Ck

I'm somewhat grateful that Ampeg's guitar amps of the last couple decades haven't been more successful, or these J-20s would be a lot more expensive than they are. What they lack in splash they make up for in substance and sound. The tone is amazing. And they have more headroom than you might expect from a 20-watt amp. When the volume knob reaches noon, the tone knob starts to behave almost like a gain knob. With the tone knob on the low side, the amp remains relatively clean. Turning it up (ostensibly increasing high-end, but not in any significant way to my ears) adds dirt. And the tremolo! The tremolo is pure butter. I run a lot of pedals through this amp (technically, I should say "these amps" because I have two and I run them in stereo), and they sound great. But taking pedals is not necessarily what this amp is all about.

It's not a complex or feature-laden pedal, but I haven't found many pedals that do this good of a job emulating (or in this case, literally reproducing thanks to the actual tubes on the inside) the tone of an overdriven tube amp. Two channels, each with a volume and a gain control, and a global EQ do a good job providing tone that ranges from mildly overdriven to dimed. Sometimes I wish each channel had its own EQ section, but most of the time I'm grateful for the lack of complexity. The only reason I'm not giving this pedal five stars is that it requires a dedicated AC wall-wart-type power supply. Having invested in a pedalboard power supply with isolated outputs shortly before purchasing this pedal, I was chagrined to discover that this pedal complicated matters. But the tone is worth the hassle.