The Best Guitar Amplifiers of the FENDER brand

I had this amp for about 4 months now, and I like it, especially at this price! It is certainly not the amp of my dreams, but you can’t always get what you want. Yet, you do get what you need!

Let me tell you though that I am a little biased in favor of Fender amps traditionally, I will not go for anything other than a Fender Amp ever (save for maybe a top of the line Mesa Boogie if I could afford any rig I wanted one day) Also, I play mostly rhythm guitar lately in my band and we do rock, blues based rock, and some blues.

The clean channel, as mentioned in reviews by others, is Fender clean. It does not have the crunch of tube amps of course, but it is very nice and jazzy, and can bring up "some" crunch through a good guitar turned up loud with quality pick-ups (and I have been using just that lately, a Gibson SG)

If you are on the clean channel and the effects are turned on, effect type set to reverb with effect level around 5, it is already a super nice sound! Although this means that the other built in effects become unavailable on the channel, which is a bit of a bummer.. if the reverb function was independent, one of the other effects could also be available simultaneously such as chorus, or tremolo, or delay or whatever..

But then again, those who want more effects could go for the very similar Fender Mustang for the same price. I personally am a strictly plug and play guy with very minimal effects, such as a Wahwah, and a chorus pedal at times, and I sure am not into modeling amps which sounds iffy (I have my computer and software to fool around with that if need be, without needing an amp with built-in digital gizmo) Plus I do not see myself punching in modeling codes into the Mustang while I am gigging!

Then there is the second channel, with adjustable gain, and few amp voicings of different amps, simulation of Fender and other amp styles, some of which sounds interestingly good. I like the tweed setting which gives it an almost tube-like crunch on leads. So in fact there is a slight modeling concept preset built into this amp in that sense, however it is kept to a minimum. I was originally looking to get a 60 W Frontman, which is similar to this amp, but with spring reverb, and no effects built-in, though it is now discontinued and replaced by the champion series.

There is also good overdrive possibilities on the second channel. I am not a metal shredder at all, but when I was fooling around with the settings in my rehearsal studio where I keep the amp for the moment, I was able to get good distortion, with the gain turned up and amp voicing set to metal.

Overall, this is a really good purchase for the price. And it has a huge, loud sound with the two awesome 12 inch speakers carrying through 100 big watts. It is even too loud to be honest! And it is taking me a little while to get used to the knobs, and the settings as their visibility is NOT so great. I must also mention that the WEIGHT is a positive factor here, for such a huge loud sound at 18,5 kg. it is indeed pretty efficient. As some of you might already know, weight can be a bigger burden than one thinks with each kilo beyond 20 or so start weighing a lot more than what it is.

I would recommend it to anyone who is on a tight budget, and who loves that Fender sound, and who needs a strong power rig for gigging any size venue, even with a strong drummer pounding away. I was thinking that when I get a better Fender tube rig eventually, such as a Hotrod Deluxe, or a Blues Junior, I could sell the Champion 100 second hand to save some money, but not anymore! I am keeping this one!

I must admit I have not been able to use this amp at a gig yet, because for the last few gigs we did with my band, very nice equipment was already set up for us on location, so we did not need to drag our own rig over. But I am confident that the Champion 100 will hold up pretty good at our upcoming gigs where we WILL have to haul our own equipment, judging from its powerhouse performance in the studio during the last four months!

With a nice guitar hooked up, and the included foot switch, you are set to rock on with this amp! Just fiddle with it, and get the hang of the knobs, buttons, and settings, and find your OWN voice on it before taking it on the road, as I have been trying to do. Because this amp can sound way beyond its relatively small price with the right individual settings for your music, whether it is jazz, blues, rock, or reggae…

very nice, easy to use, lightweight amp, i m gonna use it in the rehearsal room (about 32 m2) in my studio. Order came from store in time nice packaged and without any damage, thanx!

Honestly, for its price it is not just decent, but great. Moreover, if you are a beginner this is perfect, because there are not a lot of buttons unneeded, so making your setup should not be hard. However, if you are pro, you should consider saving up more money and buying something with more features, unless you already have a full pedalboard.

pros;
– really easy to use
– 2 channels
– it has a tap button for the FX (effects) so that you can change the effect the way you want to
– sound great, I don’t see any problem
– for 40W its volume is too big, I mean at first I thought it’s gonna be a quiet amp, and that’s why I was looking at a 100W one, but it shocked me to see that it has such a big volume and resonance for such a little amp

cons;
– it has some effects, but they are not great, so you should still look at some pedals (nevertheless, for beginners it’s still pretty great)
… and that’s it. Frankly, I cannot find too many cons for this amp.

Per overall, it is a great amp, for beginners, and for pro, as long as you have a pedalboard.

Using for practice home and with folk.

This amp has great clean sound, and very decent overdrive, vib and reverb effects.

Includes an aux-in so one can easily plug into a phone/pc and play with a backing track.

Clean channel is crisp enough, and clear – includes a treble and bass control, so there’s flexibility in altering the tone to one’s contempt. Can range from crisp clear, to fat and bluesy without much effort.

Works amazing when paired with something like BluesBreaker pedal.

Gets loud enough to cover a band in practice/small venue.

Definitely recommend if searching for great cleans and/or blues sound.

Pros:
– Amazing clean channel
– Good reverb, vibrato and overdrive(particularly metal and brit rock voice)
– Celestion speaker
– 40W output – gets loud enough to cover practice band or small venue
– Aux in for backing track play – simple and just works
– Light enough to not bee too much of a burden
– Great range of tones

Cons:
– Outside of the effects mentioned in ^^, the rest are meh
– Aux-in volume control MUST be done from the playback device – amp has no control over that – BE WARNED – if you blast your phone full volume through aux, its deafening – lower volume first before plugging in. Amp vol knob will have NO effect on aux in.
– No possibility of connecting to PC and adding new effects

This amp is great for a beginner who wants to learn to play the electric guitar. For this price, the quality of sound is good enough and it sounds very vintage. The different voices gives you a good starting point depending on what genre you want to play. You can dial in pretty cool tones, but high gain metal tones are the weakest and tend to sound a bit muddy.

The amp offers different effects like chorus, reverb, flange and delay so you can experiment and try out what you like the best and get familiar with guitar effects without having to spend a fortune on pedals.

This is a very solid first amp, but a bit lacking if you are mainly interested in playing high gain metal tones. It can still do metal tones decently but it’s the weakest point of this amp.

Pros:
*Cheap
*Versatile with the built in effects
*Easy to operate
*Good clean tones

Cons:
*Not great at high gain metal tones
*Very sensitive volume knob. I play it in an apartment but might not work if you have paper thin walls

I bought this amp for home use and practicing. It does everything it’s expected to. It can be louder than you would expect. I use clean tones, this amp isn’t very good at high gain. Effects are average, but it’s nice to have additional options. The amp is very light, the controls are clear, so plug in and play.

I bought this amp for my sister who at the time started played guitar.
The amp is very good for the money, it has nice clean tones and you can put a little crunch in there too with no problems.

Tthe only problem is if you try to get a hard rock -metal tone because the overdrive can’t produce that kind of sound plus the speaker is small and the distorted tones sound funny, but if you want to play metal I guess you don’t buy this amp.

Overall, the amp is very well built it is super simple to use , the sound quality (considering the price, and the speaker size) is very pleasing.
Great practise or beginner amp!!!

The amp arrived and has been played around with. Loving this thing, it does exactly what the description says and friends with more powerful gear are very impressed. I play a lot of blues and it sounds equally great in my garage on my own and playing as a group. Nothing negative to report, it does what I want.The quality is very good, this amp feels like it will be around for a long time and Thomann when they saw they were sending to Ireland threw in an adaptor so I could begin playing straight away. Thanks gang, very kind of you. I will be shopping here again and have told my friends.

I’ve had this for a while now and I’ve played it for 3 or 4 hours a day so far – my wife is away 🙂
I’m not someone who would want to mess with menus and downloading tones from the internet or anything like that… I’m very much a plug-n-play guitarist who uses very few effects and likes to control the drive of the amp by using the guitar volume. I’ve played tube amps for the 45 years that I’ve been playing guitar, nearly always in one band or another, and my experience of solid-state amps has always been very negative.

These amps are reasonably new and there are few reviews, but there are a couple of good ones on t’interweb now that really piqued my interest… and I’m now getting too old (and lazy) to lug a heavy valve amp and pedal board around. So… I bought one.

After trying all the different amp types with different levels of gain I’ve settled on Voice 02: Fender Clean (’65 Deluxe) with the gain turned up to maximum, the Treble at 1 o’clock and the Bass fully off. The FX Select on 04: Reverb Spring with the FX Level at 9 o’clock.

This gives a glorious sound that’s controllable from the guitar volume, from clean to bluesy crunch. (Strat with Kinman AVn ’62 in Neck and Middle, SD SSL-5 at Bridge.) If you want more then either add some boost from a pedal or choose another voice, it depends if you want to do this mid-song in a live set or practising at home. For my current band needs then no pedals are ‘needed’… but it’s nice to have a few. Tuner, graphic e/g with a ~5 dB boost at 500Hz, and a Chorus. I like mixing in Chorus with Reverb as I pretend to be playing an acoustic in quite a few of our songs. Neck p/up with the volume rolled down to 7 or 8 plus the Chorus works well enough for what we do.

Pros:
If you can find a tone you’re happy with and you don’t use lots of effects, it’s a one-box gigging solution.

It’s light and easy to carry around, get through doors and navigate stairs.

It’s loud enough for what we do – pubs and clubs where the customers actually want to be able to talk to each other while we’re playing.

Some of the f/x are great – especially the spring reverb, vib and trem. Vib and Trem being two pedals that are expensive and occasional use only, so it’s good to have them built in.

There’s no temptation to spend all my time scrolling through menus and ‘deep editing’ patches etc, only to find what sounds good at home sounds rubbish in a band-mix and you can’t change your settings on the fly.

It’s really not very expensive at all considering how good, and how convenient it is.

Cons:
The ‘clean’ channel isn’t brilliant, but I don’t find I need it ‘cos the amp responds to the volume control so well.

There are some obvious omissions like an f/x loop or a speaker-emulated line out… but these would put the price up. Their absence is plain to see if you research the specs before you buy it – if it bothers you, don’t buy it.
The ‘metal’ channel isn’t very good… but I don’t play metal so I don’t care.

Conclusion:
This is a great amp… and not just ‘for-the-price’. My choice of Voice sounds great to me and inspires me to play more. I don’t think you can ask for more than that.

Ok wow. I only got this recently but I’m already in love. It’s all i ever wanted from an amp and more. Originally i was going to go for the Champion 40 but then this came up as I was browsing Thomann. I did my research and was instantly won over by the gorgeous sound of the Celestion speaker.

What a step up from the other champions I heard in store!

As other reviewers have said, it’s so simple to use! Plug it in, mess around with the voicings and effects for a bit (without having to dive into messy computer menus) and you are off. I play a little bit of everything but mainly punk, blues and country and i can honestly say this handles everything with ease. I also love that you can mess around with different effects without having to shell out loads on pedals.

To condense things down a bit:

Pros:
Its bloody light! really surprised at this considering how sturdy it is.

It can take a lot of abuse, far better than any tube amp.

Love how easy it is to choose what voice and effect you want.

It looks AMAZING. Obviously that’s not on the top of my list of priorities but I’m loving the sleek black looks along with the angled control panel.

The open back is great for stashing leads/picks. Even a cheeky drink and some ciggies if you’re careful.

The tap button is great for changing how long you want your effects to go on for, really useful to have that option.

The Aux in and phones out is so useful for jamming solo or in the night when you don’t want to disturb everyone in a 5 mile radius.

Cons:

If I’m nitpicking it would’ve been nice to have an fx loop but I can’t really complain as that would’ve made things pricier and I knew that from the get-go.

Selecting the voice was a tad confusing at the start due to the use of LEDs but soon i worked things out. Now I might even say its a pro due to its simplicity.

To wrap things up this is a brilliant amp at very affordable price point and could easily surpass amps twice, maybe three times as expensive. It begs you to pump some tunes out and at the end of the that’s what counts.

At this price, you have a great sound, perfect as a travel mate for your guitar. It’s nicely built, looks amazing, sounds like a fender, even if it’s a toy. They made it to preserve some nuances of the fender sound, which I really appreciate. Absolutely recommended, even if it sounds like….what it’s supposed to sound at this price! I also used it as a overdrive pedal (heard of some mods you can do to add a footswitch and bypass some wires to make it sound like a pedal) anyway I didn’t do it, I just plugged it in my signal chain, it took a lot of volume off but gave back a nice overdriven sound to my amp, even if a bit compressed. Apart from these experiments, it’s a great buy, take it if you want fun on a budget!

i cant get over how good this thing is ..some people are saying its like a toy or doesn’t sound good ..how this compares to a toy i dont know but it sure aint one ..for a 1 watt amp its got some great sound and the tones from this little monster are fantastic..the tweed covered case is nicely done and feels high quality i think the main casing is wood so its got some nice bass to it ..its solidly built so will take a bit of abuse i think ..its a perfect amp for practising out in the garden or throwing in your luggage if travelling ..its perfect with my Hofner shorty .

I bought this one year ago, after having used a vintge 70s one in the studio for recording my album. Tube amp iso a must for me, as i only use analogue effects.

Sound: like most Fender tube amps, this sounds PERFECT. Clean all the way through volume level 4, slightly crunchy at 5-6, distorted after 7. This amp does NOT have a distorted/crunchy/overdrive channel, this gets done the old fashioned way, adjusting the volume level. I use it at 4, which is still clean, but very bright, but my sound is enhanced permanently using an Ibanez Tube Screamer (TS9) at 20% gain. I use the Vibrato channel, as i just love the reverb ( real spring reverb!) and i keep it at level 3. I don’t really use the tremolo effect on the amp, i find it a bit too soft (using a Marshall tremolo pedal instead).

I use a Fender Jaguar and a Gibson LP, the amp sounds really perfect with both single coils and with humbuckers. When i switch from the Jaguar to the Gibson, i just turn Treble up from 5 to 6, and Bass down from 6 to 5.

I use it at home now, i don’t play in a band these days. I use it through a Koch Dummybox Home (and a Vox mini-amp at rhe end) to play through headphones most of the times. I imagine that using this for small gigs, for me at leadt, would surely need amplification, as you cannot crank it up too much if you want to keep it sounding clean (as it does not have a Clean channel); so i would keep it at volume 4, which gives the sound i need, and amplify it (maybe with the dummyload!).

I’m not rating this 5 for features and handling as it is not really for everyone, anyone. No loop circuit for effects rig, no overdrive channel, the Power and Stand-by switches are in the back (but you get the hang of that in a coupke of weeks), and it is pretty heavy for only 22W. BUT that is all in the name of keeping it identical to the original Deluxe, and rhe result is pretty good, my guitars sound the same as through the vintage one that got me into Deluxe Reverb in the firrst place.

Skip all the pedals, and plug in. feel the magic.

This thing sounds rich, and for anyone not thrashing/tapping/screaming, this thing will pull off everything you throw at it. Neighbours will also be well aware of its arrival. There is more punch than any home needs, and is ideal for any mic’d stage.

The vibrato channel is annoyingly noisy/clicky unless the vibrato is off, but that is somewhat expected given that this amp-and-circuit design is not supposed to behave like a modern piece of kit. The reverb is delicious, and is often rich-enough at 3-4.

The ‘normal’ channel seems to play nicely with pedal-fx such as overdrive, wah, etc. just run ‘treble’ and ‘bass’ at 6-7, sometimes there is too much high-end. At low volumes of 1-2, it sounds sweet.

My reverb pedals tend to fall shy of this spring-reverb, which is re-assuring given the terms ‘deluxe’ and ‘reverb’ in the product name.

Now waiting for the neighbours to take a long-holiday so I can run the valves warmer….