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Played the Fargen flagship amp today....The VOS!!!
I visited my friend, Todd at www.revolutionguitar.com today, after his invitation to check out his favorite new amp, the Fargen VOS. Todd has an Ebay warehouse/recording studio in West Los Angeles, and also has a nice collection of amps...a ton of killer Marshalls. I brought over my LP Prem Plus with 50th Anniversary Seth Lovers.
My impression of the amp is this....imagine a 50W PTP Plexi with a tube rectifier, and the absolute perfect volume level....70% of a reissue plexi. It's a single channel dual EL-34 amp that has a mastervolume, gain, bass, mid, treble, presence, and reverb that's bypassable. My first thoughts were 'this thing is Billy Gibbons soul.' There's no way you can play blues/bluesrock on the amp without hearing every ZZ Top album from the First Album to Mescalero...it does it all. Thick, growly, wide, greasy, and just badass! Even when dimed, it keeps it's composure, and the higher the gain is, the more it moves toward the VH Unchained tone. If you consider a Splawn to be the VH tone because of it's tightness, then the VOS is the ZZ Top tone, due to it's chewy goodness at highgain settings. It also cleans up very nice with the guitar's volume, but has a nice clean Hendrixy voice with the master high and the gain low.
All in all, it's an amp for a serious tone connoisseur, who goes for Gary Moore to Billy Gibbons tones, and it doesn't come cheap. Ben Fargen is a believer in stripped down tone machines, not bells'n'whistles, so you've got to know that the $2150 price tag is for supreme bluesrock tone for the guy who wants something better than Marshall has ever produced.....and I mean ever!
Most Marshall-style amps that are PTP don't come with reverb, because it's difficult to design into those circuits. Fargen did it, and it's a mastervolume amp that doesn't sound like one....it's really that good. It's a little bit saggier than you'd want for a metal amp, but for EL-34 blues to the best ZZ Top, Black Crowes, early VH, and Warren Haynes tones, it's the Cadillac!
My impression of the amp is this....imagine a 50W PTP Plexi with a tube rectifier, and the absolute perfect volume level....70% of a reissue plexi. It's a single channel dual EL-34 amp that has a mastervolume, gain, bass, mid, treble, presence, and reverb that's bypassable. My first thoughts were 'this thing is Billy Gibbons soul.' There's no way you can play blues/bluesrock on the amp without hearing every ZZ Top album from the First Album to Mescalero...it does it all. Thick, growly, wide, greasy, and just badass! Even when dimed, it keeps it's composure, and the higher the gain is, the more it moves toward the VH Unchained tone. If you consider a Splawn to be the VH tone because of it's tightness, then the VOS is the ZZ Top tone, due to it's chewy goodness at highgain settings. It also cleans up very nice with the guitar's volume, but has a nice clean Hendrixy voice with the master high and the gain low.
All in all, it's an amp for a serious tone connoisseur, who goes for Gary Moore to Billy Gibbons tones, and it doesn't come cheap. Ben Fargen is a believer in stripped down tone machines, not bells'n'whistles, so you've got to know that the $2150 price tag is for supreme bluesrock tone for the guy who wants something better than Marshall has ever produced.....and I mean ever!
Most Marshall-style amps that are PTP don't come with reverb, because it's difficult to design into those circuits. Fargen did it, and it's a mastervolume amp that doesn't sound like one....it's really that good. It's a little bit saggier than you'd want for a metal amp, but for EL-34 blues to the best ZZ Top, Black Crowes, early VH, and Warren Haynes tones, it's the Cadillac!
plugged into a
Only consolation I have is that I have a feeling I'll be one very happy person when it does arrive. 
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