My new amp is Jet City's Pico Valve. This is actually a licensed product by THD hence the logo you see here. Andy Marshall refers to THD's founding owner, Andrew Marshall, absolutely no relations to Marshall amps.
It cracks me up to see the controls going up to a maximum of '9' only, he he...So if you have any other amps going up to 10, chances are, you can beat the Pico Valve in view of this limitation- is this the case? Mua ha ha ha...
Let me give you a run-down on tone:
Clean
A wonderful warm clean heard from this one, very contemporary sounding, nothing Fender-ish. However, there's very little headroom on offer (in both 2W/ 5W models) even with the pre-amp gain backed down to its lower levels. The master control just takes over all the time.
Default gain
The drive on offer is not of the heavy metal calibre. It provides that dirt to make 'em blues rockers happy. If you are the Dumble dreamer who has no obligations to shred, this will satiate you in the mean time.
Pedals
The Pico Valve, my dear friends, is a great pedal feeder not in clean mode- that's what I heard after days of testing. For some ear candy, I cranked the gain way up & fed my pedals through. I've used many TS-type pedals along the way & the conclusion here is that they are all not strong enough in overpowering the default preamp gain, you'll hear more of what the PV is all about with added saturation. For any significant difference to be heard, your pedals need to be of the distortion type & not too mild mannered, an example here would be the Danelectro Coolcat distortion.
Being an intense distortion fan, I duly plugged in some metal-grade distortion units into the PV & was glad to hear the pedals more than the amp, the latter provides some much needed boost & saturation without getting in the way- I simply love this chemistry. My firm favourite is the (BOSS) Power Stack-PV pairing, it makes the overall tone rather huge-sounding with lots of definition in tact. This option works for a simple reason- the Power Stack is not bent on making the tone excessively piercing or typically heavy metal; it just intensifies the tone with lots of amp characteristics, akin to cascading an intense type distortion into a mild drive booster unit.
Here's a rear view- the PV only has the variable resistance on offer, no FX loop feature here. Despite its diminutive nature, the PV is hefty.
7 comments:
if compared with vox night train or it's 'lil brother? in terms of tone, controls & price...
The night train has a Brit sting to it bro (EL84), the PV has a smoother top end (6L6) :-)
Which cab did you pay them through Sub?
Played it through my Blackheart 1x12- the clean sounds great but the distortion stuff just sounds more appealing through my Marshall 1960 :-)
Have you watched Spinal Tap. These goes to 11...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbVKWCpNFhY
I've come across spinal tap in the '90s :-) they did a hilarous april fool guitar lesson in Guitar World mag & people still fell for it- Nigel Tufnel tapping with his hair, ha!
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