The Tube Loyalist Finally Changed His Vote
Between takes on Tuesday, in the four minutes it takes a singer to retune and reconsider a decision she made an hour ago, I read a quote on my phone from a man I had spent two decades assuming would never say it: "I probably would have said that in 2022 or '23, but we're in '26 and honestly, the technology is incredible." Joe Bonamassa, the most visible tube-amp loyalist alive, talking about his own new signature Fender modeler — and saying, in his own words, that it tells him he enjoys it more than the tube amps he built a career defending.
I have not put a signal through that modeler. I want to say that plainly, first, before anything else, because the whole reason anyone should trust a word I write about gear is that I don't talk about boxes I haven't heard move air in a room. What I can talk about is the sentence itself, because it's a bigger event than the product.
A modeler replacing a tube amp isn't a tone decision. It's a decision about time — about not owning a truck, a tech, a spare transformer, four hours before doors because something hummed. Bonamassa has the truck. He has the tech. He has more real 1959 tweed than most museums, and he's still the one saying the quiet part out loud: past a certain point, the box stops being a compromise and starts being a choice.
Fender has been quietly resetting its whole electric guitar lineup around the same instinct, starting with the overhauled American Professional range — not chasing a reissue fantasy, but deciding what a working guitar should do for the person who has to play it on a Tuesday, not just photograph it on a Sunday. A company and its most tube-loyal endorser arriving at the same room from opposite doors in the same month isn't a coincidence. It's a market finally admitting what a lot of session rooms already know and don't put on a forum post.
None of which means I'm buying one before Friday's session. It means I'm going to let the next modeler that shows up in my room stay plugged in a little longer than I usually allow, instead of reaching past it for the amp out of a habit I never actually re-examined. That's the whole of what a good piece of gear news should cost you: not conviction, just one extra minute of listening before you decide.
The singer came back from retuning, we rolled tape, and the amp in the corner — the real one, tubes warm, nothing modeled about it — did exactly what it always does. I'm not ready to retire it. I am, for the first time, ready to admit I might be the one being stubborn about it.
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.