{"id":2340,"date":"2008-03-28T07:16:11","date_gmt":"2008-03-28T12:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2340"},"modified":"2008-04-01T17:20:02","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T22:20:02","slug":"hot-gear-friday-the-supro-thunderbolt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=2340","title":{"rendered":"Hot Gear Friday – The Supro Thunderbolt"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Hot Gear Friday – done with a nod, as always, toward Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday<\/a>” – focuses on the “Speed Racer” of guitar gear, the Supro Thunderbolt.<\/p>\n

When you were a kid, did you ever dream about finding a bunch of parts in a second-hand-parts store, tossing them together, and – via an improbable series of empricial vicissitudes – accidentally build a go-cart that could go 200 mph? Or do the neighborhood show or skit that would get seen, randomly, by some Hollywood agent?<\/p>\n

The Supro amp was sorta like that.<\/p>\n

Supro was a budget-model line of guitars and amps, just a couple of steps above the makes you’d find in Penneys and Sears catalogs of the day, but nowhere near the A-list amps of the day, the Fenders and Ampegs and Marshalls and Hiwatts. They were priced accordingly, when they were new – outside the catalog range, but toward the lower end of the music-store brand range.<\/p>\n

But what you got…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

…was a value priced piece of equipment with a tone that’d strip the chrome off a trailer hitch. With a good, high-output guitar, the Supro would get the perfect <\/em>overdrive. It was like that mythical, fictional, fantasy go-kart built out of odds and sods that just happened to work better than the sum of their parts.
\nJimmy Page reportedly used a Thud on Led Zeppelin I, II, III <\/em>and\/or IV<\/em>, depending on the legend you choose to believe. This introduces a chicken\/egg question; would people have noticed this humble, budget amp without the Jimmy Page history\/legend, or would that legend\/history have ever existed had the Supro not been a diamond in the rought?<\/p>\n

Who cares?<\/p>\n

All I know is, I got to play one in college; when my Fender Deluxe Reverb was in the shop (a long, gruelling process in rural North Dakota at the time), I borrowed a Thud from a friend of mine.<\/p>\n

And until the dawn of amps with “modeling” processors (subject of an upcoming HGF) I’ve never played an amp that just felt <\/em>so perfect, before or since (short, perhaps, of the occasional Mesa\/Boogie that, at that time of my life, would have cost a couple months’ salary). And apparently others think so, too – once humble Thuds seem to go for princely ransoms on EBay these days.<\/p>\n

If you get the impression that I could burn through a Powerball purse on guitar gear, you’re probably not all wrong…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s Hot Gear Friday – done with a nod, as always, toward Anti-Strib’s “Hot Chick Friday” – focuses on the “Speed Racer” of guitar gear, the Supro Thunderbolt. When you were a kid, did you ever dream about finding a bunch of parts in a second-hand-parts store, tossing them together, and – via an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hot-gear-friday","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}