fenderbassguy
NEW MEMBER!
I owned two Dumble Winterlands in 1968. They were built for me by Howard (Alex) Dumble. I was (and am) a Fender bass player. I had seen Jack Casady play through a Sunn 200S at Winterland in San Francisco with Jefferson Airplane. Jack showed me the Sunn and I bought a 200S shortly thereafter. About a year later, I was playing in a group and living in the Santa Cruz area of California. I met Dumble and he asked me what I liked about the Sunn. He was just beginning to build amplifiers and was a bass player himself. I described how the Sunn was powerful and filled the places I was playing and about the Winterland experience. About a month later, Dumble presented me with two bass amps. He was paid for his work by the band's investors. Besides two heads, he built a cabinet with 4 10" JBL D110F speakers and another cabinet with two JBL D140F speakers. As he delivered the amps and set them up, he said to me "I guess you'll be able to fill Winterland now!" The amps had the name Winterland on the front of them. They were the #3 and #4 of the amps he has built. I used #3 on a live album with Buffy Sainte-Marie. Each amp had 4 KT88 tubes with a rated output of 220 watts into 8 ohms. The fuse was an 8 amp slo-blo. A panel on the back of the amp allowed the user to select and output of 4, 8, or 16 ohms. The speaker outputs were Cannon 3 pin connectors that required special cables to connect to 1/4" speaker inputs. Amp #4 was pawned by my ex-wife in 1970. I kept and used #3 until a few years ago when I sold it to a store in Santa Cruz. The only modifications made to the amp are a banana plug installed below the Cannon outputs and a fan to keep the tubes cool. When the KT88s needed replacing, I installed 6550s and had the amp rebiased. The Winterland head was heavy at 63 lbs. It was a great amp; plenty of power, great tone, and constructed with pride and craftsmanship. I'm glad I had the opportunity to use it and I hope another musician is enjoying it as much as I did.
Michael Husser
Michael Husser
