Description
90’s model – Serial VMD-0003, the 3rd Verbmaster built! Back in the day Jeff Bober had a small company that did some of my repairs and built some killer little amps called Budda, all hand-wired and built in small numbers. After gaining a reputation as the amp guru of the Baltimore area, doing Marshall mods and various repairs and hot-rodding, his extensive knowledge went into designing some of the best boutique amps ever made. Jeff eventually sold his company, but stayed on at the Maryland factory, building both his original designs plus the new “Superdrive” series, which were great amps but not hand-wired. The hand-wired series, which offered little profit margin, soon fell victim to corporate thinking and was discontinued. They came out with a 10th Anniversary hand-wired but at $5K list, the amp was essentially a Twinmaster with a commemorative badge. The Verbmaster was a fairly complex amp for Budda, with more than 3 knobs and an effects loop. The Verbmaster features anexcellent sounding reverb with two distinct sounds, “sand” and “surf”; Hi-gain and Normal inputs, each voiced differently; and the usual bass – treble – volume controls. The high-gain input adds a tube stage to overdrive the normal input’s gain stage, which in turn drives the unique tone-control stack. The back panel features an effects loop; slave output with level control; parallel speaker outs with a 4/8 ohm switch. This amp breaks up very early and isn’t recommended for anyone looking for clean headroom – but for a non-master volume high-gain amp, you get a beautiful tube breakup at a relatively low volume. For many players, this will be the perfect club or practice amp. Although 18 watts may seem rather tame, this is a deceptively loud amp. For a good example of the versatility of the Verbmaster (1X12), using only a guitar’s volume control (no effects were used), click here for a YouTube demo. Other than the Anniversary model, which is great but overpriced, Budda hand-wired amps remain some of the best values on the market, and one of the few that weren’t clones of Fender or Marshall. Dealer cost on these was over $1500 on my last price list that had the hand-wired and it’s an excellent amp, in nice shape, for $1399. See lower down on this page for the same era handwired Budda Twinmaster Ten.
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