This isn’t exactly what you’d call a Japan vintage piece, but it’s my trusty practice amp. I tried it out at a music store in Shizuoka around 2005, fell in love with it, bought it while on a business trip to Sapporo, and had it shipped all the way to Tokyo—a pretty bizarre way to buy an amp.
What’s great about this amp is its specs: the preamp tube, the Celestion speaker, and the small yet reasonably heavy cabinet. But what really appealed to me was how it produces that quintessential tube-like sound with a satisfyingly compressed feel. The distorted sound is also really good! And it was only about ¥12,000.
The knobs are clean and simple: GAIN, HIGH, LOW, and VOLUME. Plus, it has a switch to boost the GAIN and a SHIFT switch to change the tone character. This switch apparently toggles between USA and UK modes, and it’s pretty interesting how much the character changes. It handles everything from nice crunch to distortion really well, and it’s cheap too (lol).
The downsides are that it takes a bit of time to start producing sound after you turn it on, and depending on the environment, it can pick up quite a bit of hum noise. Also, I wish it had some kind of reverb. But hey, you can’t complain, it was cheap (lol).
The brand itself is American, but the manufacturing location varied over time, and this 12A was made in China. I just found out that Kanda Shokai was the Japanese distributor back then.
Since it’s a practice amp, I rarely take it out, so it’s mostly just for my own satisfaction, but I really like it. However, it’s a bit stressful when I just want to strum the guitar a little and it doesn’t produce sound immediately. That’s why I later bought the BOSS KATANA-MINI as a desktop amp. I’ll post a review of that one later too.
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