We love amplifiers at Rusty’s. They are a tool for great guitar tone and we are honored to have them represented by fine builders like Headstrong amps and Germino Amps, both hailing from North Carolina although in different regions.

Tweed amps from the 50’s have identifiable sonic qualities that folks from Keith Richards to Joe Walsh, B.B. King, Neil Young and the Edge have used on seminal recordings and are regarded with a certain reverence for their rawness and raunchy at times tones. One of these circuits is the 5E7 Bandmaster. It runs a pair of 6L6 or 5881 power tubes with a 5U4GB rectifier and three 12AX7 type preamp tubes which yields two channels Normal and Bright each running about 28W power through the Alessandro SC64 Alnico ten-inch drivers. The resulting tone has more headroom than the 1x12 5E3 style amp partly because of the larger power tubes but also due in part to the three 8-ohm speakers and the load the amp sees which creates a slight mismatch that results in a smooth overdrive when pushed.

Our builders have both meticulously assembled these circuits with modern components and timeless hand wired boards to give us the 5E7 circuit as they hear it. We are going to demonstrate the two amps for you and let you decide which one you prefer. Both sound incredible and are similar in voice. The initial overview of the amps shows them to differ with drivers. Three Alessandro SC64 AlNiCo tens are inside the Headstrong unit, the Blue Lamp 310 and the Germino 5E7 is equipped with a trio of Celestion AlNiCo Gold tens. The other obvious difference is the power tube of choice: the Headstrong with a pair of short bottle 6L6s and the Germino with a pair of 5881s. Let’s put some guitars through them and hear what we have.

Here’s our video of the Headstrong in action. We’ve paired it with an Xotic XTC-1 that has become a shop favorite.

Here’s our video of the Germino using the same song as a reference point using the same guitar and knob settings as the Headstrong for comparison.

Listen to the sounds via our podcast: Hear for the Gear……(to be posted soon…..)