Fender Super-Sonic 60 Amplifier Review

The Fender Super-Sonic 60 is a very versatile amplifier.  The Super-Sonic’s strengths include high clean headroom and two channels of clean voicing and Fender’s best drive channel I have ever heard on one of their amplifiers.  The drive channel is called the “Burn” channel and it has two gain controls.

The Clean Channels
The clean channel side is actually two clean channels voiced from two of Fenders most popular amplifiers – the Fender Vibrolux and Fender Bassman.  The Vibrolux is your dead clean channel, with a lot less low end and mids while the Bassman.  The Bassman voicing is thicker in the mids and sounds warmer and more honky (in a good way). You can switch between both of these channels with the foot switch provided or you can just use the push button on the front of the amp.

The Burn/Drive Channel
The burn channel is perfect for blues, blues rock, rock and beyond.  You can dial in as little or as much drive as you would like from Gain 1 and then adding Gain 2 will make the sound more compressed and thick which is perfect for fatter solos.  This is an amplifier you won’t need a lot of overdrive pedals with as the amplifier does a very good job of producing very usable tones.   I also tried the clean channel with a Rockett Blue Note Overdrive pedal and I think I actually liked the amp tone more.

In the video demo above of the Fender Super-Sonic 60, I am playing a Fender Stratocaster with Single Coil Pickups.  I have the cabinet mic’d with a Shure SM-57 and the room microphone is an onboard microphone on the ZOOM R-16 portable 8 track recorder.

How does the Super-Sonic 60 compare with the Super-Sonic 22?
It was clear the Super-Sonic 60 had a lot more headroom but tonally they are very similar. The low end on the Super-Sonic 60 was a lot bigger and it also seemed to fill the room more due to the spread.  A big part of this could be because of the speaker too. The Super-Sonic 60 ships with a Celestion Vintage 30 and the 22 ships with the “Special Design Eminence” speaker that we all know and sometimes don’t love.

How nice is the clean channel? it’s as nice as a Deluxe Reverb 65 Reissue Amplifier – or close enough that it doesn’t really matter.  The Super-Sonic has enough balls to cut a mix and fill any room.  I will be really surprised if I ever put the amp higher than 4 on the volume setting as it is very loud.

Fender Super-Sonic 60 Amp Details:

Pre Amp Tubes: Groove Tubes – (6 x 12AX7), (2 x 12AT7)
Power Tubes: Groove Tubes – (2 x 6L6)
FootSwitch: 3-Button Footswitch Included
Knobs: Vintage-Style White Radio
Cover: Fitted Cover Included
Speaker: One – 12″ Celestion Vintage 30

My overall review of the 2013 Fender Super-Sonic 60 (or newer versions)

Some people might disagree but my overall rating is a 5/5.  I love this amp! it sounds like magic in the context of a live mix.  It also records well, it’s super-loud and once the speaker gets broken in, it sounds even better.