Guitar Gear Forum

One of the big jam bands here does a christmas show every year i went to last night and the dude was using a Supro. never see much talk of them. Are any of them cool?? i know ive seen some thunderbolt vids that are cool.

all I can say is we used to carry Supro.. I hate saying We, cause I just tech there, but yeah.. There were Supros in there for awhile.. I think they do likely what you saw/heard! haha. They were interesting little buggers that really respond in that "way" when cranked.. Not high gain, and prolly a good pedal platform. But wind em up and get that dirty garage'y(kinda) old school dirty rock and blues.. I guess Id say Stones type stuff.. But I don't dial those tones in much.. But I did plug into them a few times and for little combos, they pushed some air and had a decent amount of punch. Its one of those amps where its the old way of Turn it up and when these just get pushed to the brink is when they get this pleasing dirty tones that have nothing to do with modern gain

Yeah Supros are cool. They have that "edge of exploding" kind tone that a lot players in the 50s-70s used and became popular again with garage bands in the 90s.
It's a smooth, almost fuzz like gain and you can push it further with a treble boost or OD pedal. There's no tightness at all, tons of sag and a squishy feel under the fingers.
It'd be best to get a low wattage one like a 16T (5w) so you can get the full range of breakup without getting too loud.
Once you get into the Thunderbird (35w), you will probably use it as a pedal platform on most occasions, which it also works well.

The newer models like the Black Magick or Royale have master volume etc and they get that tone/vibe relatively well but its different than cranking the older models. But they're cool.

The old ones are where it's at though. They're mostly based on small Fender designs like the Champ but simplified and with cheaper construction, since they were made to be sold as a practice amps. So they get into the "exploding" vibe really easy, because that's what's actually happening lol

When the Supro brand was revived in 2014, I was like, "Dear Lord, not another dead brand brought back to life... I bet they're going to suck!"
I'm glad I didn't put any money on that bet!!!
They did a good job with the initial roll out and the one Supro combo that I tried was pretty good... it reminded me of the Ampeg Reverb Rocket.
I'd rather have a Supro than a Swart.

Supro's roll out was WAAAAAAAAAY better than the revival of the Sunn))) brand and I'm not expecting much from the current Dumble revival.

I have a Supro Black Magick 1695T, which is a great 112 combo. Like Endtime described, turned up, they get that old school break up. I mainly keep mine in the clean range as a pedal platform. Tremolo is pretty awesome too.