70s Peavey amp, whats good?

alalalkasar

So 70s peavey valve amps seem pretty cheap at the moment and I guess they are big loud and indestructible. What models are good with bonus points for spring reverb, tremolo or good footswitchable overdrive.

ICBM

The Classic and Deuce are the main ones - valve power amp, solid-state preamp, reverb and tremolo. Very reliable - just a couple of known weak points which are easily fixed - quite heavy, very loud. Whether the onboard overdrive is good is a different question… by modern standards, probably not very. No real need to worry about it since the clean sound is fantastic and they take pedals very well.

Later models replaced the tremolo with phaser - ! - which is a great-sounding one but probably a bit more limited in usefulness. (Although I really like it.)

Not sure where you're located but there's an earlier tremolo version Classic in the shop I work for in Glasgow.

alalalkasar

I'm a long way from Glasgow. The classic is the one that caught my eye, seems to cover most of my bases.
What about the Mace?

lewism

Peavey had a model called the Vintage in the 70s that looks like a straight up knockoff of 50s Fender Tweeds. No idea what the circuit was based on but Pete Townsend recorded with one on Rough Mix.

ICBM

alalalkasar said:

I'm a long way from Glasgow. The classic is the one that caught my eye, seems to cover most of my bases.
What about the Mace?

The Mace is the same thing but more powerful, heavier and much rarer - and also available as a head. Well named... it's really painfully loud .

lewism said:

Peavey had a model called the Vintage in the 70s that looks like a straight up knockoff of 50s Fender Tweeds. No idea what the circuit was based on but Pete Townsend recorded with one on Rough Mix.

I've never seen one of these, but from what I can find out they're a 100W amp loosely based on a Bassman but with 6C10 preamp valves in the first version, and a more typical Peavey solid-state preamp in a later version.

JayGee

The original '70s Peavey Classic was the first approximation to a modern channel switching amplifier I ever came across when a classmate with indulgent grandparents acquired one, it had a neat wrinkle in that you could enable both the bright and normal channels at the same time and depending on which of the two sockets you were plugged into you'd get them in parallel (kind of like jumpering the inputs on an old school non-switching two channel amp) or series (more like the "cascading" set-up in a Boogie). Three distinct sounds (in addition to the reverb and tremelo) instantly accessible from a footswitch - it seemed like black magic at the time...

And hey, it looked just the big, brutally loud Mace heads which we'd just seen massive heaps of arrayed across the stage behind Rossington, Collins, and Gaines when Skynyrd came to Leeds - what more could an impressionable 15-16 year old ask for from a guitar amplifier...?