Alex Lifeson’s signature 30-watt, 6L6-powered combo offers tones from clean to scorching, that offer much more than just Rush sounds.
A powerful grab-and-go tube combo with gutsy lead and rhythm tones from an admirably simple control complement. Nice construction quality.
Independent lead and rhythm gain controls would be a plus.
$1,999
Lerxst Chi Combo
mojotone.com
In addition to being one of the world’s most-accomplished rock guitarists, Alex Lifeson is, it seems, a dab hand at product conceptualization, too. The latest evidence is the CHI Combo, a new addition to the Lerxst amp series, which is Lifeson’s collaboration with Mojotone of Burgaw, North Carolina.
The CHI was designed as an easily portable amp that Lifeson can reach for when a last-minute show pops up. It’s ostensibly “Marshall-y” in attitude, though it’s also very much a modern-voiced circuit with footswitchable clean and lead channels. It generates 30 watts via two 6L6EH output tubes and three 12AX7s in the preamp and phase-inverter stages. It’s a straight-ahead amp, wonderfully free of excess features to throw you off course. And while it's perfect for the diehard Rush fan (manual-suggested settings for several Lifeson signature tones, including “Limelight,” “Fly by Night,” and “Working Man,” confirm as much), there’s plenty here to satisfy guitarists outside the Canadian prog-rock obsessives club.
Greek to Me
The CHI exudes a businesslike demeanor, but it’s also stylish enough to stand apart from the scores of lookalike classic clones out there, dressed up as it is in race-grey levant vinyl, red-garnet piping, and black-matrix grille cloth. The logo panel sports a striking red font inspired by the text on the iconic Moving Pictures album cover, and the control panel carries an etched Starman graphic that lights up red when you flip the power switch (there’s no standby on this model). The 24" x 20" x 9", 49-pound amp, with its Baltic birch cabinet, feels solid and substantial, too. Mojotone’s reputation for quality cabinets extends back further than its amplifier business, and the company has supplied many top boutique amp builders. It’s easy to imagine why.
“Access to the fluid, singing tones that define much of Lifeson’s playing with Rush is easy.”
Controls include input gain, lead master, output master, treble, middle, bass, and presence, and there’s a pull switch for a “rhythm clip” function on the input gain, which adds a little dirt to erstwhile clean tones. Around back, you’ll find a jack for the single-button footswitch, a send and return for the effects loop, two 8-ohm speaker outs, and a single 16-ohm out. Inside, the CHI’s circuit is wired across a primary printed circuit board. Three smaller boards host output-tube connections, effects send/return and speaker outs, and the LED array that lights up the Starman. Workmanship is tidy throughout, with neat wire runs and tube sockets that are bolted to the chassis for support in addition to their connections to the respective PCBs.
The CHI’s 30-watt rating comes courtesy of cathode-biased 6L6s. The configuration slightly reins the power from these tubes, which can produce around 45 watts in a fixed-bias configuration, but they can often sound a little juicier and more harmonically complex when cathode biased. The setup also means you can replace the output tubes without having to reset their bias. (We will say, though, be careful when removing or reaching behind the amp’s upper-back panel: A sharp edge on the roughly cut protective screen left this reviewer with a slice on my index finger.)
A Ride in the Red Barchetta
Tested with a Gibson ES-355 and a Fender 1956 Stratocaster Reissue, the Lerxst CHI swiftly revealed itself as a versatile performer—able to do far more than the expected Lifeson-alike tricks that would appear to be its raison d’etre. Going straight to the gained-up lead channel with input gain set at 2 o’clock or more—a route that’s hard to resist on an amp like this—accesses a boatload of muscular grind, sustain, and sizzle. Attaining the fluid, singing tones that define much of Lifeson’s playing with Rush is easy. Dial down the input gain to noon or below, though, and you can tap into plenty of earthy, rootsy rock ‘n’ roll tones. A little tweak here and there delivers everything from gritty classic rock to dirty blues to gnarly garage-rock tones.
Rhythm channel tones will stay relatively clean at pretty hot settings, so you can play loud without sounding muddy. This capability will be a boon for texturalists who need headroom for detailed time-based and modulation effects. But the rhythm channel also works great with overdrive pedals (a TS10 Tube Screamer and Wampler Tumnus Deluxe both sounded excellent). Pulling out the input gain knob for rhythm clip is also an effective tool for adding dirt to the rhythm foundation. The overall level drops slightly, too, but since it’s not a footswitchable function you’re more likely to use this very practical mode with its own gain settings.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the CHI’s gain staging, and the knobs that control it, take some getting used to. Since input gain controls the drive level for both channels, you’re tied to finding a compromise between them, then balancing the lead output via the lead master control, and the overall volume of both channels at the output master. Including just one more knob to allow for both rhythm gain and lead gain controls would be more intuitive. As it is, the setup certainly works once you get the hang of it, and both channels can sound great, but it sometimes requires a little deviation from your ideal tone on one channel or another.
The Verdict
The Lerxst CHI combo is a convenient, versatile amp with more than enough punching power to keep up with a heavy drummer, and still sounds great when reined in to basement practice levels. While saturated rock sizzle is very much its forte, the medium-grind overdrive tones are appealing, and both cleans and clipped settings on the rhythm channel are useful and satisfying. Independent rhythm and lead gain controls would have been a plus, but the CHI combo has much to offer just as it is, whether you’re a Rush fan or not
Alex Lifeson Lerxst Chi Amp Demo by Zach Wish — Run the range of Rush riffage! | First Look
Low-gain overdrive? Tell that to the amp you just blew up with this Jekyll and Hyde stomp.
Snappy-to-nasty OD colors. Dynamically responsive. Easy to dial in a wide range of tones. Nice price. Momentary switch option.
Bass-heavy settings can sound cloudy.
$129
Electro-Harmonix Spruce Goose
ehx.com
I was very late to discover the Marshall Bluesbreaker. There’s no reason, really. We just didn’t cross paths often, and unlike, say, a Boss SD-1 or something, there wasn’t one lurking around every practice joint. Last year, though, I got to hang out with Marshall’s recent re-issue and was sad to see it go. So, I was equally stoked to get my hands on EHX’s Spruce Goose, which uses the Bluesbreaker as a point of departure.
The Spruce Goose (and the circuit it’s derived from) are popularly regarded as low-gain drives. I’m never sure where the threshold between low gain and something nastier lives. But the Goose sometimes pulls to the aggro side of that line like a mad dog on a leash. It doesn’t take a lot of work to make the Spruce Goose explosively alive, and it’s quick to wake up a thin amp. Telecaster bridge pickups can sound firecracker hot and SG Burstbuckers beastly. With the latter, you can transform any decent black-panel Fender-style amp turned up to 7 or 8 into something a lot like a Marshall in the service of Angus. Those single-coil sounds are my favorite, though. Via the Goose, they come through clear, snarly, rowdy, and rude. That clarity crossed with filth extends the Goose’s utility. High-octane folk rock arpeggios, Zep’ I lead stingers, Black Flag grind, and Sonic Youth yowl all sound perfectly at home in the cradle of the Spruce Goose. Mind the boost from that lift switch, though. It’s a little like pouring nitroglycerin on a stack of twitchy dynamite. Hearing it blow is a rambunctious pleasure.
Electro-Harmonix Spruce Goose Overdrive Effects Pedal
Spruce Goose Overdrive PedalA smooth user experience and standout high-gain sounds distinguish this powerful modeler.
Easy to create new rigs. Bluetooth, amp cloner, and cloud features are very useful. Solid high-gain tones.
Some clean, breakup, and fuzz tones can sound thin and a bit stiff.
$1,299
Headrush Prime
headrushfx.com
The Headrush Prime is an extremely deep all-in-one floor modeler that brings a few distinctive features to a very competitive space. With just seven knobs and a full-color touchscreen, navigating through the various menus and options is relatively easy—a big plus for those hesitant to take the digital plunge. The array of included effects, amps, and cabs is impressive and the main food groups are all represented. One of the most intriguing features is the Amp Cloner, which “clones” any amp, preamp, overdrive, distortion, or fuzz pedal. I tested it out with a homemade clone of a Zendrive and the process was very easy. The Prime captured the essence of the pedal without much digital stiffness.
This space doesn’t permit an exhaustive look at every feature on the Prime. But I was very impressed with the graphics on the touchscreen. Pedals and amps look much like their real-world counterparts and, thanks to a few routing templates, creating nearly any imaginable rig is a relatively smooth process, though the manual remains essential. High-gain sounds are among the strongest here, and models of Soldano and Mesa/Boogie amps are standouts. At $1,299, the Prime holds its own against other floor modelers in its class, and it’s a worthy option for players who want authentic tones without navigating endless screens of menus.
Mark Tremonti and the gang from Annapolis swing big with a 100-watt, 3-channel blast machine that spans clean and ferocious extremes.
Incredible sounds across all three channels—ranging from pretty and clean to hot and aggressive. Reasonably priced.
No onboard attenuation or reverb.
$1,849
PRS MT 100
prsguitars.com
Mark Tremonti’s relationship with PRS Guitars began in 2000 with his first signature guitar. Eight years later, he had his first signature amp, theMT 15, a successful lunchbox amp that received a Best in Show award at the NAMM show that year. The new 100-watt, 3-channelMT 100 takes Tremonti’s tone concepts to higher and louder heights.
Three Corners of a Colossus
The MT 100 is designed by amp guru Doug Sewell, who built much-revered amps under his name before Paul Reed Smith recruited him. The tube layout includes four 6L6GC power amp tubes—typical enough for a 100-watt amp. But there are eight 12AX7 preamp tubes because each channel has its own preamp section. The clean channel uses one preamp tube (V1) and the overdrive and lead channels each use two. And while the MT 100’s many knobs suggest a complicated affair, the amp is actually pretty straightforward. Each channel has its own controls for presence, master, bass, middle, treble, and gain—that’s it. On the back panel is a tube-driven, series effects loop, where you can patch in reverb or delay as desired. There’s also a very handy panel of bias jacks. A 3-button footswitch is included and there are corresponding LED lights on the switch and the amp’s faceplate (blue for clean, orange for overdrive, and red for lead), so you know which channel is engaged.
Five Years in the Making
f you only know Mark Tremonti from Alter Bridge and Creed, you’d probably assume the MT 100 is a high-gain flamethrower. It’s much more than that, though. Tremonti is an amp fanatic, and his stage setup has traditionally been pretty complex, ranging from Dual Rectifiers for dirty sounds to Twin Reverbs for clean ones. The MT 100 impressively covers much of that turf via a single amplifier.Initially the MT 100 was going to have a 2-channel design like the MT 15, but Tremonti wanted to add an overdrive channel. When Iinterviewed Tremonti in 2012, he talked of his love of Dumbles. The MT 100’s middle channel is inspired by his favorite Dumble, and took five years of back and forth before the design was finalized. Dumble-style amps are typically extra expensive, so the MT 100’s $1,849 price feels like a bargain for an amp that does Dumble and then some.
With Ears Wide Open
I plugged a couple of guitars into an MT 100, including a semi-hollow and a dual-humbucker solid-body with split-coil options, with the amp hooked up to a Celestion-equipped cabinet. It was easy to find sweet spots for each instrument I tried. With the clean channel’s tone controls at noon and the presence a touch lower than that, the MT 100 sounds bright and a lot like a Fender Twin, with more warmth and copious bottom end. The clean channel brings small details to life. Fingerpicked open chords laced with hammer-on and pull-off embellishments, for example, sound especially pretty. And while the clean sounds are full-bodied, they leave a lot of space for effects like delay and reverb. I do wish that the MT 100 had built-in reverb. Almost all of us have loads of effects at the ready, but it’s also nice when an amp—and clean channel—this fundamentally good enables you to plug and play with a reverb option.
The overdrive channel is a delight, particularly when I use my semi-hollow. With the tone controls all around noon, the presence at 9 o’clock, and the gain at 2 o’clock, I could cop Robben Ford and Larry Carlton fusion sounds in a jiffy. But the overdrive channel isn’t just smooth and heavy. With a bridge-position humbucker and the gain control all the way up, it was easy to tap Brit-style metal and hard rock tones.
For Tremonti fans, the lead channel is probably the MT 100’s main attraction, and it definitely lives up to expectations. Lead sounds bloom with sustain, and notes would ring forever whether humbuckers or split-coils drove the front end. Palm-muted rhythm figures felt massive—floor-shakingly massive. And though you could fairly categorize the lead channel as dark and heavy at times, it’s far from muddy. You’ll hear a lot of detail in these zones. What’s also cool is that the tone foundation of the lead channel is distinctly different than that you hear on the overdrive channel. It really comes across as two different amps rather than the same basic sound with different gain variations on each of the two heavy channels. Factor in the use of effects and you’re looking at a lot of tone possibilities. Switching between channels, incidentally, is smooth, organic, and free from the jarring pops that some channel-switching amps exhibit.The Verdict
In a lot of ways, PRS was brave to build the MT 100. One hundred watts is a lot of power to wrangle, and to get the amp to really move air it needs to be cooking at a volume level that may not be practical in a lot of gigging situations. Obviously, an attenuation option might have been a nice touch (though you can argue that’s what the lunchbox-sized MT 15 is for), and if you use a load box/speaker simulator like UA’s OX, you can still get in on the fun. In larger environments that can handle it with a big cab, though, it is at its most beastly.
PRS and Tremonti should be commended for choosing a streamlined design path, too. Sure, it has three channels, but it forgoes power-scaling capabilities, graphic EQ, the option to use different types of power tubes, a foot-switchable effects loop, or direct recording/speaker cabinet cloning outputs like so many modern amps. And while it eschews bells and whistles, the MT 100 dominates in terms of tone—each of the MT 100’s three channels is dripping with it. If an amp that offers delicious Fender Twin Reverb-meets-Bruno Underground clean tones, a dead-on Dumble-sounding overdrive channel, and a hellacious lead channel that can stand head-to-toe with the Dual Rectifiers, Uberschalls, and 5150s of the world sounds cool to you, you’re probably not going to think once about the lack of gimmicks.
Mark Tremonti's New 100W Amps! The PRS MT 100 Mark Tremonti Signature Amp Demo | First Look
Ambience is only part of the appeal in this delay of many modes and moods.
Deep and varied while being intuitive to explore. Abundance of polyrhythmic textures can transform simple ideas.
Deep and varied while being intuitive to explore. Abundance of polyrhythmic textures can transform simple ideas.
$239
MXR Joshua Ambient Echo
jimdunlop.com
Like any art movement that sticks around long enough, “ambient” music has come to mean many different things. As home recording grows more accessible, it’s become a popular vehicle for quiet, introspective creations that can come together in small spaces. And when the pandemic raged, ambient music exploded both as an outlet for confined creators and as a service for stressed folk that needed to chill out. Regardless of how the form evolved beyond the prophecies and concepts of Satie, Eno, and ’60s minimalists—and some manifestations have been truly vacuous—its expansion opens a lot of opportunities for pedal builders.
MXR, for its part, hasn’t dabbled much with ambient effects. The recent MXR Reverb is, until now, probably the brand’s most ambitious effort along ambient lines. The new Joshua Ambient Echo, however, explores many such avenues by melding two delays, modulation, multiple echo divisions, octave tones, and reverb. And, yes, you can probably bet the house that, in name and sound, Joshua cheekily honors the Edge and the mega-platinum LP his band made with none other than Eno himself. See how beautifully everything intertwines in the mists of ambient space? You can reach a lot of these magical places with Joshua.
The Brink of the Abyss
Joshua’s basic voice, sans reverb, modulation, or octave, produces the kind of clean, precise digital echoes that I expect when I grab my Boss DD-3. One cool byproduct of this clarity is the way it highlights the rhythmic capabilities of the Joshua, which are a draw equal to its capacity for ambience.
Less than subliminally compelled to play a bunch of muted U2-style rhythms, I heard the Joshua snap with sharp, percussive presence in a manner evocative of the Edge’s Korg SDD-3000 sounds (check The Unforgettable Fire for a good point of reference). Predictably, the dotted-eighth and triplet modes hop and pop in a fashion that turns stupidly simple melodic lines and chord patterns into compelling riffs. But it’s when you add the second echo that these patterns really percolate. Getting these complex reflections just right can be tricky when tight rhythms are the underpinning of a riff. But getting there is hardly a chore (especially when using tap tempo), and when they come together they can add intriguing extra animation and space to simple parts.
“Predictably, the dotted eighth and triplet modes hop and pop in a fashion that turns stupidly simple melodic lines and chord patterns into compelling riffs.”
These twin-delay polyrhythms sound great in subtle, low-mix settings, too—adding dimensionality that, again, evokes the Edge’s twin SDD-3000/AC30 rig. They also benefit from the Joshua’s ability to operate at very high-to-maximum repeat and mix levels. Instead of oscillating out of control, echo patterns spool into long-to-infinite loops. In audio Clip 1 that accompanies the online version of this review, you can hear a single 12th-fret harmonic stab—played in the compound-eighth/dotted-eighth mode at maximum repeat and mix—turn into a sequencer-like pattern that’s perfect for a looper or the pedal’s freeze function.
Of course, Joshua’s most complex echoes can also unlock unusual textures and compel players to explore new dynamic techniques and approaches to songcraft. Check out Clip 2. This is a very Edge-like percussive pattern, again played on the compound-eighth/dotted-eighth division setting with a pretty aggressive mix. The first segment of the clip uses a single delay and a pattern using a heavy downstroke on the one. Played in dual delay mode, this complex tangle of echoes is a mess. But apply a light touch, add some modulation and mild octave-up content, and the same pattern of notes becomes the audio equivalent of light scattered through stained glass—producing many unexpected colors and overtones.
Generally, I’m not a big fan of octave-up content in delays and reverbs or the way they can turn otherwise engaging echo tones to cloying. The +2 octave range here can be syrupy sweet to my ears. But the pedal also has +1 and -1 octave settings, the latter of which can add ballast to a part or, at high mix and repeat settings, turn a single low E note to a haunting, endless foghorn blast. The modulation is very nice, too, adding much to the movement and harmonic makeup of the pedal’s most ambient tones, or simply working as a rich chorus at fast delay times as heard in Clip 3.The Verdict
The Edge regularly credits his old Memory Man and Korg delays for completely recasting his technique and compositional approach. And doubtless, players with free spirits and few preconceptions will find many fresh paths to wander here. That so many possibilities and complex sounds can exist alongside much more basic fare in a compact unit makes the Joshua a sensible investment—even at nearly 220 bucks. For the player that masters its complexities, it could flower into a deep well of inspiration capable of paying back that sum many times over.