. One of the speakers was missing, the other had a hole in it. Whatever had punctured the speaker had also left a nasty gash in the grill cloth. It was covered in a layer of dust and smelled like a cat had been living in it for the past decade. Surprisingly, when plugged in, the power light still came on. Even with that sign of life, It was deemed as garbage. I quickly intervened to negotiate with my boss and ended up taking it home for $5.
I took it home and got right to work. The first task was scrubbing the cabinet to try to get rid of the dirt and cat smell. I then bought a set of tubes and connected the amp head to the speaker in my Fender Rock Pro 1000, and no I didn’t check ohms or watts… I didn’t even know what those things were. I fired the amp up and it was glorious! A few months and a few hundred dollars later, I had my gigging amp. It was ugly, it was smelly, it was ear-deafening loud, and it was my signature sound for the next several years.
I loved that amp and held on to it for as long as I could… but as a young, completely broke Dad, I let it go to give my kids Christmas presents. While I don’t regret the reason I sold that amp, I sure miss it… But that’s not actually the reason I’m writing this article, although I sure wish one of those would come back into my life. No, I’m here to talk about the other amp I mentioned, the Fender Roc Pro 1000. As a matter of fact, I also mentioned this specific amp in my last article. The Universe or Gods of Rock or whoever is looking down must have read that article and said, “Tim’s not done with the Roc Pro, not by a long shot.”
I think most of us have a piece of gear that defines us. Willie Nelson has Trigger. Bruce Springsteen has his pieced together Telecaster. Paul McCartney has his Hofners. I wish I could say mine was the previously mentioned Les Paul Studio Gem or one of my Taylors (I named one of my kids after the brand for crying out loud), but no… The piece of gear that has become synonymous with me is the Roc Pro 1000. As much as I know we’re bad for each other, we just can’t stay away for too long. It’s an unhealthy relationship, but it’s one that I just can’t seem to quit.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Roc Pro series, they are a hybrid solid-state/tube amp that Fender came out with in the mid-90s to compete with Marshall’s Valvestate line. They were proceeded by the Performer series, which are very similar, and followed by… well, digital modeling maybe? The Fender Super Champ XD & X2 modeling amps, which combine a 12ax7 with digital modeling, are probably the closest modern relative. The Roc Pros just hold this strange place in history. It was an era when Fender was trying to offer a loud, kind of tube-driven sound, as a solution for musicians who couldn’t afford a real tube amp.
Sometime in 1996, I was browsing the local classifieds in the newspaper. I was a paperboy for years, maybe that’s where my love for used gear shopping began. Regardless, a lightly used Roc Pro 1000 combo was listed for $300 and I HAD to have it. As mentioned in last week’s post, this was my first real amp and I loved it. It could keep up with a drum kit, no problem. It had three foot-switchable channels, clean, medium drive, heavy drive. It was awesome and I took it everywhere I could and cranked it! They’re surprisingly loud. To this day, I’m shocked that my parents didn’t make me sell it.
For better or worse, this amp was only my go-to for about 2 years. Right up until the point that I picked up my MusicMan HD 130. After that, my Roc Pro sat around and collected dust.
Fast forward a few years to the early 00s. I was a college kid, trying to make my way in the world, and more importantly, trying to become a rock star. I quickly learned that the MusicMan HD 130 was way too loud for the small local venues I was playing in so my Roc Pro saw a resurgence. By this time, I owned a Boss ME-30 Multi-Effects board, so I didn’t need my Roc Pro’s distortion channels. I just needed a nice clean and I let the pedalboard do the rest. This was actually a great setup and was my primary setup for several more years until my drummer convinced me to sell him my Roc Pro 1000. While I was reluctant to sell an amp I’d owned for 10+ years at this point, the price was right. And, as we know, when the price is right, I make bad decisions. So my relationship with the Roc Pro 1000 ended, or so I thought.
One particularly boring day at work, probably 5 years ago, led me to my favorite pastime, browsing the classifieds to look for gear I don’t need. Do you see the recurring theme yet? And there it was. A Rock Pro 1000 half stack for $80. I kid you not. A few texts and about 10 minutes later, I was out the door and headed to a storage unit on my lunch break, possibly to be murdered. But as I’ve said, when the price is right, I make bad decisions and this was a risk I was willing to take for this gem of an amp.
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure that my great deal was actually revenge for a domestic dispute or cheating or it was flat out stolen. But the woman swore her boyfriend just wanted everything out of the storage unit and how could I argue with that?
The half stack was awesome! It sounded much better than I remembered the combo version sounding. It wasn’t near as bright as the combo, one of my major complaints, but that may have been due to the fact that I now knew how to EQ an amp rather than just cranking everything. That amp was so much fun but I literally had no use for it. I wasn’t gigging at the time, so it quickly became my fun amp to crank when I was the only one home.
I held onto the half stack for probably a year, but my enthusiasm for it started to wane as it collected a thick layer of dust. Ultimately, I decided to sell it to someone who could actually use it. In the years since, I’ve often thought that I should have kept the head, flipped the cabinet, and used the money from the flip to buy a nice single 12” cab. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.
Fast forward to about two weeks ago. I had just finished posting my latest article, Does Technology Stifle Creativity?. Being in a gear mood from posting, I pulled up the classifieds to see what was new. Right there in front of my eyes was a Roc Pro 1000 combo for $50! Nostalgia started to kick in and I almost texted the guy, but I convinced myself that I didn’t need the amp.
For the next week, I held strong. But then the amp was re-listed, and I just couldn’t contain myself. The seller mentioned it was noisy, they always have been, but before driving 45 minutes to check it out, I asked the seller to send me a video. His response, “Dude, you’re going to spend $50 in gas just to come check it out. How about instead of a video, I just give you the amp for free since you’re the only person who has shown any interest in it anyway.”
And that is how my third Roc Pro 1000 came into my life. The only thing that could have made the experience better would have been if the Universe decided to “Rick-roll” me as I pulled into the parking lot to pick up my newest mediocre mid-90s Roc Pro 1000. How long will I keep this one? Probably until the Universe decides to stop messing with me and it drops a MusicMan HD 130 into my gear path. Until then, I’ll be rocking out in my basement just, like I did when I was 16 years old, with an amp that's mediocrity perfectly matches my playing.