From the jazz organ trios of the ‘50s and early ‘60s to the heavy metal histrionics of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, guitarists have coveted their B-3 wielding brethren’s ability to achieve that instantly identifiable, luxurious swirl, which has never been satisfactorily mimicked with pedals. Don’t get me wrong; Jimi’s thick, chewy UniVibe textures were amazing, just not the same. Later on, hearing the tones produced by plugging guitars into rotating speakers left even the most ardent guitar-into-amp luddites more than a little wistful. In an effort to help guitarists everywhere get their relatively economical swirl on, Motion Sound recently threw their hat into the ring with the release of the SRV series of speaker cabinets, offering 1X12 and 2X12 versions. They were kind enough to send the PG offices a 1X12 cab to help us nail the bridge to “Badge.”
The first thing you notice when busting the cab out of the shipping box is its size, or rather lack thereof, weighing in at a flyweight 40 pounds and having height and width dimensions close to a Deluxe, although deeper. Having had the pleasure of playing in a band with a B-3 player who insisted on schlepping his Leslie 147 to every gig, I appreciated its small stature, but wondered if it would have enough girth to produce a convincing amount of swirl.
Turns out the SRV-112 is better tailored for guitarists than Crockett and Tubb’s Armani suits. The rear-mounted control plate houses an 8-ohm speaker input, two XLRs for the built-in dynamic mics labeled Left and Right, AC power in, and on/off switch. The second, top-mounted control plate consists of a 1/4” stereo cable in for the footswitch and Slow, Fast and Transition speed controls. The fact that Motion Sound provides the footswitch and 1/4” tip ring sleeve cable to plug it in indicates their attention to detail. That they had the forethought to add in the two mics speaks volumes, making live and session setups a breeze.
In our March 2007 issue, I wrote a review of Electro-Harmonix’ XO series pedals. When touching on the Clone Theory, I recounted my quest for some effective Leslie-ish whirl. Since then I have gone through several chorus pedals and a Boss RT-20 before finally throwing in the towel and placing my old, faithful Boss CE-2 back on the pedalboard, which admittedly comes nowhere near Leslie territory, but is at least musical. As far as Leslie-aping pedals go, the RT-20 gets close, provided there is a nice overdrive in front of it, but still not close enough.
With that in mind, I was anxious to see what the SRV-112 could deliver. I grabbed signal from the speaker out of my old Rivera R-30, set the Fast, Slow and Transition knobs to the manual-suggested 12:00 position, and quickly found myself in a qualified nirvana. I say qualified because of that B-3 player in my band back in the day. Because of him, I not only need a back brace to take out the recycling, but I’m also keenly aware of how incredible a real Leslie can sound.
 | “The first thing you notice when busting the cab out of the shipping box is its size, or rather lack thereof, weighing in at a flyweight 40 pounds and having height and width dimensions close to a Deluxe, although deeper.” |
Once some signal was flowing the SRV-112 ramped up and down in a nice, authentic manner, but due to its stationary speaker/ rotating drum design, was of course unable to change upper and lower frequencies at different rates. Is this a deal breaker? Not at all, it’s merely a design concession due to size, portability and ultimately cost. After all, if you just have to have an authentic Leslie sound, buy a Leslie. Then hire a roadie and pick up a back brace.
That gritty upper-mid thing that Leslies do is MIA, but again, that most likely has more to do with amp and overdrive settings than anything else. I had the Rivera set in “blackface” mode and fairly clean, with just a touch of breakup. Once I kicked in a modded TS9, things were better, and stacking the TS9 with a modded BD-2 added back in that elusive, crunchy grit.
There are a few other caveats caused by the SRV’s diminutive stature, and they are addressed in the owner’s manual. One is the rotary goodness seems to disappear in large spaces, which can be rectified by keeping the cab near reflective sources. The other is its 50-watt power rating, which is totally cool with my 20-watt amptoting self, but could be an issue for guys jamming with loud drummers. 50 watts may seem like plenty, but remember, this isn’t all going straight out front; it’s getting all mojofied by the rotating drum. If more juice and disbursement is needed, spring for the 100-watt rated SRV-212 ($899 retail).
For most guitarists’ needs, this thing is one of the best portable solutions out there, with several guitar-specific design cues that make it infinitely usable for us six-string hacks. The first is the forward facing speaker design. A ported drum spins in front of the easy-to-replace, American-voiced Eminence Screamin’ Eagle speaker, and when stopped, the “Autostop” function places it in the forward facing position, negating the need for a separate cab to deliver unaffected amp tones. Granted, it’s not as focused as a traditional cab or combo enclosure, but it sounds fine for most live applications where space is often at a premium. If you have the space, a second dry amp and A/B switch will remedy this issue.
The speed controls function as expected, with the Fast knob able to get going plenty fast enough for authentic Leslie speeds and then some. The Slow speed setting seemed to get lost much below noon, becoming a little too subtle and nearly washed-out, but still fine sounding – really fine. Keep in mind that the SRV-112’s weak points are still light-years beyond the better pedal simulations I’ve heard, getting really close to such sonic rotating speaker benchmarks as “No Matter What,” “Badge,” and “Cold Shot.” In fact, the SRV seemed best suited for achieving Fender Vibratone-tones, another rotating speaker design which eschews horns. Maybe that would help explain the SRV moniker.
The bottom line is that the SRV-112 is an incredible-sounding, musical concession to portability and price. If money is no object, go vintage Leslie, and be prepared for the lifestyle changes that follow. If (lack of) money is your main criteria, check out any number of inexpensive chorus pedals that can do really nice fast-Leslie impersonations. If you want flexible, affordable, portable and toneful, the SRV- 112 and its bigger sibling the SRV-212 are on a very short list.
Buy if...
you''ve always wanted a rotating cabinet sound.
Skip if...
you''re only settle for the authentic Leslie experience.
Rating...
MSRP $759 - Motion Sound - motion-sound.com |
Hear this gear in action! premierguitar.com/podcast
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
PRS Guitars today released the updated MT 15 and the new Archon Classic amplifiers, along with a larger Archon speaker cabinet. The 15-watt, two-channel Mark Tremonti signature amp MT 15 now features a lead channel overdrive control. An addition to the Archon series, not a replacement, the 50-watt Classic offers a fresh voice by producing retro rock “classic” tones reminiscent of sound permeating the radio four and five decades ago. Now twice the size of the first Archon cabinet, the Archon 4x12 boasts four Celestion V-Type speakers.
MT 15 Amplifier Head
Balancing aggression and articulation, this 15-watt amp supplies both heavy rhythms and clear lead tones. The MT 15 revision builds off the design of the MT 100, bringing the voice of the 100’s overdrive channel into its smaller-format sibling. Updating the model, the lead channel also features a push/pull overdrive control that removes two gain stages to produce vintage, crunchier “mid gain” tones. The clean channel still features a push/pull boost control that adds a touch of overdrive crunch. A half-power switch takes the MT to 7 watts.
“Seven years ago, we released my signature MT 15 amplifier, a compact powerhouse that quickly became a go-to for players seeking both pristine cleans and crushing high-gain tones. In 2023, we took things even further with the MT 100, delivering a full-scale amplifier that carried my signature sound to the next level. That inspired us to find a way to fit the 100's third channel into the 15's lunchbox size,” said Mark Tremonti.
“Today, I’m beyond excited to introduce the next evolution of the MT15, now featuring a push/pull overdrive control on the Lead channel and a half-power switch, giving players even more tonal flexibility to shape their sound with a compact amp. Can’t wait for you all to plug in and experience it!”
Archon Classic Amplifier Head
With a refined gain structure from the original Archon, the Archon Classic’s lead channel offers a wider range of tones colored with gain, especially in the midrange. The clean channel goes from pristine all the way to the edge of breakup. This additional Archon version was developed to be a go-to tool for playing classic rock or pushing the envelope into modern territory. The Archon Classic still features the original’s bright switch, presence and depth controls. PRS continues to stock the Archon in retailers worldwide.
“The Archon Classic is not a re-issue of the original Archon, but a newly voiced circuit with the lead channel excelling in '70s and '80s rock tones and a hotter clean channel able to go into breakup. This is the answer for those wanting an Archon with a hotrod vintage lead channel gain structure without changing preamp tube types, and a juiced- up clean channel without having to use a boost pedal, all wrapped up in a retro-inspired cabinet design,” said PRS Amp Designer Doug Sewell.
Archon 4x12 Cabinet
As in the Archon 1x12 and 2x12, the mega-sized PRS Archon 4x12 speaker cabinet features Celestion V-Type speakers and a closed-back design, delivering power, punch, and tight low end. Also like its smaller brethren, the 4x12 is wrapped in durable black vinyl and adorned with a British-style black knitted-weave grill cloth. The Archon 4x12 is only the second four-speaker cabinet in the PRS lineup, next to the HDRX 4x12.
PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40 th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.
