Fender Dual Showman Reverb Question

hi, i just bought this amp and it came with no foot switch for the reverb and vibrato...i can adjust the reverb but when i adjust the speed and intensity controls for the vibrato, i hear no change...is there something wrong or do i just need to footswitch to control the vibrato and thats why i hear no change...thanks!

also if anyone has an extra footswitch they'd sell, i'd be interested

<3 ryan

Sounds like the vibrato is broken. Somehow. I assume that it's not working at all? Might need a new tube.

Thats what I usually do. It seems alot of people dont understand the simplicity of a footswitch

It'll say "POW" when you hit the tremelo switch if the trem switch wire isn't shielded from the reverb switch wire. You
*can* use a TRS if necessary (it's only hardware, doesn't affect the tone or operation) but you'd need to use some wire with two shielded pairs inside. (This is the closest thing you can find these days to the one in/one out wire
Fender uses, which I can't seem to buy in bulk *anywhere*.)
2-pair "snake" cable is the stuff. There is also some cable available that consists of two side-by-side ("zip" style)
shielded single conductors that's used for "stereo" RCA cables for the DJ market. It's either light-duty *garbage* or it's so large it won't fit through the strain relief on a
TRS - give it a miss. If you're going the TRS route, the dual (foil-) shielded pair stuff is the way to go.

Hey man if you cant afford an overpriced footswitch you might try this. Get two male RCA jacks and two small push button switches. They could be the cheap plastic dads or nice ones but you probably want em to be small.Solder the positive or hot terminal of the switch to the hot of the male jack.Like wise the Negative to negative then slip a little heatshrink on it from the body of the switch up onto the RCA jack . Make two. You may not have a footswitch but you've got something equivilent to it that'll do the job just as well.Pull the som bitches out when transporting and drop in the bottom of your amp till you fire it up again.Doesnt take up any space atall

Nope. Without either the footswitch or a shorting jack there is no tremolo. Ryan, put an RCA cable into the tremolo footswitch jack.
Put a penny across the inner and outer connectors on the other end of the cable. set the trem intensity and speed on 5. Does that make the tremolo come on? If so then your trem works. If you want you can make a shorting jack by getting an RCA plug, taking it apart and soldering the inside to the outside. Put it into the footswitch jack and turn the intensity off whn you don't want tremolo.

If you want to use a footswitch, you don't need to buy a Fender footswitch for that thing. All you need is a stomp on, stomp off footswitch with the RCA connector at the end. For my Twin, and for my
Dual Showan Reverb I've done various things. I bought a switch and put it in an aluminum box and wired it to a 1/4" jack. Then I used a guitar cable with a 1/4"-to-RCA plug adapter. These days I use a Boss
FS-5L latching footswitch, connected to the trem by a cheapo radio shack cable with a 1/4" plug on one end (into the switch) and an RCA plug on the other end (into the footswitch jack. Works great and I get a little LED to tell me when it's on.

These solutions will turn the trem on and off. I just leave the reverb on. If you want to switch both you can use these solutions twice. Or... there are a bunch of switches in the world with two switches and a cable terminating in a tip-ring-sleeve plug. Radio shack has adapters with a female 1/4" TRS to 2 male RCAs. That's all you need to adapt one of these switches.

FWIW - if you have a choice between straight-in RCA plugs and right-angle plugs, the right-angle will put less stress on the connection and last longer with fewer problems.

Or, for $35 you can get one like the original from www.angela.com.
look under guitar amp parts/Fender amplifier parts.

AH - I see...you just wrote the part about it humming if the leads are reversed. The part I snipped off.

Without the footswitch, the reverb defaults to "on" while the vibrato defaults of "off". So, to use the vibrato (or to shut off the reverb) you generally need a switch, although I've resorted to shorting out the vibrato jack before.....