Garnet Vagabond D90h 'Stencil' Tube Bass/Guitar Head 1970s Canada

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Thieves and Vagabonds...

Here is a Canadian classic. It's a Garnet 'stencil' tube amp from the late 1960s or early 1970s. It was created as a bass amp but is equally at home with guitar. These have endless headroom and will remain crystal clear to 10. It's an excellent pedal platform. It's 15 watts and runs two 6V6 tubes. This one has some cosmetic wear in accordanced with a workhorse of it's age but is cleaned, tested and sounding great.

Winnipeg was the home of a guy by the name of Gar Gillies; the man behind Garnet amplifiers. He made some real nice tube amps in his day and for those who know they are highly prized. I think he was mostly using Fender templates but they have their own voice. Anyhow, he also made a bunch of amps under alternate nameplates for a variety of retailers. One of those stencils was a brand called Vagabond. It has two inputs, one clean and one grittier. It's pure rock, an absolute workhorse and it's LOUD for a 15 watter.

"I had a habit of blowing up his amplifiers every time we played a show. I had found that by plugging a smaller amp into a bigger one and then cranking up the volume I could create a continuous sound, likened to the violin. The noise was as short-lived as it was heavenly, however, causing one or both amps to melt. I'd take it into an electronics shop and they'd say 'we can't fix this' and 'what you are doing is stupid' - blah, blah, blah. So I heard about this guy, Gar Gillies, who was a musician who had a fridge-and-stove stores. I found out he was sympathetic to musicians. So I brought it in and he fixed it. He invited me to his warehouse on Winnipeg's fringes, where noise was never an issue, to experiment with various amplifiers. After the umpteenth blown unit, Gar built a pre-amp that replicated my tone without melting any speakers. I was reading a book by Saul Bellow titled Herzog, so we called the thing a Herzog. It became Randy Bachman's Herzog and it was MY lead sound. It came to the forefront of songs such as 'American Woman' and 'No Time' as well as being heard prominently on albums such as Canned Wheat, Wheatfield Soul and American Woman. You can't get that sound from anything else to this day."

- Randy Bachman

(Info courtesy of GarnetAmps.com)

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