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Read the latest user reviews of FAB amps at Harmony Central-Click here
Some reviews posted by FAB amp customers pasted from the Harmony-Central forums:
Review by Id-man
Download these clips while you read this:
Misty Fox(clean)
Hard Fox (with compressor pedal)
This is a long overdue update on my "Wild RF" problem and a review of my new FAB Fox. It came on New Year's Eve, and it looks BETTER than the pics. Thanks for doing a fine job Rob, it's beautiful.
When first plugging it in, it took me a little while to figure out that SB meant StandBy, and that M meant Main, not Mid's. I forgot about this being a master volume setup. Once I got it going, I was surprised by two things, how absolutely silent the amp is when the guitar strings are not vibrating, and the really low overall volume. I played it for a couple hours, trying all combinations of things, including various pedal combinations, and these were my initial observations..
 *First of all, dead silent between notes - even with all knobs pegged, if I set my guitar down, I do not know this is on. And remember I was the guy complaining about raging RF in my gear, well not with this baby. It's completely GONE! Maybe due to the ultra heavy 1/8" aluminum chassis? This is going to be a huge asset when recording. I'll try it with my particularly noisy Wah pedal tomorrow and give a further report.
*Second, this clean tone is CREAMY! I can push the bass up and get it really thick and drippy, even with the bridge pickup on my Strat. That 8" Alpha speaker can really handle the bass.
*I don't care for the diode clipper switch so far. It squashes the tone a bit, drops the volume, and even though it's fairly subtle and transparent, it just isn't the kind of distortion I think I'll use much (for Blues anyway).
*The bass boost, treble boost and channel boost boost switches all add great things, although again, fairly subtle. My favorite tone is everything switched up and full right (everything except the diode clipper).
*Even with everything switched up and pegged, this is one extremely polite and low volume amp. Low volume is what I asked for, and boy did I get it. This 8 watt amp is easily less than 1/4 the vol of my 15 watt Fender® Pro Jr. Yippee. I'm surprised that there's so much difference in overall volume between these two 'low powered' amps.
*It is much more tame than I was expecting. Not bland by any means, just not very 'hot', which I was hoping for a little more of. I keep trying to turn it up some more, but it's already flat out. Basically, it does not overdrive. No overdrive from preamp or power amp. I tried a few pedals in front of it to boost the signal going in, and in the loop too, without getting the results I'm wanting - of driving the output tube into saturation where you can hear it break up. It's not happening. It lets the pedals sound come through very well, but as far as overdrive, it's just various flavors of clean, clean, clean. There's not a mean bone in it's body. Not even a slightly miffed bone.
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Second Review: After having the amp a couple weeks now, it's true personality slowly emerges. Day by day the versatility of this Fox seems to be increasing as I figure out what she wants - ain't it just like a woman. So she does clean tone in buckets, and compliments my American Strat very well, but I'm am looking to stretch the limits and push that single 6L6 into power tube saturation. There's actually more overdrive there than I initially thought. Not a lot, but it's there. The mic picks it up better on recordings than I can perceive it with my ear, probably due to the low overall volume. Still, the bottom line is this Ampeg preamp version of the Fox is for you clean buffs, especially if you want an amp you can be in the same room with at full volume. That is, until you add a pedal...
Further use of overdrive pedals have given much better results after I've gotten more familiar with the amp, but I'm not here to talk about pedals. I want to concentrate on what the amp can do without anything strongly coloring it's tone. To get the power tube to overdrive, this amp insists on being slammed hard in the front end.
Enter the Compressor. The Hard Fox clip is an experiment in pushing the Fox way past what it was intended for, by the use of a cheap Arion compressor pedal between the Fox and my Strat, no overdrive or distortion. Now the little Fox is doing things she didn't know she could. I like it. I have to wonder what a premium compressor could achieve...
Without getting bogged down in details about settings, suffice it to say the amps controls give a LOT of options, which are a little hard to interpret in a recording situation because the sound the mic hears from 1" away is much different then what my ears hear by the time the sound bounces around the room. So I continue to tweak, fiddle and test. I haven't scratched the surface yet. The future will include testing her with humbucking guitars and an assortment of external cabs. But I wanted to get these initial clips up now. I'm pretty impressed that these two tones came from the same guitar and the same amp.
Eventually I am going to want to get my hands on one or more of Rob's harder preamps for squealing leads.
Final note on the RF noise with the Wah pedal...it's still there a little bit with the Fox, but a fraction of what the Pro Jr has. It's useable at least, while the Pro is not. Time to wrap my wah and maybe my foot with tin foil I guess.LOL.
Review by Justin
FAB CM-16 Head First Impressions REVIEWED
Hey all just picked my FAB CM-16 head up from Rob's yesterday. Here's my first impressions.
The Look-This is one thing that really surprised me. Rob has a Danish woodworker making his boxes now and my head was left in a wood finish which looks awesome-there are metal corners, chickenhead knobs, and a black mesh front. The faceplate is very clean and is arranged neatly. The head is a little smaller width wise than my Mesa 50 Cal+ but is higher as well. THe back is neat and the fuse is on the outside, the tubes line up and everything back there looks as it should.
The Features-My amp is 16watts, it has three 12ax7s and two JJ 6L6s. I got the Fender® Tweed and high-gain plexi pre-amps. The amp has two separate eq controls, one for each channel. There is Mid, Bass, Treb, and Gain. The channels are footswitchable but there is a three-way switch that switches between the two as well as combines both of them which is a great feature. There is also as master volume for both channels. I got Rob to put in two 3pos switches as well. One for compression and one for a bass boost . As with all his amps there is an effects loop(mine is active)
The Sound: Tweed-this is the channel that I have spent the least time tweaking because its good from the get-go. It has quite a punch and the bass boost REALLY boosts the bass(there is an off pos. low bass boost pos. and low mid boost position) The clean is pretty shimmery and can break up if you want it to, I was very impressed with this channel and have not had to tweak it much.
Plexi-it does what it says. The high end can get pretty bitey but I keep the treb at 10:00 and it keeps it in check-the compression switch helps with this greatly as well as keeps it really focused but I like it wide open. One thing that I just tried to do to boos the gain more was put my old MXR 10-band eq with a ^ boost. This made the amp really come alive-as good as I thought it was before this thing really wants to be pushed, I'd like to try a tubescreamer or Boss Super overdrive. THe amp with the boost was just amazing to me, if I had a fooswitchable eq pedal I would use it for my lead tone. It just screams Van Halen!!. Justin
Review by RonniePentatonic
Just Got My FAB Amp, and I learned one thing real quick...
This thing loves pedals, its very quiet thru the front end and can sound somewhat brutal. I made this first clip just screwing around with my old Boss OD1 overdrive. The amp master and gain were both on 10, channel A. (The CM8 combo is pretty damn loud for 8 watts BTW) The speaker is an old Jensen Alnico PM10 from a sixties Bassman, (thanks Rob ) and its being listened to by an SM57 close miced an inch left of center. I did not use an external speaker cabinet on any of the following clips...
Clip 1: (heavy clip, gain and master maxed out chan. A boosted w/ BOSS OD1 overdrive pedal. Makes the amp sound huge!)
Clip 2: (straight amp, no pedals or anything. First part of clip is a very familiar clean funk riff and the second part is just a simple rhythm with everything maxed except the treble on 5. All boosts on and both channels blended. Very raw overdrive sound I think, with tons of dynamics and touch response. Excuse the playing on this one though, wasn't trying to impress, just trying to show the tone.
Bottom line, for my tastes I'm impressed. This amp really has some tone and seems to be built solid enough. I had it running for about six hours straight today and no problems, chassis didn't even feel as warm as I thought it would. If Rob can get the external cosmetics a little more streamlined and get a little more PC on the wiring design, get some certification and a good marketing guy, FAB amps could have some serious potential. Originally posted by RonniePentatonic
The CM8 really likes pedals more than most of my expensive amps. The amp by itself overdrives very nicely more in the territory of old Cream, Mountain, BTO, etc...maybe even as far as very early Judas Priest but not Megadeth by any means. Great tone though, and real "throaty", awesome power amp overdrive, very responsive to touch, play soft, it cleans up, dig in and it just screams. One thing that really stands out about the CM8 is the clean tones are very warm yet PUNCHY. For 8 watts it has some serious balls! Louder than you would expect as well.
Great customer service from Rob as well, he really cares and keeps you up to date throughout the process. Anyone who hasn't personally talked to Rob and has a negative opinion of him really needs to meet him in person. Real nice guy and LOVES his work.
I strongly feel that if I ever had a problem with my amp, Rob would take care of it right away, no excuses, not like some of the big name mass produced amp makers who could give a crap less.
Thanks Rob, especially for the speaker, I love it.
Ron
Review by Occam (Clipless FAB Amp Review)
I don't have any clips so don't ask. I will try and get them but I only have a 4-track tape machine so I'm trying to track down a friend of mine to record some clips but who knows when I'll have them....
Okay now for the review. I have the little Fox amp 1xJJ 6L6 and 2x12AX7's and a 12" speaker. I tortured Rob by constantly changing my order but I eventually got the Orange amp circuit with an effects loop, slave out, FAC control (true Orange style), hi and low inputs and speaker outs. At first I was a little disappointed, the speaker is a pretty old one and definitely on the inefficient side of things, very quiet but fizzy and loose. I'm going to try some different speakers I have around the house and see how they sound but I haven't had much time.
I then decided to see what the amp sounds like using the slave outs into a Mesa® 20/20 and a Mesa® 1x12 Thiele EVM cab and a 2x12 Celestion v.30 cab. I even messed around with an old MXR 15-band eq in the loop. Here the amp sounding just amazing. Very Orange like but not exactly (probably due to the power section among other things). I was getting some great stoner rock tones....heavy and super crunchy and more high gain stuff with a 808-modded TS9 used as a clean boost...this got me some more metallic tones. Run like this, this amp can easily hold it's own against some of the boutique big boys.
Running the amp with the speaker out (I didn't get much time to do this) the amp became much louder and also really improved in tone....but I really liked the slave out best (I'm a volume whore). Oh, there is also a footswitchable boost channel on there but I didn't have a footswitch handy but it actually sounded pretty similar to the TS9 that I was using.
Review by Brad McGowan
Fab Amp CM12
Single-ended EL34, Class A, 12 watts
Channel 1: Hiwatt DR103
Channel 2: tweaked Vox AC30TB
I received the amp from Rob over a month ago, but have waited this long to post a review so that I could live with the amp for a while and take some time to really explore it’s character. I truly have found that the more I play this amp the more tones I discover it can do and the more I grow to like it. I’m a vintage Fender kind of guy, and really could die happy playing my blackface Princeton for the rest of my life. But I really felt that my studio was lacking an offering of the classic British tones. So thus I had Rob put this little screamer together for me. Originally I thought I would get an amp that would have one channel capable of more clean-ish tones and the other dirtier, overdriven tones. Ultimately what I ended up with was something much more versatile.
Cosmetics
I know a lot of people criticize Rob’s amps because the cosmetics leave something to be desired; in comparison to $2000 amps I would agree. But the reason you are buying a Fab Amp is not because they look like a Diezel or a Top Hat, but because you are getting good tone hand-built to your specs for rock bottom prices. In a sense you are getting a prototype, a one-of-a-kind item, a custom-made no frills tone machine, whose sole purpose is to make your ears happy. The appearance of my Fab Amp has been described by my friends and bandmates as ugly, strange, retro, “looks like a sofa from the 60’s”, different, cheap, etc. But as soon as they hear it or play it they never say another word about the way it looks.
The Sound
If I could pick two words to describe this amp it would be “versatile” and “chameleon”.
This amp becomes assumes a whole new identity each time you plug in a different guitar. My buddies and I tried Strats, Teles, a Les Paul, SG’s, and a Jaguar. Different guitars favored different channels. The Vox channel definitely sounded best with the Strats and Teles for cleaner tones. A Les Paul Studio kicked some serious ass through the Hiwatt channel, and a Gibson humbucker equipped MIJ Squire Strat faired extremely well through the Vox channel for a searing laser beam lead tone. Both channels responded extremely well to pedals, especially my Full-Drive. Other Fab Amp owners have commented on this as well. I fully intend to make a whole slew of sound clips to showcase a bunch of different guitars through the two channels of this amp. That’s really the only way I can best convey what this amp is capable of. They will probably go up on the Fab website. So keep on the lookout for that soon.
The amp shipped with three Fleetwood (Mullard?) 12AX7’s and one 12AU7 (for the Top Boost in the AC30 preamp). To be completely honest I thought the tone was a little muddy with these tubes. Through a lot of experimentation and trial and error I finally settled upon a tube selection as follows: V1=JJ Tesla ECC-83, V2=Sovtek 5751, V3=Electro-Harmonix 12AX7EH, V4=Ei ECC-83. These tubes produced the most optimal tone for both channels since each channels shares a couple of those tubes. In essence the tone was smoother, bigger, and more balanced than what the Fleetwoods had given me. Now I could play some guitar!
Interesting Features and Observations
I’ve noticed some interesting things about this amp that I’ve never really experienced on my vintage Fender and Marshall amps. First of all the tone controls are very dependent on the gain settings of the amp especially with respect to the treble response of the amp. I’ve found that at lower preamp and master volume settings that I must turn up the treble controls to balance the tone to my liking. However when the amp is running full out, I must actually roll off the treble a bit. This is not the kind of amp where you can set the tone controls and leave them—you must constantly readjust them depending on what your gain structure is. The tone circuit seems very interactive in this respect.
The Mud control allows you to adjust the negative feedback all the way from Fender to Vox and anywhere in between. I really am digging this feature since it allows you to dial in a diverse spectrum of tones just from one channel. My favorites settings were half way up for the Hiwatt channel and 2/3 of the way up for the Vox channel.
I have found the master volume to be set up in a unique way. The maximum volume you can achieve happens when the knob is turn to about 2-3 o’clock. As you keep turning clockwise (all the way up) the sound starts become chaotic and compressed and almost slightly broken sounding. Not necessarily in a crappy way, but a cool way. It was especially apparent on the Vox channel. It was almost like playing through a fuzz pedal that has attack sensitivity. The attack of the note was compressed to hell but then the note rang out and blossomed. It was like a little leprechaun was doing doing very fast volume swells for you. It was weird, but I don’t think I could duplicate that sound with any combination of effects pedals I have. Then there is the strange interactive nature of the master volume with the VAC control which I will describe below.
The VAC control does some weird, yet very cool things. This is the Volume Attenuator Clipper, which at higher preamp/master volume settings will drop the volume of the amp and add compression and distortion as the knob is turned up. There is a VAC bypass switch to turn off this feature. I noticed that with the master volume set to 2-3 o’clock (“virtual max”), when you turned the VAC switch on the volume dropped roughly by half. However, if after having switched on the VAC I then dimed the master volume, the volume of the amp would get SUPER LOUD and the weird fuzz pedal qualities I described above would disappear. The amp would sound really open and loud as nuts! I began calling this trick “Supa-loud mode”. Bizarre amp juju for sure! Then at this point if I turned the VAC knob up I would noticed that the added compression and distortion effects of VAC circuit would only kick in once I hit the 3 o’clock mark on the knob. Yet the overall volume of the amp was still louder than what I experienced with the master set to “virtual max”.
I also noticed that the amp is really touchy in the blended channel mode. I found that depending on the tone and gain settings on the amp and the output level of the guitar pickups, the tone could sometimes become a little farty sounding. It almost as if some sonic ceiling had been hit and there was not enough headroom for mixing the two channels together. For this reason I haven’t found very many settings with both channels blended together that I like. But I’m sure that will change with time.
The Final Verdict
I really like this amp the more I play it. It’s slowly showing me what it’s capable of. I expect it be getting a lot of use during upcoming recording sessions. It definitely is proving its worth amongst all the vintage Fenders and Marshalls, and Mesa Boogie amps sitting in my studio. I would by lying if I said it didn’t have a sound on par with any of them. And specifically in comparison to the some of the high-gain amps I have, I would even say that it sounds better! Don’t let this inexpensive, retro, “60’s sofa” looking box fool you. It’s a tone monster.
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