epiphone pacemaker first model

[johnnyrose]

Hi,

 

I own an epiphone pacemaker tremolo. I thought that it had been seriously modified because every picture on the web

seems to show the controls on the front, whereas mine are located on the back. I posted a craigslist listing featuring

the amp, one guy said it looked suspicious, like it was a forgery or something. Being curious and surprisingly defensive

of the amps honor, I searched for a long time on the web and finally found an old advert from 1962 showing my amp in

all its glory. Is this model rare? Why is there so little info on this amp.

[m-theory]

Epiphone and Gibson amps were one and the same for that era, and neither was considered on the same level as Fender, which is a bit odd, considering that at least a couple of models were virtually identical (the GA-6 is a tweed Deluxe with one different resistor value, as I recall).

 

The Gibson's and, naturally, their "lowly cousins," the Epiphones, were sort of like the ugly, red-headed stepson of amps of the day, and that's carried over to their status today.

 

This doesn't make them undesirable amps at all...again, in some cases, they're virtually the same amp as a Fender counterpart. It means that they don't have much collectible value, and therefore, there isn't a whole lot of information available about them. You can, however, find schematics online for them, an article here and there about them, and any old school amp tech can tell you something about them, if nothing else, by just scanning the schematic for a minute or two.

 

Your particular amp would be similar to a Princeton from that year. I highly doubt they'd be considered "rare," except that it's the ugly red-headed stepson of an ugly red-headed stepson, so there probably weren't millions produced. It was, however, a "practice" amp with small power and feature stock, so it's doubtful that it would bring in more than a few hundred dollars, if that, in a sale.

 

There are a few Gibson/Epiphone amps from the bygone days that are collectible, and do garner pretty big dollars, however. The '61 gibson discoverer is one of them, and the stereo GA79-RVT is another.

 

http://www.superiormusic.com/page199.htm

http://online.physics.uiuc.edu/courses/phys498pom/498emi_gibson_amps.html

http://www.netads.com/~meo/Guitar/Amps/Gibson/gfmap.html