Guitar Player reviews the Dixon Hummingbird 15 tube combo

Colin Decket started down the road of amp making while working as a touring musician in the 1990s, where having the ability to repair amps on the road was a real plus. Over the next three decades years he says he took advantage of playing the many amps that recording studios had on offer and learning all he could about amplifiers — especially the tube-powered combos that captured his imagination and eventually inspired him to build amplifiers under his own name.

Hand built in Northern California, the Dixon line currently consists of the Hummingbird 15, a compact and easy-to-carry 1×12 combo that’s inspired by iconic British and American combo amps from the ’50s and ’60s that embody what Colin calls the “three pillars of the Dixon sound — punch, clime and bloom.” As such, it features a cathode-bias circuit with a complement of two JJ 12AX7s, two TAD Redbase 6V6 power tubes and a TAD GZ34 rectifier, all of which plug into chassis-mounted, rubber-isolated phenolic sockets. The circuit is hand-wired on tag strips using high-grade components that include carbon-comp resistors, Jupiter and Mallory capacitors and Sprague and F&T electrolytic caps.

Other details include Carling switches and jacks, Mercury Magnetics transformers and cloth insulation on the speaker lead, which is nice vintage touch. It’s all packed into a 16-gauge aluminum chassis with welded corner-seams that is topped with a polished steel faceplate carrying the volume, low and high controls and the on/off switch. There’s no standby function, which isn’t an issue because of the slow warm-up of the tube rectifier.

Measuring 22 by 18 by 10 inches (WxHxD), the finger-jointed cabinet is constructed of Eastern yellow pine, with a Baltic birch baffle and rear panel and pine/poplar interior bracing. My review sample was covered in red Valentine Tolex (one of four color options, along with Ice Cream, Indigo and Nonemore) and has a matching handle embossed with “Dixon.” The grille cloth is classic salt-and-pepper and highlighted with silver piping around the edges. Stainless-steel hardware is used throughout the build, with wood screws securing the lower rear cover and machine screws for all of the metal-to-wood attaching points.

The Hummingbird 15 I tested came with the stock Royal 12-inch ceramic-magnet 50-watt speaker which is based on a classic British design. For a $150 upcharge you can order it with a Jubilee 50, a Brit-voiced speaker that uses an Alnico magnet. Dixon offers two other speakers: the Coronado 65, an American-style speaker for those who favor the vintage Oxford and Utah sound, and the Springfield 70, which is a replacement for the Jensen C12N and well suited for Fender blackface and silverface amps as well as players seeking to tighten up the response of their tweed amps.

I played the Hummingbird 15 using a Gibson 1963 Les Paul Junior, a Historic 1959 ’Burst, a PRS Dustie Waring and a Buzz Feiten T-style, and it delivered impressive tones with all of them. The amp sounds great clean, and it segues nicely into toothy distortion as the volume is cranked up. The low and high controls offer plenty range to accommodate single-coils or humbuckers, and I found that diming all three knobs yielded killer distortion tones from a Tele and a Les Paul alike when using the rear pickups.

The amp is very responsive to the touch, so adjusting your picking and/or riding the guitar volume knob is all it takes to morph between rhythm and lead when running straight into the amp. The Hummingbird churns out increasingly gutsy distortion as the volume is pushed past half-way, and I liked pairing it with a Fulltone tube tape echo to boost the guitar signal and enhance it all with juicy tape textures. It’s a cool setup for blues and rock, and for heavier grind I added a Fulltone OCD in tandem with a UAFX 2241 compressor pedal to take things into the soaring lead realm.

The Hummingbird 15 is plenty loud for gigs and has enough headroom to keep it all sounding tight and focused when you’re cranking. To my ears, it embodies much of what I like about low-watt tube combos — the rich clarity of a Fender Deluxe, the ballsiness of a Marshall 20 and the sparkle of a Vox AC15. The Hummingbird is a pricey affair, but if you subscribe to the less-is-more theory when it comes to guitar amps you’ll absolutely dig what it has to offer.

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