AN ANALOGUE MIND IN A DIGITAL WORLD
Fitness Traynor…
… get in the ring with Thumper’s amps.
I knew nothing about Traynor amps before I bought one, except that it sounded incredible. It was a Traynor YBA-1 Bass Master, and though it didn’t look like much the noise that came out of it was truly phenomenal*. I have never heard an amp that startled me as much as this amp did the first time I heard it. So I did a little research and almost immediately discovered a lot of people calling it “the poor man’s Plexi”. Indeed most of the posts and blogs I found about the YBA-1 were discussions of the best ways in which they could be modded to be close to Marshall JTM specs. But then I found this comment on a forum and, as well as making me laugh, it made me look a little deeper into the history of Pete Traynor and how he became an amp master: “I’m going to start buying up old Plexis and mod them to YBA-1 specs.” Because I agree with that guy, this amp has got something special that I don’t want to mess with. It’s not a poor-man’s-Plexi, it’s a Traynor, with it’s own character and great personality. I found it even more irritating as I kept coming across people who claimed that Traynor merely copied Marshall — because the more research I did, the more information I found that showed that this just wasn’t true.
There’s a story that goes something like this: It is NAMM week, or one of those big junkets for the gear manufacturers, and whilst business is being done, dinner is also being eaten. It’s about socialising of course but more than anything else it’s about talking shop. There are some bigwigs from Ampeg at the high table. The delegates from Elkhart, IN are in high spirits and good humour (in the early 1970s, after they were bought out by Magnavox, Ampeg head office was just south of Kalamazoo, MI). Also at the table is a delegate from Yorkville Sound in Toronto, ON, one Peter Traynor, or perhaps he’s seated at another table nearby. One of the Ampeg board cracks a joke about the rumour going round concerning Pete’s unorthodox test regimen:
“So you throw them out the window, Pete, is that right?”
“Yes we do. You mean you don’t?”
Or something like that, anyway; it’s not verbatim, but the anecdote has been oft repeated. Because that’s exactly what Pete Traynor would do. Pete’s original workshop was in a backroom at Toronto’s Long & McQuade music store, but in 1964, a year after Yorkville Sound was incorporated, it was moved to a room above the store. Any time he designed a new prototype or significantly re-engineered an existing model the final test was to throw it from the second story window (that is, the first floor for us europeans) into the parking lot. The flying amp would be retrieved, the shattered valves shaken out, a new set of tubes would be put in and it would be run up on the bench. Now that’s about as roadproof as you can make ‘em. But as we’ll see, that’s just one of the reasons original Traynor amps are about as tough as any piece of gear ever toured. In 1965 Yorkville Sound moved into the second story of an old industrial building on Dundas Street East. By the middle of 1967 they had outgrown this building and moved a few blocks down Dundas St. E. from number 431 to number 744, down by the river, where they occupied not only the second floor but a large part of the ground floor as well. But by the summer of ’73 Yorkville Sound had moved into a single story factory unit in Scarborough and they had to get a vibrating shaker table to emulate a hard life on the road and put the new amps through their paces. The Bass Master we have at New Cut Studios was made there in April of 1975, about a year before Pete Traynor retired from Yorkville, and may have been tested on the shaker. But you never know — he might have thrown it out the window for good measure.**
The Long & McQuade music store began life in 1957 when trumpet player & bassist Jack Long teamed up with drummer Jack McQuade and opened premises at 803 Yonge Street in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood. As well as retailing instruments they soon developed a market renting out equipment — particularly amplifiers and speaker cabinets to bands who found themselves playing bigger rooms. And there were a lot of venues along the very long Yonge Street. Their increasing stock of hire amps were doing great business but were not always treated well by the customers. It’s very easy to blow a piggy-back valve head if you’ve only ever used small combo amps and know nothing about sudden loss of output impedance when the speakers are disconnected. Around 1962 Jack & Jack were approached by a TV & radio repairman who wanted to hire a backroom at the store to service the affluent, neighbouring Rosedale district. Part of the deal was that he would also service an ever growing mound of damaged rental amps & speakers. Backline wasn’t really the guy’s field however and so the mountain grew. And grew — and before long the TV/radio man gave up on the musical equipment altogether and moved on. Pete Traynor was a young musician who played in local bands, including several with his friend Robbie Robertson who would go on to great things. His father was an electrical engineer and for some time Pete had been fixing amps and guitars for his friends. Pete was in his early 20s in ’63 when he offered to fix the backlog of broken gear at Long & McQuade. To everyone’s amazement he cleared the backlog of repairs in no time at all. You could say a pair of Jacks had come up trumps.
The way Pete told the story to the Toronto Star in 2011: “One night at closing time I went to Long & McQuade’s to get some strings for a friend, and I heard their repair man had quit, leaving behind 126 amps that needed fixing. I said I’d take a look, so they left me with the keys and I worked through the night. At nine the next morning, when people started arriving for work, every one of those amps was in working order. That’s when they took me on as their amp repair guy.” It’s quite some claim but whatever his work-rate really was, Traynor was hired: initially on piecework terms, he was quickly taken on full time. Very soon after starting at the L&M store Pete was asked if he could build a mobile PA system. There was a distinct shortage in the city so Pete took an idea from a 1930s RCA design and started building column speaker cabinets and amplifiers. Before long Pete also started to think about how much easier the rental stock of instrument amps would be to repair with a few design modifications. He was already repairing amps with the cheapest, good quality components he could source and modding where necessary away from stock designs. It was a small step from there to building an instrument amplifier of his own. Long & McQuade’s hire stock was always at full capacity and Pete worked out he could make a good quality amp head and still turn a small profit. Furthermore he decided he was going to make them super rugged — near impossible to blow expensive components like output transformers like he was always having to replace in the hire gear from other manufacturers. Jack Long agreed to back Pete’s own money with a larger investment if Pete would make an initial batch rather than just one amp. And so what did he decide to make? Pete played a little guitar but he mostly gigged as a bass player. There was only one choice really — I mean, what amp did Jim Marshall copy? What amp did Randall Smith decide to hot-rod and cram into the first tiny Princeton Boogie cabinet? The Fender 5F6-A Bassman circuit of course. But Pete’s amps had some definite upgrades, including huge power transformers and filter caps, massive output transformers to handle the low frequencies properly, as well as an extra, sacrificial small transformer to cope with impedance mismatches. That “poor man’s Plexi” moniker has led some people to claim that Traynor copied the Marshall JTM 45. And there’s another reason why that nickname irks. When the first six Traynor Dyna-Bass 40 watt amps (40w sine-wave RMS, 8 Ohms, 5%THD) came off the bench in October 1963 there were no proper Marshall Plexis to copy.
Ken Bran, Dudley Craven and Ken Underwood, so legend has it, discussed the idea of making a guitar amp in a Wimpy Bar in Ealing late one Friday night sometime in 1962 after their weekly Greenford amateur radio club meeting. Craven & Underwood had been EMI apprentices and Bran was a former Pan Am Airways engineer who had been employed by Marshall to service broken Selmer & Vox amps which Jim sold in his shop. I think we see a pattern emerging here. Craven’s associate Dick Findlay was a technical advisor and Underwood certainly got involved in building the first amps, but it was Bran and Craven who implemented most of the minor design modifications they made to the input and output stages of the Bassman circuit. It’s worth mentioning here that owners of Dyna-Bass amps have noted that they are almost stock 5F6-A architecture with barely a change in component values. There weren’t many Fender Tweed amps in London in 1963, trade restrictions had only recently been lifted and they were expensive to import. And by '63 very few new Fender amps were still Tweed models, probably only the Harvard and the Champ. But I’m willing to bet there were plenty of Tweed amps in Toronto in the early sixties.
The Marshall engineers made six prototypes, the last of which apparently nailed the new sound they were looking for. No doubt the input of guitarists like Big Jim Sullivan, Brian Poole and the young Pete Townshend — all big proponents of a British Bassman variant — were factored into the tone they aimed for. Official Marshall history has it that the No.6 prototype was first demonstrated in the shop in September 1962, and that they immediately took orders for 23 new amps. Underwood however claims that a band was put together to first demo the amp one Sunday night at The Ealing Club. Incidentally the drummer for that gig was Marshall shop Saturday boy and future Jimi Hendrix Experience sticksman Mitch Mitchell. Underwood also claims that one of the songs played at that gig was The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There — which wasn’t released until March 22nd 1963. Whatever the date of it's debut, the first production Marshall JTM 45 MK II “coffin badge” amps were certainly on the market in 1963, but with demand for these hand built models being so high, I’d be surprised if any had made it as far as Toronto by October of that year when Pete built his first run of 6 Dyna-Bass heads. Aside from this, the first plexi-glass control panel Marshalls (hence the Plexi nickname) weren’t made until 1965. It’s kind of like the argument over who discovered calculus. If Jim Marshall is Sir Isaac Newton then Pete Traynor is Gottfried Leibniz — but let us not forget, Leo Fender is Descartes, Fermat & Pascal all rolled into one.
In The Soul Of Tone Tom Wheeler quotes an interview with (then recently retired) Peavey rep Mike Borer: “I was manager at Jim Marshall’s music store when he began building his amps. Before then I worked in a music store in London called the Lew Davies Shop, which was owned by Selmer.“ While he was working at Lew Davies*** the shop bought a Tweed Bassman from an American serviceman who was returning to the States, which Borer then sold on to Adam Faith’s bassist. Borer later bought it back off the same guy, for his own use playing with Cliff Bennet & The Rebel Rousers. “The Bassman was such a great-sounding amp that Jim asked to borrow it” continued Borer. “I brought it into work. Ken Bran drew up the [Marshall] schematic from it across the street in the old smaller, original store.“ Jim Marshall opened his first shop at 76 Uxbridge Road, Hanwell in West London on the 7th July 1962 (according to the Marshall website) and then a second larger shop over the road at number 97 as well. The 5F6-A Bassman is ostensibly a 45 Watt amp. But the various output transformers in the earliest Marshalls, made by Elstone or Reading Windings (usually RS branded) were only rated at 30w. As the JTM 45 model developed the OTs were improved with 40w and 50w components from companies like Drake in 1965, and later from Dagnall as well. The first Marshalls used military surplus, rugged 5881 output valves instead of 6L6s but the supply soon started to dwindle. By 1964 it was easier to source KT66s instead of 5881s, upping the output from 40w to 45w and bringing more bite & distortion. By 1966 the new 50w Marshall Plexis moved to EL34s, although this was probably because KT66s were in turn becoming more expensive and harder to source. By comparison Traynors were measured at 40w in their earliest incarnations, but as we’ll see this was a low estimate and they were loud for a variety of reasons. Anyway, enough of Marshall amp history: as with the Bluesbreaker combo origin story, it’s difficult to separate the myth from the pith.
There was another Fender inspired amp named the Bassmaster released in 1963, judging by their first catalogue appearance. These British amp heads were made by Selmer and while they may have started off as 30w amps as early as 1962 (initially clad in the elegant Blue-Grey livery and later in the iconic silver Croc-Skin) by the end of ’63 they were 50w EL34 monsters — and long before Marshall settled on that formula. And again, people often mistakenly call them Plexi knock-offs. The Selmer Bassmaster changed it’s name to the better known Treble N’ Bass model in 1964 just as Traynor were changing their name from Dyna-Bass to Bass Master. I wonder if there’s a connection? Again, as with the Traynors, having large output transformers made for a tight, rounded bottom end with no flub or mush. I believe the Selmer Bassmaster was modelled on the tube rectified, 6G6 circuit Brownface Bassman heads that Fender brought out in 1960. Which is another reason why they are Fender tributes and certainly not Marshall clones. With the channels jumpered these Selmers are raging beasts. It was a Mark III 100w Tn’B that Lemmy used before he got his ’76 “Murder One” Super Bass. We have a nice early ‘70s Selmer Tn’B SV Compact 50R combo at New Cut Studios with it’s original pair of 12” Rola Celestions in it. It makes a great clean amp and is a superb pedal platform, but it’s over-under, double-barrel Greenbacks are also fantastic for filling up the stage of a small venue.
In 1964 the Traynor Dyna-Bass Amp (of which the first run with brass serial number plates from 0001 — 0024 may be the only ones in existence****) was rebadged as the Bass Master Amp and the legend on it’s rear plate changed from “Bass Amp” to the model number “YBA-1”. However even the earliest Dyna-Bass models had the inscription YBA-1 TUBE LAYOUT on a hand written valve chart in the bottom of the cabinet. I guess it was always the Yorkville Bass Amp mark 1, after all. After making about a thousand Bass Masters Traynor moved over to solid state rectifiers from 5AR4 valves; and around about the same time, to 6CA7 output tubes from the original spec 7027A valves. The 6CA7 is similar to a 6L6 but with different pinouts and was invented by Sylvania as America’s answer to Mullard’s 1949 EL34 design, but with a different internal construction (GEC in West London in turn developed their KT77 as an improved 6CA7 substitute). EL34s generally have a more pronounced midrange compared to the other two designs which have more bottom end power and open sounding high harmonics. So again, like Selmer (though I don’t know if there was any influence there) Traynor moved to an EL34 type output valve before Marshall. It may be pure coincidence rather than a nod to Pete Traynor, but when Leo Fender started making amps again with the first Music Man Sixty-five series in 1974 he didn’t go back to the 6L6s his old amps were famous for — he used 6CA7s.
Despite the changes over the Bass Master’s evolution the diode rectified YBA-1 amps do not sound a great deal different from the earlier models. Even the early valve rectified YBA-1s are tighter than early JTMs or Tweed Bassmans. They are tight and articulate all the way down and don’t really sag at all. That squishiness that some tube-rec amps have isn’t really a feature of most YBA-1s, largely because of the over spec’d Hammond transformers. Also, some of the original 1000 Bass Master Amps were converted to diodes by Traynor under service. After all, it’s a more stable circuit that gives more clean headroom efficiently, which is usually more desirable in a bass amp. What we’re talking about here is that valve rectifiers (with their higher internal resistance than diodes) usually compress the guitar signal a little giving a more sustained, mid-boosted timbre. It’s caused by the fluctuation of DC voltage through the valve on the signal’s decay — kind of like the amplitude modulation of a very slow tremolo. Large transient signals, when a player really digs in and plays hard, cause overheating and a consequent voltage drop that then recovers. So a valve rectifier is a saggy thing, but a large part of that is also dependent on the power transformer and the filter caps. This is all about how the power supply can actually affect the voice of an amp.
So, the poor-man’s-Plexi indeed — I’m not here to knock the Marshall heritage, their contribution to Rock n’ Roll is inestimable, but Traynor’s input, much like their output, is hugely underrated. They really are the ugly ducklings of valve amp history. I know what you’re all asking now, do they sound like an original Plexi? I only have our late model YBA-1 to make comparisons. After trawling through as many forums as I could find I have distilled the consensus of those who have actually owned and played the amps they compare down to this: The first valve rectified Dyna-Bass/Bass Masters sound somewhere between a Tweed Bassman and an early “offset” JTM 45. The solid state rectifier YBA-1 is a bit more “Plexi” but mostly like a late “Black Flag” JTM 50 or JMP Lead. While the bigger YBA-1A head sounds more like a Marshall Super Bass but also a lot like a HiWatt DR103. The architecture may be different but many owners of the “100 Watt” Mark II Bass Masters bought them because they already played vintage HiWatts. As to our own comparisons: here at New Cut Studios we have reissue models of both the Fender ’59 Bassman LTD Tweed and Marshall Plexi panel MK II JTM 45; as well as a 1978 Ally panel JMP 50w Mk2. Lead — and they are all very nice amps — but the ’75 Traynor just blows them away.
Want to look inside a ‘70s Bass Master to see what all the fuss is about? Simply remove the four screws from the top and lift the panel. The chassis is laid out in front of you, a long strip of eyelet board runs through the middle allowing all the hand wired components to be tested or replaced without having to remove the chassis. It’s not exactly the same as a 5F6-A component board and despite all the mustard caps it’s not the same as a JTM Plexi but it is the same amp fundamentally. This easy access, point-to-point construction is another reason why they are such favourites for modders. Pete was a repair man and he made his amps repair friendly in ways nobody else ever has. There’s the sacrificial small transformer on the output stage to prevent blowing the main OT, there’s the circuit breaker re-set switch instead of a fuse. Over here are convenient points to meter a ten volt DC drop across a resistor so you can set the bias to the power valves without an oscilloscope, or having to work out plate dissipation with a multi-meter & calculator..
Pete Traynor was a man who thought in terms of solutions, when he introduced his YBA-3 Custom Special bass stack in 1967 it put out 130 Watts RMS (clean at moderate level remember) at 4 Ohms into an 8 x 10” speaker cabinet — the YC-810 "Big B" enclosure, 200 Watts RMS at 4 Ohms. Maybe he just thought that if you stacked two Tweed Bassman cabs you’d get a great sound — but the point is Traynor had that thought 2 years before Ampeg brought out their SVT-810. He was a pioneer of concert audio and Traynor fans from back in the day also claim that he invented the first wedge-shaped floor monitor, before Bill Hanley introduced the idea to Neil Young for Buffalo Springfield. Perhaps that's why Hanley was quoted as saying “Oh crikey, I don’t know how we came up with them! They were really antique at the time though. They looked like rabbit hutches and that’s what I used to call them.”
Pete Traynor was born on the 28th of April 1940, I’ve just looked that up online and found his obituary in the Toronto Star newspaper. As I write, today’s date is April 28th 2020. I’m a little shocked by such a big coincidence — that I would just happen to look up his dates on the 80th anniversary of his birth. Especially since I made a start on this article about a fortnight ago. I will try and finish writing this for the 4th anniversary of his passing. When Pete passed away on May 7th 2016 legendary musician Robbie Robertson paid this tribute:
“Pete Traynor or Thumper as we called him, was an old pal of mine. We played in several bands together: The Rhythm Chords, Robbie and The Robots, Thumper and the Trambones, and the Suedes. He could just as easily build a guitar as play one. He hot-rodded my amps, guitars, or anything he could get his hands on. We ran together, double dated, and tried to stay out of trouble, sometimes unsuccessfully. As I went off to Arkansas to join Ronnie Hawkins and The Hawks, Pete went on to become the premier guitar amp maker in Canada. He had an amazing gift for electronics and his amps had a powerful crystal sound. Some years back, they were making a documentary on me and Pete and i met up at my mother's old house in Toronto. He still had that fire in his eye like he needed to figure out what to build next. If David Bowie or Prince need an amp fixed up in heaven, I can tell you they're in good hands now. Thanks Thumper, for all the good times and wonderful memories. Blessings, Robbie”
But maybe we should leave the last word to Thumper: “I sort of liked the old days, when there was a bit of mystery about how it all worked, and every guitar player had his own sound and his own secret way of getting that special edge.”
With great thanks to Mike Holman’s Yorkville Sound History 1963 to 1991 published Feb 20, 2002. It was a very useful source for facts about time & place. Acknowledgements also to The Star newspaper in Toronto for several good articles consulted whilst researching this and the quotes from Traynor himself.
* I purchased our Bass Master (big thanks to Babsy for spotting it) from long-time Killing Joke roadie Dave Simpson who also manages the Heron Music shop in Bristol. It’s a proper Aladdin’s cave and a real institution in the St. George district of the city. It’s also the nearest guitar shop to my house, and to our studio, and I was privileged to tour Europe with Dave and FOH man extraordinaire Johnnie Haskett with the original Killing Joke line-up some years ago.
** There’s another story however that before they got the shaker table the amps were pulled off a forklift at full extension with ropes! It’s like the drop test was a crucial part of the process.
*** I believe I read somewhere that Selmer’s Lew Davies shop specialised in guitars, was near the corner of Denmark Street and that both Jerry Donahue and Paul Kossof worked there. Incidentally around 1964 both Ronnie Lane & Kenney Jones worked at Selmer’s amp factory at Theobalds Road in Holborn when they formed the Small Faces: Ronnie playing bass & guitar in the test department and Kenny on the speaker cab production line.
**** Holman’s Yorkville history reads to me as though the run of 24 amps made before the end of 1963 was over and above the initial batch of 6 prototypes. It further reads as though the transition to YBA-1 Bass Master which happened in 1964 was a cosmetic change that coincided with the using up of all the serial number plates. Does this mean that only 30 Dyna-Bass front panels had been fabricated?
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