RIP Pete Traynor

[pogo97]

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/05/10/pete-traynor-torontos-quietly-legendary-sound-man-keenan.html

[WRGKMC]

I was never a big fan of his amps but they sure made allot of them over the years.

[onelife]

I thought his early amps were a great take on the Fender/Marshall design. They were well built with quality components that could handle the power requirements and, above all, his amps were field serviceable.

 

The top cover came off them easily and had the schematic pasted on the inside.

 

 

When Pete retired and sold Yorkville Sound, they dropped the Traynor name but recently resurrected it for a new line of tube amps which may be imports - I know Yorkville does import some of the amplifiers.

 

 

 

 

 

[WRGKMC]

^^^ Built well, yes. Allot of the old ones are still alive and kicking. To they did sound similar to Fender amps for some settings, but their tone stacks were darker sounding. I owned Fenders before I heard Traynor's and they didn't rate as high for me.

 

I played with several bass players who owned the larger 50 and 100W tube amps and my recollection was they sounded a bit muddy and broke up early. I think they sold more of those tube bass amps in the area I lived in then the guitar amps. The only guitar amps I remember being sold were their solid state ones in the mid 70's like these. Like auto manufacturers everything was being poorly manufacturers during those years. Fender moved to Japan and Gibson went through its Norlin period. Traynor went to making budget junk and I think it really hurt them.

 

 

 

 

I have a Traynor 2X15 bass cab a buddy gave me. Someone was throwing it out so he grabbed it. I tried 3 different sets of speakers in that cab including a pair of Celestion bass speakers in there which should sound great. The cab is too shallow to produce good bass tones. I suspect a matching head and whatever stock speakers they used to use were able to get better bass tones. Maybe that's why the bass heads sounded darker in tone, they may have been voiced for their cabs.

 

That 2X15" Traynor cab sounds fantastic for guitar however. I still need to make a new grill cloth cover for it. I have the cloth I just need to buy some wood for the frame. I tried using the metal grill covers but couldn't get rid of the rattle.

 

I was never too impressed with anything made by Yorkville either, Most of the stuff I'd see were low end cheesy solid state gear, strictly practice amp grade and pathetically under powered.

 

If they did make bigger stuff back then, not many of them made it to the US. I'd come across them being sold in flea markets every so often. People couldn't give them away. I think most were bought via mail order cause I never saw music stores sell them. I used to buy them for like $5 to $10, refurb them then try to sell them for a profit. Now that Vintage is cool you see people selling them for higher prices. I guess anything will go up in value if you sit on it long enough, unfortunately, that doesn't improve their quality.

 

I tried to find some pics of the old ones but struck out. I remember them as being chrome faced amps made with tacky looking cab designs, kind of half Hi Fi-ish. You open them up and there's nothing in them. Its been a long time I've seen any except occasionally on EBay. Maybe they predated Traynor working for them?

 

I have a bass player who has one of the newer small Yorkville bass amps. It went through a flood here and was completely submerged under water. I did a refurb on it and cleaned the circuits, The speaker had already dried by then. Plugged it in and the friggin thing worked. Go Figure. He eventually had the speaker re-coned because dirt had gotten into the magnet, but considering that fact I never expected it to work.

 

Anyway, The man did have a big contribution to the amplifier business, especially up in Canada where they were most popular. You'll likely see the vintage ones go up in price.