The K.O.D.A is a full-featured “amp-in-a-box” with a discrete preamp, active tone control section, and a switchable power amp output stage.
Baton Rouge, LA (January 25, 2018) -- Following up on the success of its groundbreaking, patent-pending AmbiKab stereo effects-amplification guitar cabinet, which enables the addition of ambient guitar effects while maintaining the tone of a guitar amplifier, Komet™ Amplification has introduced the AmbiKab Junior.
Often, when applied time-based effects such as reverb or delay are applied before distortion, the sound becomes “washed out” and indistinct. Many amplifiers employ an onboard effects loop for this, but this design only works if the amplifier’s output stage does not contribute to the overall tone. Effects loops don’t work well with many classic vintage amplifiers, which don’t have a master volume and employ output-stage distortion to attain greater responsiveness and a rich sound.
Intended to be used with combo amplifiers that have internal speakers for the dry guitar sound, the AmbiKab Junior’s 16 ohm speaker input connects to the combo amp’s second speaker output. The AmbiKab Junior routes the signal to a line-level output that patches to your effects input. An Effects Send Level control enables the AmbiKab Junior to accommodate a variety of effects, from floor pedals to studio-quality rack units. The wet signal is returned to the AmbiKab Junior’s Left/Mono and (for stereo effects) Right effects inputs. An Effects Bass Cut knob and Effects Volume knob let you shape your wet signal and mix it to taste. The amplified wet signal then drives the AmbiKab Junior’s 12-inch Celestion speaker. An Effects Kill jack admits a footswitch (not included) so you can instantly switch to an all-dry mix.
In this way, the AmbiKab Junior expands your amp into a full stereo wet/dry/wet effects rig without altering the amp’s tone and response. In addition, because the AmbiKab Junior is physically separate from your main amp and its speakers, you can place the amp’s dry sound and the AmbiKab Junior’s wet sound in different locations for greater stereo separation, enhancing your sound-imaging possibilities.
AmbiKab Junior is also a great choice for guitarists who already own a favorite amp/speaker cabinet combination. Simply run your amp through your preferred cabinet and plug the AmbiKab Junior into your amp’s second speaker out jack for instant stereo effects.
Known for meticulously hand-built guitar amplifiers and cabinets featuring no-compromises quality, supremely musical sound, and attention to detail, Komet™ Amplification has never been a “me-too” company. Designed in collaboration with Scotty Smith of ProAnalog Devices, the company's new Komet OverDrive Amplifier pedal, or K.O.D.A., continues the company’s tradition of unique designs: a full-featured “amp-in-a-box” with a discrete preamp, active tone control section, and a switchable power amp output stage.
Komet’s first pedal, the K.O.D.A. can be operated with the output stage switched on or off for distinctive tone and response characteristics, delivering a level of versatility not found in other “amp-like” pedals. A three position hi-cut switch enables you to fine tune K.O.D.A.’s treble content to your amplifier, and you can EQ the low and high ends separately.
The result is a massive sounding, versatile pedal that’s remarkably tunable and offers an amp-like overdrive structure. Gain staging can be controlled anywhere in the circuit, allowing for anything from a fat, clean boost to edge-of-breakup overdrive—or go all in for searing, high-gain distortion.
K.O.D.A.’s natural response is full of rich harmonics, yet the unique characteristics of your favorite instrument are never masked. The pedal has a remarkable amp-like feel and response and reacts well to changes in picking dynamics and guitar volume. And like everything from Komet, it’s made in the USA with top-quality parts and workmanship.
For more information, please visit Komet Amplification at Winter NAMM booth 3346.
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Komet Amplification
The Hi/Low footswitch is designed to provide a gain boost with an EQ shift for tight tones.
Now featuring enhanced functionality, along with a new and improved look, the Dutch Overdrive ‘24 offers versatility in a pedalboard-friendly package.
The Dutch Overdrive retains its ability to cover a broad range of musical styles, from transparent clean tones and edgy breakup to medium-gain blues, hard rock rhythms, and searing leads. Delivering a perfect blend of classic American and British sounds, its smooth, balanced voice ensures compatibility with a wide variety of instruments and amplifiers.
In addition to a familiar four-knob control set – controlling drive, treble, bass and output level – the new Dutch ’24 offers a potent Hi/Low mode selector controlled by an independent footswitch. By engaging the Hi gain mode, you can add a preset, carefully tailored EQ/gain boost to provide just the right amount of punch, clarity, and output level to your solos.
Key features and upgrades to the Dutch Overdrive include:
- Hi/Low footswitch provides a gain boost with an EQ shift, enhancing added gain and focusing the midrange for tight tones
- A refreshed design for a modern aesthetic, with top-mounted input/output jacks
- Upgraded soft touch switching with last state memory – powers up with the same settings you were using when you previously powered down
- 9-18 volt operation using standard external supply (no battery compartment)
- US-made in Mesa, AZ
The re-release of the Dutch Overdrive brings back a classic with modern improvements. The street price for the upgraded Dutch Overdrive is $225 and is now available for purchase at lpdpedals.com.
Developing good, clean workshop practices will help you save time and money.
Who doesn’t like a sweet, sustaining, saturated guitar sound? I know I do, but I also love a clear and full clean tone maybe even more. Dirty or clean, to me a guitar sounds like a million bucks when the tubes are glowing and the playing flows. But most of the time I’m in the workshop making lots of dirt, and I don’t mean the overdriven amplifier kind. Making guitars can be a dirty business. Carving wood, plastic, and steel into a majestic instrument creates a lot of mess, and eventually you have to sweep your way clear.
Half a century ago, a mentor passed on this advice: The best way to clean up a mess is to not make one in the first place. Maybe this sounds quaint, but I assure you that it is good for business—any business. It doesn’t matter if you make pedals, guitars, amps, or even music, mess is money down the drain. Not only that, it’s a psychological strain on you that saps your energy and makes you careless.
When I worked at Fender, I was part of a team that was charged with revamping departments for efficiency, safety, and worker well-being. I can’t say that we made a huge difference, but I learned a lot that I could apply to my own shop and a host of other businesses. One thing there we didn’t have to fix was cleanliness. Despite the gargantuan scale of the enterprise, all of the factories are incredibly clean, especially considering the amount of materials that get processed. It reminded me of the race cars and shops of Roger Penske, who understood that a clean, organized workplace sets the tone for excellence. It’s also difficult to pinpoint problems when areas are cluttered, and you can’t see what’s going on clearly.
Beyond the obvious advantages of keeping things organized, there is another benefit created by keeping things clean, one that I’m surprised that more shops I visit (and see in videos) don’t understand. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to stop making your product and clean up. When you’re buried in debris, straightening up is time-consuming, and time is money. When you determine your cost per unit, whether it’s guitars, amps, or even rehearsal time, do you factor in the hours you spend cleaning up? It may not seem like much, but it can really add up. Regardless of if you own a shop or are in a band, if you create a tangle every time you work, the time you spend undoing it is time you could have been with your friends, family, or doing anything else.
A well-designed work area that reduces clutter will save your health and save you money. You don’t have to be a big organization to justify some basic cleanliness improvements like a good dust-collection system, either. It doesn’t have to be a huge investment. There are a slew of affordable mobile dust-collectors/vacuums with adjustable arms that can be rolled from task to task.
"When you determine your cost per unit, whether it’s guitars, amps, or even rehearsal time, do you factor in the hours you spend cleaning up?"
Stop blowing dust off your workbench or machinery onto the floor—picking it up later is like throwing profit away. Everybody benefits because cleanliness improves efficiency that reduces passing unneeded costs on to your customers. Over the course of a year, cleaning up 60 minutes a week adds up to almost seven days’ worth of time you could be using for something better, and who doesn’t want an extra week?
I’ve found that if you build cleanup time into your daily routine, it reduces stress as well. It’s important to create procedures that promote a constant state of improvement and order. After a gig, pro techs have a mandated way of breaking down and stowing gear that avoids confusion when the next setup happens. Daily routines of maintenance and cleanup catch problems before they stop the show or cripple production. If you habitually clean the spilled beer off your cables and amplifier, you’re making it easier for yourself in the long run. I know this all seems pretty obvious to some of you, but I’ve learned from master Kaizen practitioners that there’s always a higher level to reach for. If you are a one-person shop or a weekend warrior musician, those steps can really make a difference.
I suppose the reverse is true for me. If I apply this multi-tiered improvement regime to my guitar playing, I’d probably be a lot happier with my proficiency. An old dog can learn new tricks, and that’s exactly what I mean to do. So when I step on that distortion pedal, it will be the only dirt I deal with.A very Vox-like template yields a surprising wealth of trans-Atlantic tones—all in a light, compact head.
Relatively small and light. All-tube power and preamp sections. Surprising versatility for a single-channel format.
You’ll have to be willing to tinker a lot with the EQ to tap into the maximum number of sounds.
$1,499
Victory The Deputy Compact Guitar Head
victoryamps.com
If a venue’s dimensions demand you turn down, you might as well lighten your load.Victory Amps are hip to this trade-off. Their line is now thickly populated with amps that are smaller, quieter, but still sound massive.
The EL86-driven, 25-watt, single-channelThe Deputy Compact Head is the newest of Victory’s mighty mites. Although it’s generally lunchbox-sized, The Deputy looks like a proper amp head—eschewing the mostly metal, vented enclosure design used in some other Victory offerings. Created in conjunction with Pete Honoré (known to many YouTube guitar heads as Danish Pete), The Deputy Compact Head aims to span ’60s British-style clean tones and ’70s classic-rock overdrive. It’s truly compact at 15" x 8" x 7.5" and 17.6 pounds.
Dawg Daze
Other than the bijou size, which is not unusual these days, The Deputy stands out for its use of EL86 output tubes. Although it can be re-biased to use the more common EL84, Victory ships the head with a pair of new-old-stock EL86 tubes which are broadly similar to EL84s in character and output power—though capable of a little more of it from a little less voltage. They are also relatively available and affordable as NOS components. The preamp is driven by three 12AX7s. Rectification is solid-state.
The straightforward controls include gain, treble, middle, bass, reverb, and master, plus a 2-way bright switch and a 3-way voice switch. The latter is arguably more of a gain-structure switch, though gain, voice, and tone are often used interchangeably in guitar-speak. The amp’s lowest gain setting is accessed via the upper position. The middle position stacks another +6 dB of gain on top of that, and the lower position adds upper-mid and treble on top of the extra 6 dB. As for the reverb, Victory describes it as a mix of plate- and hall-type textures, and it is probably meant to sound a bit more contemporary, studio-like, and less specific than a traditional spring reverb.
The amp’s back panel includes send and return jacks for the series effects loop, two 8-ohm speaker outputs and one 16-ohm output, bias checkpoints, and a bias adjustment pot. Rather than being cathode-biased like most EL84 amplifiers, The Deputy’s EL86s are run in adjustable fixed bias, which delivers slightly tighter, firmer response from any given pair of tubes, while maximizing their output potential (all else being equal). As such, you need to check and adjust this setting when replacing the EL86s or substituting EL84s. The Deputy’s circuit is arranged on a rugged printed circuit board, the components are all high quality, and the transformers are U.K.-made.
Hot Lunch
I tested The Deputy with an open-back 1x12 cabinet equipped with a Scumback J75 and a closed-back 2x12 with Celestion M65 Creambacks. I also paired it with a Gibson ES-355, a Fender Stratocaster, a selection of overdrive pedals at the front end, and a Source Audio Collider in the effects loop for delay and reverb. Almost regardless of what’s in the mix, The Deputy is a great-sounding little head. In fact, any sense of “little” largely vanishes from consideration once you start playing it. Full, fat, deep, clear, and vintage-leaning, with a character that’s very much its own, The Deputy doesn’t care if there’s a stompbox anywhere in sight, but it’s also an excellent pedal platform.
The Deputy’s tube complement and Victory’s English origins might imply that strictly Vox-like voices emit from this diminutive head, but the circuit enables many more trans-Atlantic sounds. With the EQ dialed in right and the bright switch engaged, The Deputy will indeed cop AC-style tones on the clean and crunchy side of that spectrum. But the robust preamp voicing and fixed-bias output stage—as well as the solid-state rectification—lend a tautness that enables convincing Fender-like tones when you want them. By dialing down the middle control to around 10 o’clock with the voice in the low-gain position, the gain below noon, and master just advanced from midday, I heard pretty good Deluxe Reverb sounds. There’s certainly more than just one breed of clean to source.
On the whole, I preferred heavier amp-generated crunch and lead sounds with the voice switch in the middle position, the bright switch off, and a little bump from the midrange control. Set this way, The Deputy lends thickness to a Strat without adding harsh or spiky clipping, while the ES-355’s humbuckers are blissfully muscular and aggressive. With more conservative gain settings, the extra upper mid and high end from the brighter voice add cutting power and a shimmering, cranked-Vox-like character that plays well with many styles. Add digital reverb—which moves readily from “just a touch” to an evocative atmospheric wash—and the palette of tones at hand becomes even more impressive.
The Verdict
With an able assist from Pete Honoré, Victory has pulled off another deft design. It’s a toneful performer that can sound and feel bigger than it is. For a single-channel head, it’s crazy versatile—with or without pedals. But if you’re into economy on the equipment and cost fronts, you’re bound to be pleased with how much you can do with this high-quality, diminutive head, a cab, a guitar, and nothing else.
Victory Amplification The Deputy 25 25-watt Tube Amplifier Head
Deputy 25W Tube HeadThe Jason Richardson signature includes HT humbucker pickups, 24 stainless steel frets, and custom tremolo.
Inspired by over a decade of guitar string research, HT pickups deliver an ultra-high-output, powerful low-end response while retaining a distinctively clean, clear tone and definition at lower volume levels. The HT pickups in the latest Jason Richardson model have been voiced specifically for Jason with unparalleled clarity, power, and output. Additional features include 24 stainless steel frets, a custom Music Man tremolo, and innovative electronics, including a push/push volume knob for a 20+ dB gain boost and coil splitting via the push/push tone knob. The Jason Richardson Artist Series Cutlass HT is available now in two new finishes:
- Kokiri Forest—a mesmerizing translucent green finish. Crafted with an alder body, a buckeye burl top, and a roasted, figured maple neck with an ebony fretboard.
- Venetian Red —a striking translucent finish. Crafted with an alder body, a maple burl top, and a white maple neck with a striped ebony fretboard.
“These new pickups are a level up! More body and fullness, effortless pinch harmonics. I’m stoked to have more variations for everyone to choose from with my models now!” “The KokiriForest might be my new favorite color! Absolutely stunning to see in person! The Venetian Red also adds a more diverse option between the woods we haven’t done with my line before, incredibly stoked on both these guitars!” -Jason Richardson
The Jason Richardson Artist Series Cutlass HT in Venetian Red is available exclusively in the Ernie Ball Music Man Vault and is limited-to-25 units in a 6-string and limited-to-25 units in a 7-string. The Kokiri Forest colorway is available at your local Ernie Ball Music Man dealer.
For more information, please visit music-man.com