Fun trip to Kevin Nelson’s today.

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
Dropped off an amp got the school. My Deluxe wasn’t ready yet but we hung out for a few and he showed me a few items if interest. Item one is a guitar that he’s had since 1976. The neck is an original rosewood telecaster neck that was built as a warranty replacement for an original rosewood tele ala George Harrison and never used. He worked in a shop that had the neck and they were friends with Wayne Charvel so Wayne made him the rosewood strat body for it, late-60’s early 70’s strat Pickup’s. Weighs a ton but plays great. He had the neck re-radius and had bigger frets put on it:

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The second item was a counterfeit showman amp built in the Philippines. Apparently an example of Fender not wanting to spend the money to defend their IP until it was too late.

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Love the Strat. Would be cool to plane the back a bit, chamber the body, then glue a rosewood acoustic back set on and finish.
 
Isn't that how Mesa Boogie got started?
Yeah...Randall Smith was modding Fender amps for people and ended up doing his own thing. John had Kevin put in an Altec speaker (Kevins first jobs with with Altec Lansing in the 60's) and then he put in an output transformer from a twin and added another pair of output tubes among other things.

One of the cool things about Kevin is that you can ask for almost anything in the Fender/Marshall worlds and he can build it for you from scratch and modify it however you want it. Some day I might have him build me a custom amp....
 
Yeah...Randall Smith was modding Fender amps for people and ended up doing his own thing. John had Kevin put in an Altec speaker (Kevins first jobs with with Altec Lansing in the 60's) and then he put in an output transformer from a twin and added another pair of output tubes among other things.

One of the cool things about Kevin is that you can ask for almost anything in the Fender/Marshall worlds and he can build it for you from scratch and modify it however you want it. Some day I might have him build me a custom amp....

I just got back from working on a buddy's amp. He has an old Genz Benz he wants to get rid of, but just got a custom built plexi style amp. It sounded killer.
 
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