Falcon Grande 1x12" 20-watt Tube Combo Amp with Attenuator and Reverb - Black Review

Tone King Falcon Grande

Amazing would be an understatement. I've owned a variety of terrific amps including a 1968 Fender Super Reverb, Peavey Classic 30, Fender Deluxe Reverb (still have it), Marshall's, etc. This amp puts them to shame, the tonal variances you can easily dial up are first class. As you move from the rhythm button to more aggressive, the tubes do their thing. Reverb is quite nice… read more with the two adjustments, you can pretty much go from deep to just a bit The attenuator feature allows you to set the amp up at practice volumes -- to still get a very nice tube break up. All the way up and at a volume of 3, expect to rattle the windows. This amp is a bit heavy, but well made and USA made. For sure, it's got plenty of punch to be gigged out. Worth the bucks, thanks to Sweetwater for having this in your offerings. !00% recommend Tone King, you nailed it. All good here.

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Just a description of the plusses and minuses

The main thing about this amp are the three "modes", which emulate Fender blackface, Fender tweed, and Valco sounds, via internal analog switching.All three modes are useful; none of them are an exact replacement for the real thing. I'd say the blackface sound is probably the most different from a real Fender amp -- not nearly as bright and detailed, but it is very scooped sounding… read more like those amps. The tweed mode is my default -- meaty with a high mid boost, it just sounds like I want a guitar amp to sound when not going for some kind of specific effect. Valco mode is nasally and snarly and when you are in that mood it is inspiring.I think of it as more of a recording amp than a live amp -- there is a *substantial* volume increase as you go from blackface > tweed > valco, which would make balancing a live mix problematic when switching between modes... unless for example you were using the tweed mode for rhythm and the valco mode for leads, in which case it might work great, since you'd get a volume boost for your lead parts along with a nice lead guitar tone that cuts through the mix.But for my purposes it's a songwriting/recording amp, where I dial in the sound I want with a good deal of care in order to get both the tone and volume where I want it.The amp suffers from what every amp with an attenuator I have ever used does: it's either too loud or too quiet most of the time due to the great jumps in volume between the different attenuator settings (complicated by the fact that, as said earlier, each of the 3 modes has a very different inherent volume).But I do appreciate the attenuator for being able to get what is sort of a heavily overdrive Fender blackface sound (by turning the attenuator to max and cranking the gain on the amp). This is not a sound that you can get with any other amp that I am aware of at home volumes.The reverb is great. I do wish it had a built-in tremolo. The high and low input jacks provide more tonal variation. The low jack will get you into some cool early 60's plunky sounds in both tweed and valco mode.It just has a single tone knob. How you set this will be tied to which mode you are using. The tone gets brighter (and louder) as you move through the modes, so again that's another reason I consider it a better recording amp than gigging amp, as ideally you would usually want to adjust the tone knob as you move through various modes.I am unaware of any other real tube amp that offers such a wide pallete of sounds without resorting to some kind of cheesy DSP trickery. In conclusion I think even not taking into account the 3 modes, it is a very good tweed-like amp (I also have a Fender Tweed Deluxe reissue and then gets a lot more use mostly because the Fender is insanely loud), which a lot of nice additions (reverb, attenuator, and the other 2 modes).

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