Recently I‘ve been looking into small amps:. I thought I’d never care about them but here I am writing a blog all about them. Traditionally, we rock/metal guitar players look up to our heroes and see these impressive rigs and do our best to have the same thing. I too, was into big amps and huge rigs for a long time. That is to say, I thought that big amps were the only things that were worth looking into. I used to be a Mesa Boogie man through and through. I owned a Rectifier and was in love with Mark IVs, Lonestars and Roadkings. A lot of this changed when I moved from California to Japan. I sold all my gear and headed of to teach English (Oh know! The cat‘s out of the bag, I‘m under the grammar microscope now).
At first, I told myself: “just a little cheap guitar and a cool practice amp and then I’m done.” I’m sure you know as well as I do that telling yourself to stop wanting new gear is about as effective as a vacuum in the Sahara. So obviously I slowly started wanting to get the tones I had while in possession of a Boogie. And began looking into big half stacks with 100 watt heads and so on. But those are expensive and now that I’m married and have more bills to pay, I see that spending $3000 on a Mesa head isn’t going to be easy. What was I to do about this lack of funds during an increasingly severe attack of GAS? A trip back to Cali for the holidays was the cure.
While I was visiting family and friends in the States I jammed with some buddies and my Pops. All of these guys are in the same boat as me: married, poor and GAS ridden. When I went to jam with them they brought out some surprising gear:
Blackheart BH5H Little Giant 5W Head
THD UniValve 15W Class A Head
Fender Super Champ XD Combo
All of these amps were very small in power but fairly rich in tone. No, not compared to a high dollar rig. Even though they are small they have tones better than price or power rating would suggest. The THD is a little expensive for what it is, but it can really sing if you give it the time to get a great tone out of it. The Blackeart had a few mods on it. The first was a switch that changes the nature of the preamp so that you can get a Fender tone, A Marshall tone, and a VOX tone. I don’t know how much this mod cost to do, but it seemed to be pretty common for Blackheart owners. The other mod was an added power attenuator. This helped to get the power tubes screaming without too much volume and if you ask me it was well worth it. The Super Champ had a mod on it as well. It’s stock speaker was replaced with an Eminence Patriot Ragin' Cajun 10" speaker. This helped the clarity and bass response of the combo I’m told, I didn’t hear it with the old speaker. However, this isn’t a review of these amps, it’s a commentary on power, tone and size.
Price aside, these small watted amps really dished out huge tone for their respective wattages. The volume and clarity of all of them, especially the THD, surprised me. Another surprising aspect of these amps was that all of them had enough head room for rock purposes. Now if you’re looking to play loud, raging shred and then roll your volume off to do your best Pat Martino impression, look somewhere else, but you could get a Jimmy Page clean or a good Texas clean, just by lowering your guitar’s volume. Novel idea isn’t it? Using your guitar’s controls.
The musicality of the tone is what stands out when you have a small amp cranked. It is the tone we look for but never find, even with a huge Mesa, Marshall, Peavey or Bogner stack. In 9 years of owning a Rectifier (great years in my opinion) I never got the volume above 9 o’clock and I had the 50-watt head. As great as it sounded, I never got the cranked amp tone I hear so many people talk about. And so many people on forums and in guitar shops talk about 150-watt heads and 200-watt power amps. What for? Yes, Petrucci has a killer rig with amazing tone, but he’s on a world tour, endorsed by Mesa and plays live to thousands of people every night. All I know is that, within 5 minutes of using the THD Univlave I got a cranked vintage blues rock tone that was beyond the musicality I thought I could achieve with a small amp. Not to mention the volume, flexibility and head room to play for a small club ummiced and a large club miced. All this without blowing the hair off peoples heads. .
I have to say that I’ve really had my mind changed about power ratings and tone. I have for most of my playing life believed that a big stack sounded better than anything did, but I’ve learned that more power doesn’t equal more tone or more usability the way many of us guitarists think it does. Go ahead and give a smaller amp a try, use your guitar more dynamically and don’t worry too much about how much power your hero is using live. He’s on stage in front of thousands; you are at home. Or maybe you’re at a club, or in the studio. A small amp will take care of those situations easily. You might be pleasantly surprised by how good a 15 watt head sounds.
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