1959 Natural Music Guild The Skipper

Not a whole lot of information on these guys. Natural Music Guild was a company in Santa Ana that started to produce guitars and amps. The contracted Bartell to build their amps, and this particular amp is designed and built by Ray Massie of St. George. This is an earlier model, and there is very little information on them. This tolex and grill cloth seems to be very rare, as all the images that come up of Natural Music Guild amps have black tolex and grill cloth. It sports one original RCA 6V6 power tube pushing a good 5 watts through an 8" speaker. The output transformer and a couple caps have been replaced, but the originals are included. Simple amp three inputs and a volume and tone, all you need.

It's a very simple amp, similar to a Fender Champ in volume. Not much clean headroom, its appeal would definitely be for someone looking for a cool little dirty amp. The inputs give you different amount of headroom. Inputs 2 & 3 give you really great on "edge of breakup sounds" that are very down and dirty blues/garage sounds. Input 1 is as nasty as an amp can get.