The Silvertone amplifiers

Silvertone was not a maker. It was Sears, Roebuck's house brand, and the amplifiers sold under it were built to order by other companies and identified in service literature by a Sears chassis number rather than by a circuit designation — which is why the entries in this family are catalogued by the number stamped on the chassis plate. Danelectro of Neptune City, New Jersey built the guitar amplifiers of the 1960s line, and its house style is nothing like Fullerton's or Chicago's. A Danelectro-built Silvertone puts its tone controls between two gain stages rather than in one stack after the first; gives each channel its own Bass and Treble instead of sharing a network; sums the channels through resistors into a mixer node; and, in the larger amplifiers, reaches for a nine-pin 6CG7 where an American maker would have reached for a 12AX7 or a 12AT7. Two habits are more distinctive still. The supplies are solid-state early and unusually — a stacked capacitor multiplier building a high rail out of low-voltage electrolytics, years before Fender let a silicon diode near a guitar amplifier. And the tremolo is optical: a neon lamp facing a photocell inside a sealed module, which is what gives these amplifiers their slow, soft modulation instead of the era's usual chop. Sears sold them by catalogue, cheaply, in enormous numbers, which is the other reason they matter — more players learned on one of these than on anything with a nameplate.