Piranha bites

Good Saturday morning to the gear heads out there. It's fast approaching mid-month & for many of us, our funds are running low. Nevertheless, we move on with the consolation that good affordable gear are available if we look at the right places. With that in mind, the Peavey 6505 Piranha head seen here is an affordable piece of gear, listing for $250 & I managed to check it out at Guitar Workshop last evening.

First impressions

There's no clean channel on offer here so if you need to toggle between clean & dirt, please consider something else out there. Also, contrary to popular embrace, the Piranha is not a full tube unit; it features a tube pre-amp with a solidstate power section. This is a flagship technology done years ago with Peavey (TransTube) & Marshall (Valvestate) being the forefront names in the game. Peavey eventually removed all tubes in their TransTube technology & products with this technology tag are 100% solidstate. 

The crunch channels offer a fair serving of Bluesbreaker-esque nuances at the early gain stages, moving on to a good ACDC type attack at both higher gain & volume levels. The lead channel pushes the gain boundaries while retaining the crunch bite. This might upset the 6505 fans out there but the Piranha does not offer that blistering heavy metal assault we love to hear coming from the 5150 & 6505 amps under the Peavey moniker. Instead, the high gain module offered here remains crunchy but with excessive jabs to address all things heavy metal- this is the crucial difference. It had to happen this way because Peavey has the lunchbox type 6505 in the catalog & if you wish to tread the 6505 way then you need a real 6505 to do the job. The Piranha here is a different take on the 6505 aggression using an essentially different approach- a hybrid pre/power section.

I'm holding back further appraisals for the Piranha until mine gets here 😁 I took up the pre-order promotion for the Piranha yesterday- a 10% discount (you should too, if you are interested) & I'm fully aware that I'm not getting a full fledge 6505 tones upon acquisition. The showroom model isn't for sale but it's a good opportunity to hear the Piranha in action. So head down to Guitar Workshop for the personal experience. 

Thank you Guitar Workshop for the opportunity. My special thanks to the lady boss in store for helping me with the testing yesterday (didn't catch your name- apologies!).

PS: 10% discount only for the first 5 pre-orders (OK now down to 4...)