Re: Speaker recommendations 73 Fender Pro Reverb
If you want to tame the output, try a pair of eminence mavericks which are adjustable from 90-99db. real nice speakers even without the built in attenuation capabilities.
If you'd rather conventional speakers, the texas heat is not super loud (im pretty sure eminence, celestion and jensen all have slightly different standards when it comes to measuring their spls ) but a truly stellar sounding speaker in any fender amp. Thick enough, warm enough and balanced enough for getting great tones at any volume. Ive been using them for years in a twin to tame its output a little, but also in a princeton, a bassman clone, a hot rod and a 5e3. Sounded great in all of them- i dont have the hotrod anymore and the 5e3 has a maverick acting as a faux master volume. texas Heats are my fave speaker by a mile for fenders of any type.
Re: your model. Turning the master up all the way gives you a fatter tone so leave it up full. I know this seems counter intuitive given that you want to reduce volume, but you can always lower the channel volume and use a carefully selected od pedal if you want dirt. If the amp is sounding its best, you will get a good warm (but not necessarily dirty) tone across the whole volume spectrum.
Also if yours is one of the ones with the ultralinear transformer, there are taps on it so you can not run it in ultralinear mode.
Check your speaker baffle too. A lot of 70s fenders for some reason used particle board. If so, replace it with marine ply.
These things will get you a much fatter, sweeter tone at any volume so even when you are running the channel volume low, you will get a satisfying sound.
Forget about going for the fabled "power tube saturation". Blackface and silverface amps and later are simply not built to do that (yes i know stevie ray vaughan cranked his amps but he was also insanely loud which is impossible in most clubs these days). Let it do what it does best as well as it can, then modify your tone using your favourite pedal. You can get killer tones that way, but also work with the delicious cleans on offer. There is an incredible amount of nuance, expression and dynamics you can get simply by squeezing all you can out of how you actually play the guitar.
Last thing...keep your amp loaded with 4 ohms. It is how it was designed and although it can run with a mismatch, you gotta believe that the folks at fender knew exactly what they were doing back then. Do that and youll have killer tone for decades.
