After a week rehearsing with the Genz head, i decided that despite the fact its an incredible amp and sounds insanely good, the head and cab format, along with the weight and size just isn't going to be practical for my application. So it was back to the drawing board for a modern recording and gigging amp. I'd owned a H&K TM18 head a few years ago and loved the features and the modern tones so i started the hunt for the combo version with the 12 inch speaker. My luck was obviously in because one came up very local to me and at a killer price.
Initial thoughts: Its so compact and lightweight, a very easy one handed lift! The cleans are great, you can get it super clean or you can dial in a little bit of breakup, either way it sounds pretty smart. The drive channel is excellent, its very modern with a wide sweep on the EQ, very easy to dial in good rock tones in seconds. The boosted drive channel is a superb tone, very defined and great for heavy palm mutes or single string riffs. The output wattage selector works a treat, so you can mute the speaker for recording if you want or have a bit of amp for monitoring. Reverb is big sounding.
I think the speaker is holding the amp back a bit, i'm going to see if i can fit a neo cream back or V-Type into it and i think the cheap chinese valves aren't great either, but they're easy things to fix.
Comments
I really like the EQ, but i used the same EQ settings on clean, crunch & lead on any amp, so the shared EQ is just fine for me!
One thing to say its really responsive to different pick ups and guitars, which could be a huge pain in the ass if you chop and change guitars alot.
- new power valves, TAD CZ
- new pre amp valves, Ruby Premium Selects
- new speaker, Celestion V-type
- foamed the bottom and back of the internal cab walls.
Huge difference in tone! The cleans are now deeper and break up a little bit later. Crunch is now usable! It's made the crunch slightly thicker and less fizzy, a bit more vintage sounding! The lead channel is now sublime, very much like channel 3 of my old trilogy now.
its hard to tell which elements had the biggest result, I'd guess it's the speaker and the foam, although you can definitely hear there's more quality and balance to the tones now.
Glad you're happy though. I find the crunch channel is only any cop with really hot humbuckers or my tele
The ultimate versatile, compact rig for both live and recording