There are hundreds of guitar amps available to buy, but which should you choose?  The one with the badge you know?  The one with 30 knobs, 40 digital effects and 4 channels?  Is 50 Watts enough or should you go for 100?  How about solid state, digital modelling, valves/tubes or a hybrid technology?  Class A is the best isn’t it?  Should it have a valve/tube rectifier?

 

It can all get very confusing.  Most guitar players we know are constantly changing their amp as again and again, what they've just bought just isn't quite right.  Usually it’s too loud, too complex, unreliable or just doesn't sound so great.

 

Many companies will tell you nothing more than a list of the amps specs and features; its valve types, or the fact that they use paper composition capacitors specially made to the original 60's specs.......quite frankly, it's bollocks, boring and is no good indication of anything useful.

 

Amps of the 50’s and 60’s such as the Vox AC-30, Fender ’59 Bassman and Marshall Bluesbreaker are widely regarded as the holy grails of guitar tone.  All are simple, great sounding workhorses with no frills, bells or whistles that sound fantastic just by plugging in a nice guitar.  For a player who wants to add their own personal flavour, they also sound great when being driven by any of the numerous high quality pedals that are available.

 

Whilst these vintage amps sound fantastic, in the modern world they have two significant flaws; they often have poor reliability and in most cases too much power, particularly for home or studio use.

 

Modern amplifiers are the result of incremental development over the past 40+ years with features such as multiple switchable channels, master volume controls, effects loops, built-in reverb and tremolo, massive amounts of gain and crazy amounts of power.  What’s often overlooked is what is sacrificed by adding these features?

 

Adding features increases the complexity and number of components; taking into account that most companies also have to meet a ‘target price’ defined by the marketing department to meet a certain demographic and it’s inevitable that significant compromises have to be made on the circuit design and component quality.  The result?  Poor tone and poor reliability.

 

Tone can be drastically improved just by purposefully removing these (arguably) unnecessary features at the design stage.  The old adage of ‘less is more’ is certainly true of guitar amps.  Reliability can also be greatly improved by using better construction techniques, higher rated components, and a well thought out design.

 

So what do you really need?  We believe all you really need is a great sounding, reliable amp.

 

 

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