Fender Frontman 212R Electric Guitar Amplifier

Fender Frontman 212R Electric Guitar Amplifier

Fender Frontman amps deliver quality sound at an affordable price, with the unmistakable Fender Blackface look. The 100-watt Frontman 212R features two specially designed 12″ speakers, classic styling, simple controls, drive and more drive distortion, channel selector, and reverb. One of the best value-for-money amps you’ll find.

What Does This Amp Pack

This Fender Frontman 212R is a good option for its price. It is a powerful, transistor-based amp that, regardless of sound, has a Twin Reverb aesthetic that makes it appealing enough. And for sure, you can make it work very well even with a long chain of effect pedals

This amp is a complete transistor amp. It is not hybrid and has no valves if that warmth is what you’re looking for. For that same reason, it has a bit of a sketchy overdrive. It features 2 x 12″ speakers, explicitly made by Fender for this amp, and they deliver an astonishing amount of volume. You will probably find yourself not turning it up louder than “4” on the knob.

The two inputs have different channels throughout the amp, and both are affected by the volume, treble mid, and bass knobs. After that, we have a drive channel, with a switch button on the front of the amp, or you can use the 2-switch foot pedal that comes with the amp- a very robust and straightforward pedal that does its job well.

The “more drive” option gives you a little boost for soloing and can be modified by the EQ and the mid-contouring.

The last knob is for the only effect prebuilt into the amp, a very, very spacial reverb. Probably bringing it up to around “2” is more than enough if you don’t want to feel you are gigging in the middle of a church.

Last but not least, we have a footswitch input and pre-out and pwr-in, which you can use for connecting your effect chain before sending the signal to the speakers. It is a series effect send and not a parallel send, effectively going after the preamp and before the actual speaker output. One major con is it does not have a Master volume, just two volume knobs for each channel independently, which are quite exponential when raising the knob- after 2, it absolutely shoots up instead of doing so in a more linear way.

Behind The Amp

The On/Off switch is right behind the amp, as it is on most Fender amps, which I tend to find troublesome if I want to put it against the wall. The open cabinet acts as a resonance chamber, and the connections to each speaker are exposed in a way that doesn’t make the amp look very expensive. This, on the other hand, gives us access to the left speaker, which is useful for the following:

Bringin the total output of the amp down: The two speakers have an amperage of 4 ohms. This is important to note because we can feed a speaker with a signal that is above that but not below. You can use increments of 8 Ohms or even 16 Ohms.

If you disconnect the left speaker, the signal is output only through the right speaker and at 8Ohms, significantly reducing its total output if you want to gig at home and raise the volume past 3 or 4.

Sound

Sonically, there is not much to the Fender Frontman 212R. Its distortion is a typical transistor distortion. i.e. not a very good one. If you’re a beginner, you might not notice anything amiss, but if you push the gain and volume, it may become quite harsh if you don’t EQ it properly. Having said that, I will admit that the clean channel is quite useable, even just throwing some reverb on it.

Having the effects send means you can further tune its clean with some soft overdrive, maybe with an Ibanez overdrive, but something like an aggressive MXR heavy gain will probably not fit well with it. I haven’t tried the clean channel with an independent reverb pedal, but that most surely would have a good outcome.

There is so much power that this 100W amp can output that I think they could have sacrificed some of the brute force for more fine-tuning options for the reverb, or an upgrade on the 12″ speakers. A built-in option to dampen the total output volume would have been nice, too.

Pros

Pros

• 100W at 4 Ohms through 2×12″ Speakers. Loud.
• It has a decent clean channel and is quite useful used only as a cabinet or speaker for another signal chain.
• Black Fenderface looks really neat.