"Waterstoneуs new Meaden hollowbody bass has a 32"" scale and is equipped with two humbuckers and sexy checkerboard binding. Pictured here is the violet burst version, which retails for $679 with a hardshell case. waterstoneguitars.com"
This month's roundup features 15 essential releases, including EarthQuaker Devices’ all-analog tube preamp, Red Panda’s new pitch delay, and a studio-grade line isolator from Lehle. Whether you need vintage grit or modern precision, we’ve got the highlights.
Chicago Music Exchange
Fender Player II Lavender Haze Collection
Chicago Music Exchange and Andertons introduce their latest exclusive: Lavender Haze—a Player II collection that looks like a lost custom color from Fender’s golden era and sounds bigger, warmer, and more powerful than ever. Each instrument is loaded with exclusive “Full Dip” pickups, upgraded wiring mods, and thoughtful vintage-inspired details.
Nobels’ new mini pedals all feature tap tempo, mono or stereo (TRS), and true- or buffered-bypass switching. Each model offers 3 modes: MOD-mini has tremolo, phase, and u-vibe; CHO-mini has chorus 1, chorus 2, and flanger; DEL-mini tape, analog, and digital. Lots of features, great value!
Building on the legacy of the StroboStomp HD, the view-only StroboVUE delivers Peterson’s renowned strobe accuracy in an always-on pedalboard format. Its angled, high-visibility display and fully top-mounted jacks keep setups clean. Featuring pure buffered output, continuous tuning feedback, and no mute switch, StroboVUE is built for players who demand precision.
Dial in the past with the tilt EQ to create vintage bucket brigade tones, or dial it the opposite way to achieve classic ’80s sounds. The Aqueous features a preamp for gain makeup to limit the input and brings the circuit to life.
This all-analog tube preamp, designed with Dr. Z Amplification, features a real EF86 pentode tube to deliver authentic warmth and touch-sensitive response. This end-of-chain solution includes a three-band EQ, independent boost, analog cabinet simulation, and XLR/headphone outputs—perfect for direct recording or pedalboard-based rigs.
Do you want complete control of your overdrive? Kernom Ridge preserves your pure analog tone while unlocking the power of digital control. Its patented Analog Morphing Core sweeps smoothly from edge-of-breakup to saturated lead and every drive tone in between. Save presets, use MIDI or expression, and command your tone.
This stereo line isolator brings you closer to the main system. Passively, it converts your stereo audio signal not only to balanced XLR but lifts the ground so there’s no chance of noise or hum. Perfect for pedalboards or modeler, live or studio—all fitted into a handy size.
This focused digital delay features integrated pitch and frequency shifting designed for immediate, hands-on control. Shift repeats once or endlessly in the feedback loop, from clean delays to subtly twisted textures and out-there sounds.
The Dirt Dog Overdrive—developed with Joey Landreth—delivers expressive, amp-like breakup with outstanding touch sensitivity. Simple gain, level, bite, and tone controls make it easy to shape everything from warm grit to rich, sustaining drive.
This bold cross-border collab takes Summer School Electronics’ DS-1-inspired buzzsaw distortion and smashes into Supercool Pedals’ watery Small Clone chorus to create unmistakable grunge tones. With a chain-order switch in tow and art soaked in ’90s lore, it’s a blistering love letter to an iconic sound.
This boutique, Klon-style overdrive pedal is now fully built and ready to play. Get rich, transparent drive, smooth sustain, and dynamic response without building the kit yourself. Perfect for adding warm grit or pushing your amp into singing lead tones.
The StewMac Two Kings, based on the Analog Man King of Tone, packs two legendary overdrive circuits into one fully built pedal, no soldering required. From transparent boost to rich mid-gain crunch, stack the drives for endless tonal options. Perfect for shaping your rhythm tone or adding singing sustain to solos.
This fully assembled, board-ready analog phaser pedal was inspired by the legendary Mu-Tron Phasor II. Featuring lush, sweeping modulation, rich vintage tone, and three intuitive controls for rate, depth, and feedback, it effortlessly delivers anything from subtle movement to deep, psychedelic swirls—no assembly required.
A boutique-style pedal inspired by the Analog Man Sun Face, fully built and board-ready. The Sun Fuzz delivers rich, touch-sensitive fuzz tones with warmth, clarity, and adjustability. Featuring silicon-based circuitry with internal bias and clean blend controls for tonal finesse, it handles thick chords and saturated leads equally well.
Vintage Verified founders Jon Roncolato (left) and Zach Ziemer
We don’t often talk about Renaissance high art and ’50s rock ’n’ roll guitars in the same breath, unless we’re forming a new rockabilly-prog band called Hot-Rod Maximus. (You’re welcome.) But in the modern world of art and guitar collecting, items reputed to be the work of either Leonardo Da Vinci or Leo Fender are subject to much the same scrutiny from experts in the field, are known for fetching vast prices from discriminating buyers, and, given the millions of dollars potentially involved in even a single sale, are likewise expected to stand up to the most rigorous high-tech scientific analysis, as well. Right?
Well, almost. While the worlds of high art, medicine, astronomy, police forensics, and environmentalism have all taken that last cue to heart by making data-driven determinations with the latest tools of chemical analysis, the vintage guitar market—and its many rightfully respected authorities—has generally proven resistant to sharing the process of authentication with the likes of spectrometers, microscopes, and 3D imaging, tools that have long proven their worth in identifying the material composition of everything from planets to polyps to paint thinners. Black lights on the backs of headstocks have typically been about the latest “tech" in the room.
Until now. In a story that feels ripped from The Da Vinci Code or Cold Case Files, two remarkably down-to-earth—if undeniably intrepid—guitar-shop guys from Nashville, Jon Roncolato and Zach Ziemer, have quietly upended the vintage-guitar market in a matter of months. Fueled by rotating batches of fresh-ground coffee, an abundance of nerve, and a stomach for study, they’ve tapped some of the most advanced and expensive analytical machines available to capture, catalog, and compare hundreds of thousands of data points from countless vintage and modern instruments—their lacquers, pigments, pots, pegs, pickups, and parts—building the largest dataset for guitar-component and finish comparison in existence.
In the process, they’ve issued a gentle nudge to dealers, appraisers, and collectors—and yes, they’ve even shifted the status of some long-held vintage “treasures.” Although they no longer appraise or sell instruments themselves, they’ve still managed to ruffle a few feathers and attract more than a few legal threats. At the same time, they’ve leveraged their diligence and strong reputations to assemble a trusted advisory team made up of some of the most respected minds in guitars, art, and hard science: icons like repair guru Joe Glaser, cultural-heritage scientist Dr. Tom Tague (who authenticated Da Vinci’s “lost masterpiece” Salvator Mundi), Music City session legend Tom Bukovac, pickup mastermind Ron Ellis, and analytical chemist Dr. Gene Hall, among others.
Vintage Duco reference/research materials
Jon and Zach are guarded about the technology, as you might expect. They don’t post selfies, they don’t have a podcast, and they won’t be starting one. As Ziemer puts it, they’d much rather “keep our heads down and keep hammering away” with laser-based spectrometers, plumb the deepest secrets of Fullerton red Strats, and compare the chemical makeup of Duco paints (ironically, both Pollock and Fender’s mutual go-to.) In their scrupulously clean Nashville HQ—which will expand to offices in L.A. and N.Y.C. in 2026—they seem pretty resigned to their current controversial status, and remain motivated primarily by going after, y'know, the truth.
Okay, that and a good cup of coffee.
What was the genesis of this idea to apply these types of cultural heritage sciences to vintage guitars? Is the problem with inaccuracies, refinishes, and forgeries really that widespread?
Jon Roncolato: We met while I was the GM at Carter Vintage Guitars in Nashville. We initially hired Zach as part of the inspection team. It’s difficult to find people who have logged enough time examining vintage instruments to truly know what they’re looking at, but Zach had spent a couple years at Glaser Instruments—the go-to shop for repairs on high-dollar pieces.
When Zach became Head of Authentication, we began seeing questionable instruments come through with six-figure price tags that other experts had already signed off on. When you have a six-figure instrument and multiple experts all saying different things, you’ve got a problem. That’s when we realized there had to be a better way to do this—something grounded in science, not speculation.
Zach Ziemer: Everybody misses now and again. Most dealers are trying their absolute hardest with their experience, eye, and gut to tell an original from a fake or a refin. There’s simply some things you just can’t know unless you look at them with the kinds of tools that we’re bringing to the table. And it shouldn’t be that controversial: after all, literally every other collectible industry has a third party unassociated service like ours. The most obvious one is PSA with collectible sports cards. PSA is a little different than it used to be, but everybody still sees a sports card and a PSA box and if it says, “PSA 9,” for instance, you know you’re probably in good shape.
“In the art world, scientific validation has long been standard practice—pigment analysis, canvas fiber studies, dimensional scans. Sometimes it changes the story. That’s not an attack on tradition. It’s the pursuit of truth.” —George Gruhn, Gruhn Guitars
Jon Roncolato: In the art world, if you don’t have both iron-clad provenance and scientific analysis, it’s not possible to certify a piece as unequivocally “by the hand” of a given artist. Art dealers are very specific about their language, and there’s a whole hierarchy of degrees of certainty that directly correlate to the price of the piece. In the world of dealing guitars, though, even if you’re not 100% sure, you have to absolutely stake all your credibility on a guitar, even if there’s some doubt. You're not going to sell a $250,000 custom color Fender if you come out and say, “Well, I think it's a custom color. It looks good to me.” So that's just been the structure of the industry. Being in the underbelly of the whole thing, as we were, we realized what a big problem this was.
There must have been a ridiculous learning curve. You guys are guitar dudes, not scientists. Takes a bit of brass to bite off something like that, no?
Jon Roncolato: We have a framed quote in the kitchen from Wilbur Wright: "There are two ways of learning to ride a fractious horse: one is to get on him and learn by actual practice how each motion and trick may be best met. The other is to sit on a fence and watch the beast awhile, and then retire to the house." We chose the former.
That said, we spent the first year and a half offering no services at all—just studying the science. That included week-long training seminars where everyone but us had a doctorate attached to their name, and consulting with the top experts in the cultural heritage field.
We also didn’t get here alone. We caught a major break by connecting with Dr. Tom Tague and Dr. Gene Hall, two of the world’s leading experts in analytical chemistry. They took us under their wing and gave us a crash course in PhD-level material analysis.
Zach Ziemer: I can't even express how difficult it was to make heads or tails of any of this at first. Jon and I were not chemists, and a lot of what we do now is largely analytical chemistry. So the learning curve on that was incredibly steep. We always joked that we were smart enough to have the idea, but dumb enough to think we could do it. And while this process exists in other industries, the finished instrument industry is totally unique. The instruments are so modular, and you have finishes, plastics, hardware, pickups, and so you have to have an answer for all that information.
Jon Roncolato: That’s right. The process is designed to have an answer for anything and everything on the instrument. The headstock decals, the finish, the hardware, the fret wire, the fingerboard inlays—we have a data-driven answer for everything. That was really critical, because we didn't want to give incomplete information. Another absolutely critical principle for us was that anything we put in one of these reports has to be defensible in court. If we get subpoenaed to go to court, which inevitably we will, we need to know that Zach or I can show up and we can defend this and prove this. Our other guiding principle is that we remain completely independent, and not touch the buying and selling of the instruments.
“Vintage Verified is doing what we couldn’t do 20 years ago. They’re bringing in real tools—from forensics, from art conversation, from aerospace—and applying them to guitars. And it’s not about replacing experience. It’s about supporting it.” —Joe Glaser, Glaser Guitars
The workshop
Fair enough. So, what’s the most difficult or highly sensitive area of your analysis?
Jon Roncolato: Finish is easily the most complicated part of what we do, an absolute maze of information, and it’s also where you see the biggest value swings. Traditionally, if a guitar’s been refinished, the rule of thumb is that it cuts the value in half. Nowadays, it probably cuts the value by 40%. But if you start talking about custom colors, like a Fender Sonic Blue Strat, or the Fullerton red we have in our lab right now, this Strat here is probably a $250,000 Strat, assuming the finish is original. If the finish is, in fact, not legitimate, then potentially you’re looking at a $20,000 Strat.
And to determine this, you don’t just need that guitar’s own fingerprint, if you will, but you need to be able to conduct comparative analysis against a bulwark of trustworthy data. Where does that come from?
Jon Roncolato: We’ve been very fortunate to have guys like Joe Glaser and George Gruhn in our corner, who put their own cred on the line to help us scan and analyze literally thousands of vintage guitars, plus Dr. Gene Hall, whose work decoding Jackson Pollock paintings means he has the largest collection and database of period-correct Duco, Ditzler, R-M, Sherwin Williams, etc. paints on the planet, the same paints Fender used in their golden era. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We now have millions of data points across several different machines, a good $500,000 worth of spectrometers alone. We spent eight hours a day, all day, every day, collecting data as much as we possibly could.
So is it very much a one-to-one comparison? “This finish’s chemical composition is true to the year this guitar purports to be, so we’re good”? Or is it more complex than that?
Zach Ziemer: A little of both. Sure, the data that I just grabbed matches the aggregate of the given model/era pretty well, so therefore we can say with a high degree of certainty that it’s a period-correct material. But what really blew the doors open for us was when we got past that level, and started to have a fundamental understanding of these lacquer formulations, how various formulations over time were degrading, and how the different components in a lacquer formulation—plasticizers, pigments, etc.—all interact and evolve. How did those components morph over time?
If the government set regulations, what was the regulation attached to? If you look at a spectrum of a given lacquer, you’ll have hundreds of chemical compounds. A ton of information in there. What we had to do was figure out which chemical compounds were going to be chief identifiers of who was using what, and when. Building out this timeline for the major manufacturers was the bulk of our work, just as much as developing an understanding of the complexity of the materials. In other words, the data is only valuable if you understand the materials that are producing the data.
You’ve encountered some backlash, and even dealers who later became supporters initially had their lawyers on the phone. What’s your message to dealers, appraisers, collectors, working players, and the business as a whole?
Jon Roncolato: We knew there would be a significant amount of skepticism and backlash early on, just as there always is around a new service or technology. It’s like the wagon wheel salesman in the age of the automobile. Zach and I think they’ll come around eventually. One positive aspect of our service is that it allows buyers who would otherwise not feel comfortable spending large amounts of money on a piece to now buy with confidence. For years, many people at the top of the market wouldn’t buy custom color Fenders, wouldn’t buy Flying Vs. Because they were largely under the impression that many of them are refins or counterfeit pieces. So, already we’ve seen that many of these people who previously were not buying custom colors, bursts, or whatever, are now joining that market again because they have the trust that these are authentic.
Zach Ziemer: Our mission is to make sure that the data and the information we provide is absolutely correct. That’s our lane. We're not the guitar police. We are not policing transactions, and we do not appraise or assign any type of valuation, monetary or otherwise, to any instrument, ever. We’re hoping that we can help dealers begin to understand that this is designed to be an asset. It’s designed to help you protect yourself. And look, as soon as we print out a report, and I hand it to you, you can throw it in the garbage if you want. But it’s an option for you. Ultimately, it’s something that we believe helps give people the confidence to buy and sell high-value instruments, and know exactly what they’re getting.
Any effect can color a guitar’s personality and language. But Boss’ new XS-1 Poly Shifter literally stretches the instrument’s vocal range. With the ability to shift input by +/-3 octaves or semitones, it can turn your guitar into a bass, a synth, or a baritone, or function as a capo. It also seamlessly generates harmonies for single note leads and keeps up with quick picking without any apparent latency. Furthermore, the pedal is capable of stranger fare that stokes many out-of-the-box ideas. But if you’re a guitarist that plays more than one role in your band—or musical life in general—the XS-1 can be a utilitarian multitool, too. It’s a pedal that can live many lives.
- YouTube
The XS-1, which was released alongside its bigger, more intricate sibling, the XS-100, is an accessible route to exploring pitch shifting’s potential. Housed in a standard Boss enclosure, it doesn’t consume a lot of floor space like the XS-100 or DigiTech’s Whammy. And while it achieves this spatial economy in part by forgoing a built-in expression pedal (which could be a deal breaker for some potential customers) it’s still capable of +/- seven semitones and a +/- three-octave range that can be utilized in momentary or latching applications.
Slipping, Sliding, and Twitching
Though digital pitch shifters have always been capable of amazing things, early ones sounded very inorganic at times. High-octave sounds in particular could come across as artificial, like the yip of a robot chihuahua plagued by metal fleas. Some very creative players use these colors—as well as the most sonorous pitch shift tones—to great effect (Nels Cline and Johnny Greenwood’s alien tonalities come to mind). In other settings, though, these older pitch devices can be downright cringey.
“The pedal clearly represents several leaps forward from first-generation pitch shifters.”
The XS-1 belies digitalness in some octave-up situations. But the pedal clearly represents several leaps forward from first-generation pitch shifters. Tracking is excellent and shines in string bending situations. Semitone shifts can provide focused harmony or provocative dissonance depending on the wet/dry mix and which semitones clash or sing against the dry signal. At many settings the XS-1 feels alive and organic, too, with legato lines taking on many of the touch characteristics of a violin-family instrument. You get far less of a note-to-note “hiccup,” and glissandos take on a beautifully fluid feel—with or without a slide—letting the XS-1 deliver convincing pedal- and lap-steel-style textures when you add a single octave up. (Such applications sound especially convincing when you kick back on guitar tone and restrict your fretwork to the 3rd through 5th strings, which keeps digital artifacts at bay.)
Mixmaster Required
The most crucial XS-1 control is the mix. For the most convincing bass, baritone, and 12-string tones, you’ll want a fully wet signal. But composite sounds can be awesome, too. You can use the control’s excellent sensitivity and range to highlight or fine tune the prominence of a consonant harmony. But it’s sensitive enough to make blends with dissonant harmonies sound a lot more intentional and integrated. And many of these eerie, wonky, off-balance textures are extra effective when introduced in quick bursts via the momentary switch. (That switch can also deliver great flashes of drama with more consonant harmonies—like dropping in a 3rd or 5th above a resolving chord in a verse.)
You can get creative in other ways using dissonant blends. Droney open tunings can yield fields of overtones that sound extra fascinating with delay, reverb, or 12-string guitar… or all of them! Dialing in blends that really work takes some trial and error, and you’ll definitely hit a few awkward moments if you’re navigating by instinct alone. But those same experiments often uncover real gems—especially in the pitch-down modes, which tend to produce more mysteriously atmospheric textures than their pitch-up counterparts.
The Verdict
Boss’ most straightforward pitch shifter covers a lot of ground. If you play in a duo, trio, or small band, it can expand that collective’s stylistic and harmonic range. It’s small, at least relative to treadle-equipped pitch shifters, so if you’re not a pitch shift power user, you don’t sacrifice a lot of room for an effect you might only employ occasionally, and you can still use the expression pedal jack to hook up a pedal for dynamic pitch control. The $199 price puts it in line with competitors of similar size and feature sets, but the XS-1 is a great value compared to more elaborate, treadle-equipped pitch shifters. If you’re taking your first forays into pitch shifting, or know that you need only the most straightforward functions here, it will ably return the investment. And along the way, it might even unlock a whole cache of unexpected tonal discoveries.
Reverb and delay. What two effects are better suited to live side-by-side in one pedal? Source Audio’s new Encounter reverb and delay is a mirror image of the company’s Collider, which explores the reverb/delay combo via a vintage lens. The mirror by which Encounter reflects the Collider, however, is more like the funhouse variety. There are many psychedelic, cosmic, and wildly refracted echoes to utilize in the Encounter. There are lots of practical ones that can be tuned to subtle ends, too. But Encounter’s realm-of-the-extra-real extras make it a companion for players that ply dreamy musical seas. It’s incredibly fun, a great spark for creativity, and, most certainly, a place to lose oneself.
Exponentially Unfolding
Of Encounter’s six reverb modes and six delay modes, four of them—the hypersphere, shimmers, and trem verb reverbs, and the kaleidoscope delay—are entirely new. Hypersphere, fundamentally, makes reverberations more particulate. Source Audio says it’s a reverb without direct reflections. In their most naked state, these reverberations can still sound a touch angular and perhaps not quite as ghostly and fluid as “no direct reflections” suggests. But they are still complex, appealing, immersive sounds. Odd reverberation clusters can conjure a confused sense of space and highlight different overtones and frequency peaks in random ways. At settings where you can hear this level of detail, hypersphere shines, particularly in spacious solo phrases. Hypersphere also features phase rate and pitch modulation depth functions via the control 1 and control 2 knobs, and they can further accent and enhance those frequency peaks, creating intoxicating, deep fractal reflection systems.
“Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day.”
The new trem verb mode can be practical or insane. The two effects together are a pillar of vintage electric guitar atmospherics. But the Encounter’s trem verb explodes those templates. As with the hypersphere mode, trem verb can zest simple chord melodies by using extreme effect settings at low mixes, where chaotic, half-hidden patterns dip in and out of the shadows, sometimes creating eerie counterpoint. But I loved trem verb most at extremes—mostly high mix, feedback, and decay settings with really slow modulation. Sounds here can be intense and vague—like strobe flashes piercing drifting fog. It might not be an ideal place to indulge fast, technical fretwork, but it’s a wonderland for exploring overtones, drone, and melodic possibilities.
Incidentally, the trem verb is a great match for the six delays, and the new kaleidoscope delay in particular, which fractures and scatters repeats in a million possible directions and spaces. Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day. The sound permutations often seem endless, and finding magic can take some attention and patience. But you can strike gold fast, too. You have to take care to save settings you really love (you can store as many as eight presets on board, and 128 total via midi) because it’s hard to resist the urge to meander through— and meditate on—hours of sound without stopping. Not all of the Encounter’s sounds are perfectly pleasing. Some combinations reveal peaky little chirps that betray digital origins—the merits of which are subjective and contextual. For the most part, though, the combined sounds are liquid and vividly complex, and can be especially enveloping at high mix and feedback.
Extended Reach
If the onboard controls don’t get you in enough trouble, downloading the Neuro 3 app, which unlocks deep control and functionality, is a minor wormhole. Take the case of trem verb—you can use Neuro 3 to change the wave shape or set up the reverb to affect the wet signal only, just the dry signal, or both of them. All of these changes open up a new system of tone caves as the sound evolves. If you’re deep in the nuance of a mix or arrangement, this functionality can be invaluable. And it’s a boon if you have nothing but time on your hands. In a state of engaged, intuitive workflow, I like to avoid these kinds of app dives. But having that much extended power on your phone or computer is impressive.
Neuro 3 extends the capability of the Encounter in other ways, too. The SoundCheck tool within Encounter is home to prerecorded loops of various instruments that you can then route through a virtual Encounter pedal. That means you can explore Encounter’s potential while stuck in a train station. It’s a real asset if you want to understand the pedal as completely as possible, and certainly a way to extract the most value from the unit’s considerable $399 price.
The Verdict
About that price. It looks steep. For most of us, it’s a significant investment. But when I consider how many sounds I found in the Encounter, how compact it is, and the possibilities that it opens up in performance and portable production (especially when you factor in the stereo ins and outs), that investment seems pretty sound. I must qualify all this by saying I was happiest with the Encounter when exploring its spaciest places—the kind of atmospheric layer where Spacemen 3, ambient producers, 1969 Pink Floyd, and slow-soul balladeers all hang. But there is room to roam for precision pickers that background radical effects, too.
Still looking to justify the cash outlay? Consider the Encounter as a portable outboard post-production and mixing asset. If you’re creating music built on big, shape-shifting ambience, it’s a cool thing to have in your bag of tricks. Different artists will mine more from the Encounter than others, so you should consider our ratings scores on a sliding scale. But as you contemplate the Encounter, be sure to factor in mystery paths that will beckon when you dive in. There’s lots of fuel for creation along most of them.
Most amp kits are Fender flavored, typically recreating historic 5F1 Champ, 5F2-A Princeton, or 5E3 Deluxe tweed-style circuits. And since an actual late-’50s Princeton, for example, costs about $3,000, at well less than a third of that price a DIY kit is an affordable alternative for any guitarist with soldering skills and the patience to follow instructions. But what if Fender isn’t exclusively the taste you’re looking for? What if Valco, Ampeg, Marshall, or modern takes on classic tones also float your rubber raft?
Enter StewMac’s mighty little Valve Factory 18 head kit, a 12-pound beast that punches above its weight class, offers a variety of classic-inspired sounds, and hints at modern boutique amp voices.
Flexible Fryer
Part of the Valve Factory 18’s versatility is due to the two preamp tube options provided in the kit: a 12AX7 or a 12AY7. But it’s mostly the result of a concise-but-flexible set of controls. On the front panel, there are volume, gain, and tone dials, but the way they shape sound depends on whether your guitar is plugged into the low- or high-input jack. The low input is the clearer of the two and hews close to Fender tweed world. But the high input offers gentle breakup that, to my ears, gets into gnarlier old amp voices. Both channels offer plenty of headroom and work well with pedals, but if your primary sources of tone color are stompboxes, the low input may be best for you. Both also benefit from a clean boost footswitch that pumps up the volume without altering the tones in play too much.
On the back, there’s an impedance switch with 4-, 8-, and 16-ohm settings, so the Valve Factory 18 can be used with most cabinets. There’s a single speaker-out jack, and on/off and standby toggles. And as its name implies, the amp delivers 18 watts, and it’s a loud 18 watts at that—fitting for today’s small-amp sweepstakes.
Brick By Brick
Confession: StewMac sent me an immaculate, pre-assembled review model rather than a kit. But I still settled into a meticulous reading of the highly detailed and lavishly illustrated instruction book. It begins with a menu of the included parts, which are metal film and metal oxide resistors, plus a single wire-wound resistor, two 1N5408 diodes, nine various capacitors, a pair of custom-built Pacific Trans transformers (power and output, naturally), wire, heat-shrink tubing, sockets and tubes (more on the tubes later), the fuse and fuse holder, the pilot lamp, screws and locknuts, input jacks, control pots, front and rear faceplates, the fully assembled footswitch for the boost, and a very solid anodized metal chassis.
Point-to-point assembly begins with the filter cap and works through the sockets on up to populating the circuit board, and so on. It’s advisable to have a digital multimeter handy to check each resistor before installation. Our test Valve Factory 18 arrived ready to go save for installing the tubes, which was easy, since this amp does not have a cabinet, so, it's merely a matter of plugging the tubes into the slots on the top of the chassis. Two JJ 6V6s live atop the amp’s crown next to the filter cap, which is also adjacent to the 18-watt power amp. I inserted the provided 12AT7 phase inverter tube and then decided whether to plug the 12AX7 or 12AY7 into the preamp slot.
Totally Tubular
Those aren't the only tubes that can be swapped in the preamp slot. The amp will function happily with 7025, 5751, 12AT7, and 12AU7 valves. But I stuck to the provided 12AX7 and 12AY7. Both performed true to their tendencies. I used the Valve Factory 18 to power a Sam Hill Custom 1x12 cab with a 50-watt Eminence Private Jack and plugged in a two-humbucker Les Paul, a PRS SE Silver Sky, a Dean electric resonator with a lipstick pickup and a piezo, and a Steinberger Spirit. In all these combinations the 12AY7 yielded a little more headroom than the 12AX7, little breakup when pushed, and a cleaner sound profile overall. That is not to say the 12AX7, my favorite of the two, lacks headroom—especially when I plugged into the low-input jack. But playing through the high-input side, the 12AX7 gave me exactly what I want from an amp: enough clean tone to stay articulate along with a gritty patina that speaks the language of rock and blues.
For me, that sound sings best with the tone between 10 and 2 o’clock and the gain between 10 and 12 o’clock which generates genuine old-school breakup. The tone control has great range. Turned hard to the left, it creates a booming, bass dominated voice; hard right, it’s bright and cutting, but never piercing. I did not find an unsatisfying sound within its scope. Dialing the gain to the top and the tone to about 8 o’clock, visions of doom rock danced in my head. With the tone at noon and higher, and the gain all the way up, I could hear the hard rock and metal applications, though the Valve Factory 18 isn’t a 5150 by any means. The volume dial simply makes things louder without significantly impacting the tone, which is ideal.
The Verdict
Short story: I dig this amp in all its sonic variations. Although the Valve Factory 18 is simple to use—and seems relatively easy to build—it is cleverly designed too. Playing it is a joy. So much so that I am disappointed that it’s not gig-ready. Without a cabinet or some cover to protect the tubes, transformers, and filter cap, it’s easily damaged. That said, the power, versatility, tonal range, and sense of accomplishment in building a point-to-point packed with character seems well worth $599.
