TCguitar is the modern continuation of a vintage tradition
This domain — tcguitar.com — was originally the online home of 20th Century Guitar Magazine, an American print publication that ran from 1996 through approximately 2013 and covered vintage guitars and Fender tube amplifiers with a depth that the broader internet has rarely matched since. The magazine ceased operations more than a decade ago. We acquired the domain in 2026 and have rebuilt the site as a modern vintage Fender amp resource, carrying forward the spirit of the original publication while making no claim to its name or estate.
Who we are
TCguitar is operated by an independent editorial team based in the Netherlands that builds and maintains specialist content sites across a handful of niches. We are not a vintage guitar dealer, not a restoration shop, and not affiliated with Fender Musical Instruments Corporation or with any of the original 20th Century Guitar Magazine staff. We are a small team of people who take research and writing seriously, run our own publishing infrastructure, and try to build resources that we ourselves would want to read.
The decision to rebuild this domain rather than retire it was deliberate. The original site hosted Greg Gagliano’s five-part Fender amp dating series — research that remains the foundation of how the vintage community thinks about identifying and valuing these amplifiers. That work deserves a living home, not a 404 page or a parked-domain landing screen.
The original 20th Century Guitar Magazine
20th Century Guitar Magazine was an American print publication, distributed primarily on the East Coast and through guitar dealers nationwide. It covered vintage Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, Martin, and Rickenbacker instruments, as well as the broader vintage amp world. The magazine ran feature articles, gear reviews, dealer profiles, and serialized technical pieces. Many of those serialized pieces — including the Gagliano amp dating series and the original Fender amp speaker reference chart — became the standard references that informed-buyers still cite today.
The magazine also promoted the Classic American Guitar Show (CAGS) in Lake Grove, Long Island — an annual vintage event with a Jazz Bar that hosted East Coast jazz guitarists informally throughout the show day. CAGS retrospectives are documented separately.
The print magazine ceased operations in or around 2013. Some of the original staff continue to write and consult in the vintage guitar world; we have not sought to involve them in this site, both because we did not want to create the impression of continuity and because their work stands on its own.
The Gagliano research lineage
Greg Gagliano’s five-part Fender amp dating series, published in 20th Century Guitar Magazine between 1997 and 2000, established the framework that the entire vintage Fender community uses to date amplifiers without serial-number records. The research was conducted alongside Devin Riebe and Greg Huntington, with Gagliano as lead author. The five parts covered, in sequence: the modern letter-prefix dating system; pre-1990 tube chart codes; transformer and component date references; cosmetic and circuit identification; and the comprehensive speaker reference chart that catalogued original Fender speaker complements across decades and models.
That work has been reproduced, paraphrased, summarized, and copied countless times since — sometimes with credit, sometimes without. The point of our pillar guide is to present the methodology in modern form with proper credit and to extend it with information that has accumulated in the community since the original series ran.
Our editorial approach
Three principles guide every page on this site:
- Credit the sources. Where research originates with a specific author or community contributor, we name them. This is basic honesty and it is also what makes the resource trustworthy.
- Get the facts right. Vintage Fender amp lore is full of recycled myths — wrong years, wrong circuits, wrong speakers attributed to wrong models. We cross-reference primary sources (Teagle and Sprung’s Fender Amps: The First Fifty Years, Fender’s own documentation, Reverb completed-sales data, and community archives) and we welcome corrections from readers with primary documentation.
- Serve the reader, not the keyword. A page on a Fender amp model is supposed to answer the question someone actually has when they pick up that amp. If we can’t answer that question better than the existing top-ranked pages, we don’t publish.
How this site makes money
Transparency: this site generates revenue through affiliate links to Reverb.com, Sweetwater, Thomann, and Amazon Associates, and through occasional sponsored content arrangements with vintage guitar dealers and amp manufacturers. Affiliate links are marked with appropriate disclosure. We do not let advertising relationships influence the editorial position of any guide.
Contact
For corrections, content suggestions, or business inquiries, see our contact page. For the full bibliography and acknowledgments behind the technical content on this site, see Sources and Credits.
What this site is not
TCguitar is not a continuation of 20th Century Guitar Magazine. We do not own, license, or claim affiliation with that publication or with its former staff. The TCG name and trademarks belong to whoever inherited them; we use the historical context of this domain because the domain’s relevance to vintage Fender content predates our ownership by more than two decades. If you represent the estate or rights-holder of the original publication and wish to discuss this, please reach out via the contact page.