The GA-45RVT has the same sixty-watt power amp and a very similar preamp to that of the Ranger. Of course, it was LOUD and insufferable heavy at around seventy pounds.
All I had to do was put a clean boost out front to get a great lead sound. My Ranger had a sort of dark sound but it had a wonderful smooth distortion that everyone loved back then and it compressed and sustained nicely when it was pushed, yeilding a sound like some of the Allman Brothers' later, Eat a Peach studio sounds. I can hear lips curling all over the Internet right now. As a result, just as in the “Silverface” period for Fender, the whiteface Gibson period has developed a lesser reputation from their earlier periods, a reputation that they have some sort of “tone suck” circuit and that people often have to tinker with them to make them sound decent. Like Fender, in this period Gibson began changing their amp designs to yield more clean power to support the surf music fad. I'm guessing most people can remember the Saturn I and Saturn V boosters of the Apollo Program? There you go. missiles and satellites: Vanguard, Apollo, Ranger, Saturn, Lancer, Minuteman, Explorer, and one oddball, the Skylark, whose name was carried over from an earlier period. The Gibson amps offered during that era featured raw aluminum faceplates (hence the “whiteface” designation) and were named for U.S. It was, after all, the Space Age and we were all going to be astronauts, right? I know I was. Now my interest was piqued.Ī LITTLE BACKGROUND ON THIS ERA OF GIBSON AMPLIFIERS:īoth of these amps were from the “missile and satellite” or “whiteface” era of Gibson, 1965 through 1967. They were, but for some reason my search also brought up an example of the little brother of the Ranger, the GA-45RVT Saturn, that was for sale at a local used gear dealer. But recently in a fit of idle curiosity and nostalgia, I ran an Internet search, "Gibson GA-55RVT," hoping to see if any were still floating around. Eventually, master volume amps became all the rage and I traded the Ranger for another amp. My lead guitar sound drew lots of compliments when I was using that amp. The Ranger was often referred to as the “Kalamazoo Super” because of its 4x10" speaker configuration and fifty watts, though it was quite a different beastie from the Fender Super Reverb that lent the moniker. You see, when I was in college bands in the 1970s, I played through an old Gibson GA-55RVT Ranger guitar amplifier. For instance, my most recent quest was started by a search based on unabashed nostalgia. The majority of my searching is done while I'm just looking for information, window-shopping the world of knowledge that's floating around. Interesting things come to light all the time, often from unexpected places. I do a good bit of poking about on the Internet, investigating music history as well as old and new gear.
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