Supro Black Magick Steve’s Music Tech & Gear Report

Supro presents Black Magick, a recreation of one of Rock & Roll music’s holy-grail amplifiers. This all-tube, high-gain blues machine hearkens back to the dimensions, cosmetics, and circuitry of the Supro amps from 1959, just like the one loaned by Jimmy Page to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. In tribute to this legendary and extensively modified Supro combo, we’ve used the cabinet dimensions from a ‘59 Supro 2×10 and replaced the baffle with a 1×12, and armed this 25-watt combo, with a custom, British voiced speaker that was specially developed for the Black Magick amp.

With more gain on tap than any other Supro reissue, Black Magick absolutely rips for heavy blues and classic rock guitar styles. This amp’s traditional, cathode-biased “Class-A” power section uses 6973 tubes to achieve the instantly recognizable midrange grind and phenomenal touch dynamics that define the Supro sound. A complete range of tones from warm cleans to heavy distortion can be accessed by simply adjusting the volume knob on your instrument. The signature Supro power tube tremolo adds footswitchable depth and dimension to this historic Rock and Roll machine.

The preamp found in the Black Magick features two channels wired in parallel, with independent volume controls and a single, shared tone control. The vintage-correct front-end topology of the original 1959 Supro combos has been streamlined in the Black Magick, with automatic linking of channels 1&2 when using only the first input jack. This flexible arrangement provides double the gain when used with one instrument and also allows for two instruments to share the same Black Magick or for the use of an A/B/Y box to achieve channel-switching on the fly.

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