The Joy of 5 Watt Tube Amps
The Tone King Gremlin - a simple 5 watt amplifier
Hello folks,
About seven weeks ago….
At this time of the year, the thought of new gear gets a boost, particularly when Black Friday sales start at the beginning of November and run right into Christmas and Boxing Week sales.
I’ve spent most all of 2022 working on the recording side of music creation, so have placed my primary attention on robust digital platforms such as the Kemper, the Quad Cortex. Key was the ability to run DI out from the amp to the recording interface over a balanced line. This is awesome and to those who lift their noses at digital, suggest that before you slam something, maybe try it for more than two minutes and invest in the trial with your brain. You may be impressed.
I am also very much a pedal geek. Rather that a single board where I rotate pedals, I have built multiple boards for different amplifiers. This has given me a lot of latitude in soundscapes and tonal response and except for space considerations have no regrets.
However, I never completely ignore the words of my buddy Keith Williams over at Five Watt World. If you don’t know Five Watt, I would suggest that you have a look. Seriously, go have a look. The research that Keith puts into his segments is absolutely incredible. He has enormous knowledge and knows what he does not know and engages other experts to fill the gaps. Plus, as best as I can tell, while he understands his competence, he comes across as very humble and always open to learning more. While we have never met, we have communicated via email and he strikes me as a very find gentleman, so fire up YouTube and search for Five Watt World. You will be glad that you did.
When I was younger, the thought of a low powered tube amp with limited controls was never on my radar. Power was everything and I worked hard to acquire my first 100 watt Marshall, a 70’s Custom Super Lead Mark II. It remains everything I expected. Massively loud, with a voice found nowhere else when turned up and driving a pair of 4x12 cabinets. Time has moved on and while I still love that sound, my ability to play the thing unharnessed to get the sound that I want is increasingly limited. I’ve used both an OX box and a Wazacraft Amp controller. Both sound great, but to get that Marshall sound, it’s still rather loud, and by it’s nature not particularly portable.
The direction that I think that I want to try next is a low wattage tube amp, that tends to naturally overdrive quickly, and without pedals. Something simple, with perhaps a volume and tone control only. I have been a musician and music geek long enough to know that while massive stacks are great on stage, many ageless records were recorded with very small amps in studio including the old tube based Fender Champ, small Supros and others. I even owned a really nice Blackstar HT-5 head and cabinet for a while but traded them for a special edition Blackstar Club 40 that could be set for four watts as well as full tilt. While it goes to 4w, it was built for 40w and doesn’t sound the same. It does however have a DI out, that is very nice. Still it’s not a simple 5 watter.
I figured that if I want to go the route to a purpose built small amp, now is the time to start the search. I have played one of the Supro Deltas but the one that I played was a higher wattage, I couldn’t get the tone without turning it up louder than was practical for the environment. I also didn’t follow my own specs of simple as it does (well) more than just volume and tone.
Thus starts the quest. I may end up with something, I may not find anything that does what I want at a price point that I am willing to spend. Oh I love the sound of a Marshall reissue 1962 Bluesbreaker, but it is a lot of coin and at 30W is bludgeoningly loud. There are many stories of Eric Clapton setting his at full tilt to get the sound he wanted during the recording of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (commonly called the Beano album) and some of the studio folks walking out because even in the studio while they were in the control room it was just too loud. Yet what many people believe was an enormous Marshall stack for the sound of Led Zeppelin’s first album was actually a small Supro. Great players have done some great sounds with small amps.
Present Day - December 20, 2022
As regular readers will know, since that time, I picked up a Fender Tonemaster Deluxe Reverb in Blonde. I have written about that amp in a different article, but my thoughts kept coming back to my five watt concept. When I was looking for the Tonemaster, I found one in a Dutch Auction at local music store Cosmo Music. Cosmo carries all manner of gear, not just guitars and amps and it is where I got the trumpet currently under the Christmas tree for my daughter. There are great and helpful folks there and my thanks go out to Andrew, Brandon, Chris and Cindy for their support.
The concept of the Dutch Auction is that it is a way to save money on demo, scratch and dent and otherwise not saleable as new or used equipment. For each week following inception, the sticker price of the product drops and as a I write this, everything on the Dutch Auction that remains is at 45% off MAP. I was looking at the list last week and saw two Tone King Gremlin amplifiers, one of the contenders for my goal but an amp at its normal selling price that would be outside the price point that I was prepared to go to. Small wattage tube amps tend to be rare and often from more boutique vendors, whatever boutique means this week.
I already own a Tone King Imperial Mark II. It is an amazing amplifier with two channels that are switchable, referred to as Blackface and Tweed. All Tone King amplifiers are hand wired and use custom speakers for each amp. The Imperial Mark II uses a custom built Eminence speaker. It also includes Tone King’s widely reknowned Iron Man II Reactive Attenuation. It has a wonderful spring reverb and is rated at 20 watts. Let me be very clear. A 20 watt Tone King Imperial Mark II with no attenuation is window rattling loud, so I find myself using the Iron Man II engaged most of the time for playing and only set it to no effect for recording with the amp in a studio room type setting.
Given my proven experience with the Imperial Mark II, I was confident that the Gremlin would be a reasonable choice. It is only 5 watts, and still includes the Iron Man II Reactive Attenuator. Unlike other devices of similar concept, I do not find that the attenuator is acting like a tone suck at any time, so while I was not sure that I would need an attenuator for only five watts, that an Iron Man II on its own is around $1000 CAD, having one come in a Gremlin made some sense if the price was right.
There were two Gremlins on the Dutch Auction list, one in cream and one in turquoise. I called ahead and they were able to find only the turquoise version, which was ok with me, as if I were going to buy one, I would prefer the turquoise.
Upon arrival, Brandon unboxed the amp. It was plainly a repack but in excellent shape. No smudges, discolouration, tears or damage to the Tolex. The feet were all in good shape and there were no scratches on the control plates. It had the manual and the power cord and given Cosmo’s flexible return policy and that I was there as the Auction price dropped to 45% off, I made the purchase decision.
I got the amp home last night and following household duties got it set up, which involved finding a place to put it and plugging it into one of my Furman Power Conditioners.
Impressions
The Gremlin top deck. It does not get much simpler
The first thing I discovered using the Rhythm channel, aka the Blackface channel is that even at halfway up, the Gremlin is very loud. The controls could not be simpler as you can see in the image below. It has volume, tone and two inputs. The Rhythm is referred to as the Blackface and the Lead is referred to as Tweed. Channel selection is made by deciding where you plug the guitar cable into. As there is only one volume and one tone control, it is improbable that you will be doing live channel hopping even if you could. The speaker is a custom designed Celestion 12 inch that sounds great and you can feel it move air. So it passes the trouser flapping test. The Iron Man II does what it says it does, it reduces the overall volume without compromising the sound of the amplifier at all. There is no modelling, no fancy stuff, not even basic reverb. It sounds glorious and while I know very well that auditory memory is highly subjective, I prefer the sound of this amp to the other 5 watters that I tried during my search. It was in fact, even after discount, more expensive than most others, but I believe that I am getting the extra value from the extra cost.
Gremlin rear view. Simple is good. Note the Iron Man II attenuator control
It handles different pickups well. My first guitar played through the amp was a Fender Limited Edition Semi-Hollow Telecaster with a fresh set of Curt Mangan strings. The strings were a test set (for me) of Super Lights, 8.5 - 38 and contrary to popular misconception, there is no tone lost with light strings. To see this kind of test in a long form, use your search engine for a video with Rick Beato and Rhett Shull that demonstrates this reality.
The next guitar was not one of my go to instruments. I had on the previous weekend restrung a Gibson Custom Shop 1961 Reissue Les Paul (the one that has an SG body). This is a nice guitar that embodies everything wrong with the Gibson of about twelve years back. Despite being a Custom Shop product, the setup was never good and it took a lot of work on my part to get the thing to a playable scenario. It is the guitar that turned me off new Gibson products for a very long time, not that I can say that anything brand new that I have picked up has enthralled me either. So very sad, but that’s another topic.
The Les Paul has three pickups with the three way selector as it did in 1961. The body is quite narrow, and the neck when properly adjusted is not too bad. It is much lighter than my 1960 Les Paul and has a very different voice because of how it is wired. Different, not bad. Plugged direct into the Gremlin it has a nice tone albeit in my opinion best with only the neck pickup and the tone rolled off in the Lead channel. Back on the wall hook Mr. LP
My final guitar as part of the “do I keep this” test was a Suhr Classic in HSS configuration. This is a lovely guitar that I have found loves some amps, others not so much. The Gremlin has no reverb, so for part of the play test I used a Keeley Caverns with only the reverb side active and the reverb set to spring. Mine is I think a V1 which does not offer the trails/true buffer option, so I use it as it came from the factory. The spring reverb is definitely not a real spring, but it does what is expected. The Tone King Imperial Mark II has a real long spring tank and that spoils the player a lot.
The Suhr Classic sounded as good as it ever had and better than most times. I was predominantly in the Rhythm channel with the guitar around 8 and the amp volume turned down to about four, with the attenuator value lowered as well. This gave me a clean on the edge of breakup tone for single note lines and a very pleasing overdriven tone for chords. This playing test revealed to an even greater extent how the simple controls on the Gremlin could do so much with just a little bit of tweaking. For example dropping the volume from 6 to 4 changed the breakup characteristics completely. It also returned some high end that was getting run over when the amp volume was set too high. Small changes to volume and tone can have a big impact, exactly what you want in terms of flexibility. With the attenuator defeated, it was quite loud. I could probably do a small gig with this amp if pressed.
As you can see, there is no DI out on the Gremlin so recording one means the use of a microphone on a stand cabled to an interface. Or two microphones on stands. In either case, microphone selection has an impact on the recorded sound, evident to anyone who has ever used two different microphones on the same amplifier. I did not buy the Gremlin as a recording source, so this was not a big issue from my perspective. There is a line out, capable of driving an external power amp, so I suspect that I could run that into a line in on an Apollo and may have to use the PAD to get the level under control as there is no level control on the amp for the line out specifically. I expect that I will find out at some point on a day with some spare time and a bit of boredom, although I will need to add a speaker emulation in post. No IRs in the line out here.
My Conclusions
I will be keeping the Gremlin based on a day of playing. It like it a lot, and am even quite happy with just the guitar into the amp and nothing else. This surprised me to be honest. Also 5 watts of tube 2 x 12AX7, 1 x KT66 can be very loud when fully cranked up and the Iron Man II attenuator disengaged. Based on my own listening tests, it is noticeably louder than a 30 watt solid state amp. When plugged into the lead channel, it goes into amp distortion very quickly and the volume control becomes a distortion control in short order. The presence of the Iron Man II is just brilliant because I can really push the amp in either the rhythm or lead channel and dial down the overall output so it is inaudible (mostly) outside the practice room. And unlike amplifiers with those power level selectors, I do not hear a tonal difference with the attenuator engaged, other than the expected differences caused by how the human ear works as documented in Fletcher Munson curves. I have no intention to get rid of any of my 100 watt amps, and see the Gremlin as both a beneficial and a very pleasing addition.
