Over the past month, we’ve been taking care of an original Orange OR120 head from 1974 that was sent in by its owner for a tune-up before being passed down to their son. In the previous entries, we’ve had a look at the unit’s history and legacy, as well as how we’ve fixed it up for use in the modern age. Now, it’s time for the ultimate proof of the pudding — plugging in a guitar. All guitar sound samples in this post were recorded on a PJD Carey guitar with a single-coil pickup at the neck and humbucker pickup at the bridge.

NO PRISONERS

The first thing to say about this amp is that it’s LOUD. Like, incredibly loud — louder than any modern Orange amp by quite some margin, to the extent that it is perhaps even less of a mystery now why so many 1960s and 70s rockers are suffering hearing loss in their dotage. We ran it through an Orange PPC412 speaker cabinet at about one-third volume in a space about the size of an average rehearsal room, and it was already dishing out instant bouts of tinnitus, and demanding ear defenders all round. Given that the amp’s sockets allow for the connection of two speaker cabinets, too, the potential of this beast is massive.

That sheer muscle is perhaps an indication of the era in which the amp was designed and built, before the age of complex, high-powered PA systems in the early 80s but shortly after the arrival of stadium rock and the outdoor music festivals of the early 70s (the original Woodstock was August 1969 and the first Glastonbury June 1970, for example). During that time, bands were largely expected to bring their own noise, and not to expect much in the way of a boost from a PA system. And with that in mind, the OR120 rigged up to a couple of 4×12 speaker cabinets would have no problem in filling huge spaces.

What’s more, with stage monitoring technology still very primitive back in the early 1970s, there was an expectation that you needed to be able to hear your playing directly from your amp on stage, even if it was 50 feet away and there was a rhythm section smashing away in between you and it. The OR120’s power could deliver all that with confidence, and was clearly designed specifically for that.

How the amp achieves this volume is mainly down to the huge 500 V voltage in its circuit, which is far greater than modern amps and will offer miles more clean headroom. Four power valves and a simple pre-amp circuit that doesn’t subtract too much gain from the signal also helps. There are also fewer tone stacks in the OR120 than a lot of its successors in the Orange range, which would account for less gain loss through the signal chain.

The amp’s tone is also an interesting indicator of its age. With all dials set to the middle, it’s remarkably clean and chiming, with plenty of heft and three-dimensionality, if not quite the character of Orange amps of the new millennium.

TONE-SHAPING

However, the unusual F.A.C. control, a six-point notched dial that subtracts increasing amounts of low end from the tone, has a huge impact in shaping the tone, making the sound increasingly brittle and bright as it’s introduced. At its farthest extreme, this sounds piercingly trebly to modern ears, but revisiting the records of the second half of the 60s and early 70s by the likes of the Beatles and the Byrds, for example, reveal this to be the sound of contemporary guitar music, suggesting Orange to be on the cutting edge, as ever.

When the F.A.C. is combined with higher gain and into overdrive territory, however, it adds a definition to the tone that counterbalances the slightly muddiness of the basic overdriven sound, and proves to be an invaluable component of the amp’s tone-shaping toolbox.

The two-band EQ is also surprisingly powerful, with the range of both knobs allowing considerable variety to the shape of the sound and consequent versatility, presumably another feature included with the idea of helping the guitarist onstage with a noisy band around him. Similarly, the HF. Gain knob has slightly more subtle control, moulding the mid–high tones in much the same way as a modern-day presence control would, but its interaction with the gain knob is still well incorporated.

OVERDRIVE

Another interesting sign of the times, tonally, comes in the form of the OR120’s only modest overdrive capabilities: the amp’s noticeably clean chime only starts to break up as the gain is pushed up beyond about three-quarters, and there’s a lot of “edge-of-breakup” territory where the tone’s fuzz is largely dictated by the player’s technique. Furthermore, the absence of a master volume knob means that you have to be playing through the amp at an exceptionally loud volume before any semblance of break-up or overdrive emerges. Even at full gain, though, it’s a long way from the fully saturated tube screamers of the 1990s and beyond, and retains more of a British punk/Sex Pistols sound, with grit and ferocity, but also quite crisp (although whether the likes of the Steve Jones, who famously stole his early instruments, ever got his mitts on an OR120, is a moot point).

This marks the OR120 as an interesting artefact of rock music history: even in 1974, when this amp was made, three years after Led Zep IV and Paranoid had ushered in the dawn of heavy metal and huge-sounding rock music, guitar tones remained fairly polite, and the appetite for extreme howling overdrive was still clearly in its early infancy. Understanding that somewhat recontextualises those classic albums as real sonic boundary-pushers, and also serves as a reminder that the bloom from crunch into thrash and total saturation would take another few years — and perhaps the introduction of a master volume control. And we’ll have to wait for another Orange relic to arrive on the bench before we dig into that.

Gear moves in and out of the Orange workshop pretty constantly, with fixes, mods and inspections to amps, pedals and prototypes all in a day’s work. Very occasionally, though, something gets sent in that makes us crowd around the workbench — something rare, old, or unusual, or just something we’ve only ever read about before.

One of these occasionallys happened last week: an amp head showed up at Orange HQ wrapped in a home-sewn leather cover with an accompanying note from the original owner. The amp had been kept in storage for a while, the note explained, but now the owner was looking to give it to his son, a promising guitarist. Before he did that, though, he wanted to have the unit looked at by our expert technicians, and so here it was with us.

But this head in question isn’t just any old Orange relic. Removing the cover revealed an early-manufacture OR120, also known as the Orange Graphic 120 — the model that has a decent claim to be the foundation stone of the Orange sound as we now recognise it, well into its sixth decade.

The serial number dated this unit to 1974, barely five years after Orange was founded, and only two after the company began serious mass production with its first factory in Kent. The OR120 was a year-zero moment for Orange: a wholesale rejigging of the existing schematics, from which emerged a new tone that everybody would come to associate with the brand, with a design and sound that would influence the amp world, both Orange’s and other’s, ever since. And here was one of the beauties, right in front of us on the bench!

BEGINNING OF A DESIGN EVOLUTION

The first thing that leaps out about the looks of OR120, when viewed through 2022 eyes, is how much of a snapshot it is of the young Orange in 1974, on the cusp of a breakthrough. Sure, there’s the none-more-70s brass handle bolts and gold trim, both of which would become black in future iterations, but the threshold-of-greatness status is perhaps best observed through the amp’s controls, and specifically how much (and how little) things have changed in the past 48 years: superficially, the layout on the OR120 is much the same as its modern-day successors, but look a little closer, and interesting differences emerge.

There’s a knob marked F.A.C. (supposed to stand for Frequency Attenuator Control, or is that Frequency Adjustment Circuit?), actually a six-point notched dial that subtracts increasing amounts of low end from the tone, and the two treble and bass dials marked just “KHz” and Hz”, respectively. Along with another marked “HF. Drive”, it suggests an amp being labelled up for an end user who already understood scientific terms and was comfortable with undescribed acronyms.

Alongside that, though, was one of the first outings of the soon-to-be-famous Orange hieroglyphs, with a charming accidentally reversed bass clef symbol to represent the low end, and the now-familiar clenched-fist symbol to indicate what future amps would simply call “punch”.

The amp also serves as something of a Rosetta Stone for some of the less straightforward icons too. Ever wondered, for example, why twin mountain peaks represents an effects loop? The OR120 might have an answer: the pair of sockets through which the user could connect an external reverb unit was marked “Echo”, illustrated with the classic mountain scene.

Suddenly, sound bouncing off an alpine canyon makes perfect sense. Those pair of sockets would eventually migrate to the back of many an Orange amp, and the “echo” be broadened out to include any manner of external effects units, but the hieroglyph never changed, perhaps because it spoke a language never grounded in words: these symbols seemed to want to reach new players unbothered by scientific jargon, who wanted a universal language of guitar tone — and the circuitry spoke to that, too.

UNDER THE HOOD

We’d all seen pictures of the outside of the OR120 before this example arrived in the workshop. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of having one to investigate in the flesh was popping off the sleeve and seeing the creature’s guts. And what a perfectly clean, immaculately preserved example of an OR120 we had here, with the circuitry and build serving as an absolutely textbook example of how to construct an amp in 1974.

Unfortunately, the valves had had become unmatched over the years, so that they were drawing differing amounts of current to one another — a simple function of old age — and the original Plessey capacitors, proudly stamped with “British Made”, needed replacing. However, what the meticulous attention to detail shows is how these heads were built to last.

LEGACY

And last they did, with a build quality and sonic popularity to give them decades of acclaim. A 1974 ad in the trade press reveals them to have retailed at £140 (about £1,200 in today’s money), with earnest insistence that “good value and reliability ensure your customers return”.

Indeed, it’s testament to the OR120’s tonal longevity that 23 years after they were first introduced, they had perhaps their most eye-catching role: when Oasis revealed the video accompanying the number-one single D’You Know What I Mean from their third, victory-lap album Be Here Now in July 1997 (still the fastest-selling rock album in British chart history, amazingly), a pair of re-issued OR120s sat proudly on their own Orange double 4×12 stacks behind Noel Gallagher (see the screengrabs from the video, above).

Full of epic rock bombast — helicopters, crowd riots and aerial photography — it was the most expensive music video made by the UK’s last genuinely household-name rock band, and amid all the grey concrete and khaki parkas elsewhere in the video, that pair of bright orange monoliths stand proud. And so they should.

COMING NEXT TIME: What fixes were done to this OR120, and how it sounded when returned to its former glory