But he never forgot that the band’s real purpose was in its service in the city of Birmingham, at the Citadel and that the same standards of playing and deportment were expected in the open air meeting and Sunday morning meeting as were to be given in the Royal Albert Hall! Bram led the band to their second appearance at the RAH in 1964 and chose to play Erik Leidzen’s ‘None other Name’. For lesser men this would have been too big a task, but Bram more than rose to the challenge and took the band to higher levels of achievement in performing in the nation’s most high profile concert halls, recordings on radio, television and LP’s as well as leading the band on three overseas tours. Langworthy who Bram readily recognised as a legend. He became Bandmaster in 1955 taking over from B.T. There began a love with BCB which was to last all his life. Bram was an inspirational leader, a fine musician and a fantastic encourager who took a real interest in the lives of his bandsmen.īram came to the Citadel from Oldbury at the age of 8 and worked his way through the junior corps, learning to play an instrument and eventually joining the senior band. Sigh.The name of Bramwell Williams has been synonymous with the Birmingham Citadel Band for well over 70 years. I regretted that for about 30 years - sigh.Īnyways, it was so long ago that I can't remember enough about the tone to tell how true the AxeFX version is to the one I had. I was a teenager, and therefore stupid, and I figured the 2:1, lbs:watts ratio was a loser, so I sold it. No way we could get them all back in the right places. I cranked it and strummed the first two chords and all of the spoons came rattling off the rack. Some guys were over and we were playing "Wild Thing". My mother had a teaspoon collection in a bunch of racks on the wall in the dining room. I remember being pretty impressed with the resulting distortion, and the fact that you now had 4 tone knobs (2 before and 2 after the distortion) to play with. I had a tech run the output of channel 1 into the input of channel 2. The head weighed 30 lbs, and the cabinet weighed 50 lbs. When I was a teenager, I had one of what I figured was the last of the pre-CBS Bandmasters, made in late 1964 - almost the same time that I was born. No Master Volume either, so keep the Master control in the model dimed. There’s no Middle tone control, so keep this at “5” in the model for authenticity. The original amp controls are: Treble, Bass, Volume Bright and Volume Normal, and a Bright switch. I know quite a few people use it as their main Fender model. The Bandmaster sounds very balanced to me. When it does start to break up, it produces a nice overdrive. It’s an amp with quite a lot of headroom. The model is based on the Vibrato channel. It has two channels: “Normal ” and “Vibrato”. This amp puts out around 40 watts through two 6L6 tubes. This makes it possible to adapt to small and big stages and gigs just by configuring the speakers." The blackface and silverface Bandmaster is a big sounding amp with a flexible speaker impedance of 4 ohm, allowing anything between one and four speakers (8 ohm each) to be connected via the main and/or external speaker jack. The blackface Bandmaster is therefore ideal for those who look for a pure Fender clean sound without making ones ears bleed. A smaller output transformer will introduce sag and compression in the power amp section. The Bassman has a slightly bigger output transformer resulting in a firmer tone and more attack. Hence, the AA864 Bassman normal channel has more preamp “juice” and reaches the sweet spot at an earlier volume knob setting. The vibrato channel in the Bandmaster is even more clean than the Bassman because of the vibrato circuitry loading the signal chain and reducing the gain level in the premp section. They are similar in the way that both are clean sounding with just one 12ax7 tube in the preamp stage (vibrato ch in bandmaster and normal channel in bassman). Let’s study the blackface Bandmaster AB763 and Bassman AA864. : “Not all silverface amps were developed in a bad direction.
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