brotherrat's Reviews

Great Budget Rat Clone

Found this pedal to be pretty useful despite being only $35 new. The Fat and Mosfet clipping modes are great for bass and can help with the bright and aggressive tone the RAT usually has. Only complaint I have is the thing can feedback extremely easily at higher gain settings and the DC jack being on the side is a bit baffling as a design decision.

One of the best budget guitars I've owned

I bought this thing for $300 a few years ago and since then its been my main guitar and I've never found a guitar I like better. It feels amazing to play and stays in tune pretty well even with some abuse (I have never had it setup). It also is one of those guitars that you can tune to damn near anything and it doesn't completely throw off the tuning setup or the intonation too badly. The neck is pretty wide and a little flat compared to most "vintage" style guitars which throws a lot of people off. I have large enough fingers so its not an issue for me but keep that in mind. The pickups are Ceramic Ibanez Super58 humbuckers which admittedly are a little bright sounding. They aren't necessarily bad, and I would say the neck pickup is quite nice, but they weren't really for me. I swapped them with some cheap P90s and they sound much better. There are some rocker switches for coil splitting which work fine but coil splitting doesn't really get you much of a real "single coil sound" so I only ever used it for cutting some output on the fly. The electronics on the whole are fine for the most part. The thing is a little heavy, but lighter than the JTK1 and still very manageable. Overall would highly recommend.

A Great Little Amp On a Budget

Picked this one up for $175 with a matching 10in cab. This amp has only a master volume so keep that in mind as this thing wont really break up much at "bedroom volumes" but is still a good clean pedal platform nonetheless. This entire line of amps was actually made by Pyotr Belov who was behind the Epiphone Valve Jr and some other Epiphone amps from the mid 2000's. He even puts his name on the PCB and there's even a spot for tube rectifiers if you want that for whatever reason.

The amp itself sounds great, it feels like a mix of a marshall and a fender a little bit. It is very bright though so the treble knob often has to be dialed down unless you're cranking it. There is a 3W switch which turns the El84 power tube into a triode, and while this does let you get more break up earlier, it does compress the amp a bit overall and the power tube distortion will sound different too. Overall, the 5W mode is much much brighter but also fattens up quite a bit when pushed to the edge. I do feel like this amp kinda works best as a clean pedal platform though. In terms of negatives, I do wish this thing had an FX loop but overall its a great mini amp for the price and doesn't feel cheap or overengineered.

Some Technical notes: If you are willing to open this thing up (which is quite easy) and know your tube amp safety rules there is an easy mod to get rid of some of the noise in this amp. There are two lugs on the board that are for the optional tube rectifier installation that end up introducing noise into the circuit due to its close proximity to the tone stack. These wires are not used at all and should be disconnected and taped up somewhere in the chassis away from the main components. More info here:https://guitarnuts.rotterdaminbeeld.nl/amps/bh5h/index.html Not gonna go into any of the other mods, lets just say my current BH5 has been modded to hell and is essentially a 5W plexi now with some beefier components to reduce noise. I might document these on my website at some point but I do highly recommend doing this small modification if you are comfortable with it.

The Cab: I only have the 10 inch cab so I can't comment on the 12 inch cab that was also released with this amp or the combo version. I'll just say the eminence speaker in there is bright as hell and I rarely use it because of that. Honestly wouldn't recommend using it with this head as it is already pretty bright.

Another Cheap Dud from Crate

This is probably one of the worst heads I've ever heard, got it in a combo deal with another cheap amp head. Yes you can get them cheap and yes they provide a sizable 120W into 4 ohms but I promise you there are better cheap gigging amps out there if you look a little harder. The cleans are stiff and completely lacking in dynamics, the overdrive and high gain modes are fizzy and unpleasant sounding to say the least. With some effort you can get some usable tones in high gain with the shape knob I guess. If you want to sound like those beginner guitarists on Instagram who have the gain dimed on their practice amps so they sound like pure fizz with ear-piercing high frequencies while playing Smells like Teen Spirit then this amp can get you there extremely quickly. Albeit this thing is suited more to mid scoopy stuff so maybe if you like that this will get you there but I would still advise against ever getting near this thing. The effects are mediocre at best and, well, i'm not sure why you would want effects like this built into a cheap amp anyways. Cheap chinese pedals that do the same thing better or even decent multieffects pedals aren't hard to find. For better or for worse this is certainly a relic of the early-to-mid 2000's, and, despite the circuit design being quite creative from looking at the service manual, the careful engineering didn't really translate into a good sounding amp. I hate to pick on Crate like everyone else since there are great Crate amps out there but they have their reputation for a reason.

Surprisingly faithful Jazz Bass Clone

These things can be found stupidly cheap on the used market (case in point mine was less than $200) and they are about as good as a quality Classic Vibe Squier Jazz Bass. Feels amazing to play and the pickups sound great. Only complaint I have is the pots have essentially zero friction which means an aggressive player like me loses volume constantly. My solution was taping the neck pickup knob at full, but the more sensible thing to do would be replacing the pot entirely.