Fender Pawn Shop Special Excelsior

oscillation that works wonders for all kinds of Americana, blues and the like.

The bass/treble switch is a bit all-or-nothing; in the former position it's very dark sounding and in the latter adds both treble and a swathe of brightness. An additional rotary tone control like the Greta's would have been good, but in its absence, you can tame things from the guitar.

Headroom disappears quickly as you wind up the wick, and powerful pickups have the Excelsior driving soon enough. It's a vintage-style drive that can get right into the kind of messed-up, lo-fi worlds of Jon Spencer and the previously mentioned Messrs Auerbach and White.

Wound back to a lighter range of drives, these sounds sit in countless genres from pop and blues, to soul and country. Will it be loud enough? That depends entirely on your bass player and drummer; in Fender terms it's much closer to Blues Junior territory than Hot Rod Deluxe.

It seems that Fender's sheer might allows it the luxury, on a product or two at least, to kick back, chill and make something that's just cool - pure and simple. So while everyone else slugs it out with features and benefits in the low-end valve amp market, in come the Greta and Excelsior with no such pretensions. The premise is simple: loads of fun, not much money and both unquestionably hit the bullseye on that.

Improvements? Fender could use a more expensive speaker, heftier transformers, add reverb and a more upmarket ply cabinet to make it a tone-hound beast to compete with anything. Would you pay the extra £4-500 for it? It'd be a tough call. As it is, it gets 80 per cent of the way there for a ridiculously low price. In these times, that's the way to do it.

Read more about Fender Pawn Shop Special Excelsior at MusicRadar.com

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