The other day I went to a local guitar store with a friend of mine and came across “the one that got away”. I was beside myself when I saw this thing. I didn’t bother playing it right then as I had a strong feeling that it would be mine if I did.

You see, I have been thinking about this amp since the one and only time I heard it way back in the late 90’s. I assumed that this was a new model that would be made for years and years. Little did I know that this was a Custom Shop amp with a _very_ limited run. I never saw it again, until last week.

There isn’t much information about it online other than this from the owner’s manual:

The Fender Amp Custom Shop is dedicated to creating high quality amplification to serve top artists and discriminating players. The Tone-Master is a unique amplifier with many possibilities. On the surface it is a 100 watt, 2 channel switching “Head” amplifier. Upon further inspection one will notice many features which set it apart from anything offered before.

The Tone-Master is a hand-made, point-to-point wired, tube instrument amplifier. There are no solid- state (transistor) devices in the signal path of any kind. This amplifier was created from the efforts of a handful of top craftsmen, players and designers who saw a need and envisioned a new amplifier. Like the other Fender custom amps, the Tone-Master is painstakingly built, one at a time, by a select group of craftsmen at the Fender electronics factory in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

The Tone-Master was created for the discriminating player who requires a high powered, high volume amplifier capable of clean tones, overdriven vintage amp tones as well as heavily overdriven distortion. It has 2 independent channels, switchable via the front panel A/B switch or the footswitch (provided).

Needless to say, I did play it and now it’s mine.