Blues Junior Overdriven Tones are AWESOME

[zizyphus]

in retrospect, it was silly of me not to specify that my junior has been modded

A few cap swaps REALLY bring the junior to life. There are many, many caps in the circuit that filter bass, leading to the bassless, "boxy" sound. Pulling a few of those caps out or decreasing their value, and swapping the tone stack caps and the slope resistor make a huge difference, but I guess that's obvious

maybe I should have said that the junior has the POTENTIAL to sound awesome, if you're willing to spend $30 on a couple different capacitor / resistor variety packs and take the time to tweak it to taste__PRESENT

[Mincer]

Blues Jrs and the Hot Rod series are the standards for backlines for lots of festival shows. I don't know that they sound horrible, but they wouldn't be my choices. Even reissue Deluxes and Twins would be better, though more expensive, choices.

[Rex_Rocker]

I used to play in a band where the guitarist played a Blues Junior with the speaker swapped for a Celestion G12H Anniversary. Great amp. The stock speaker wasn't very good, so the Celestion really did open it up.

[donaldr]

Surfing YT recently for Blues Jr IV and they sound VERY good. Fender worked out the eq, the reverb and swapped the speaker on the IV version.
Looking to get one with a Flyrig RK5 in front (and use the sansamp section to compensate the volume when playing quietly at home)

[FuseG4]

The BJ4 is a massive improvement over the previous version I thought. First time firing one up in a guitar center I did a double take... Who took the blanket off, the blanket I was used to. Or like there was an internal "congestion" switch that was suddenly now off.

the IV is such an improvement over III that I would never pay money for a BJ3 as long as ver4 exists

[Juanhanglo]

I had a '98 or '99 (version 2?) as my first tube amp.

Is was the same as above. Boxy, no bass, etc.

I made a larger solid cherry cabinet for it, making it bigger than a deluxe. It still sounded boxy and small.

it was eventually given away to a friend of mine.

My laney lionheart is a big step up IMO.

[SoPhx]

Blues Jrs and the Hot Rod series are the standards for backlines for lots of festival shows. I don't know that they sound horrible, but they wouldn't be my choices. Even reissue Deluxes and Twins would be better, though more expensive, choices.

I got stuck using that stuff too many times. One festival even had a pair of Blooze Jrs for guitar backline. No thanks...Now I bring a Twin Reverb or a VT40 for festivals/outdoor shows.

[jeremy]

ive played plenty of gigs with blues jrs and hot rods. not my favorite but you can get good tones of out them