Amplifiers
Vaughan used various amplifiers, mainly Fender and Marshall. He said of his choice that he had it backwards: "I use the Fenders for distortion and the Marshall for clarity." He often used two amplifiers simultaneously, one more distorted than the other.
The amplifiers he used on stage included:
- Two "Blackface" Fender Super Reverbs
- Marshall Club & Country combo amp with 2×12" JBL speakers
- Two 1964 "Blackface" Fender Vibroverb amplifiers (numbers five and six off production line), with one 15" speaker
- Two Dumble Steel String Singers played through Marshall cabs
- Fender Vibratone rotary cabinet
- Two Fender Twin Reverbs, one Blackface and one Silverface
From early on his career, beginning in 1979, Vaughan received technical assistance from César Díaz, who began by replacing and tweaking the output transformers on his amplifiers. Vaughan played so hard (especially on the low strings) and his heavy strings produced such "non-standard frequencies" that the amplifiers' vacuum tubes would occasionally spark and emit smoke, causing the need to buffer the input.
An oddity about Vaughan's usage was that he preferred the amplifier's dials to always have the same numbers ("Volume at 6, treble at 51⁄2, bass at 4"), and "in order to avoid problems, would back off the volume control by unscrewing the knob and turning it back a bit so it would appear to be at the same level as before."
Read more about this topic: Stevie Ray Vaughan's Musical Instruments