• From: NH - USA
  • Registered: 2010-11-08
  • Posts: 149

Topic: Reeves Amps

Wondering if any of you tone nut's have any experience and/or thoughts on Reeves amp's. They are aimed squarely at the Hiwatt, JTM type tone and seem to have a decent price point... appealing thing to me is that they offer a 12 watt of their Custom and a 10 watt HG, both with a power scaling feature... my thinking it that one of these would be a nice portable vintage minded Creamy tone that would work from bedroom volume up to jam space and small clubs but there is only a couple of demo's i can find for the lower wattage amps... and none with a driven sound on a Les Paul, ES, or Strat

Anyone put one of these through it's paces or have experience with them?

Thanks

http://www.reevesamps.com/amplifiers.htm

havoc41's Website

2 Reply by André (edited by André 2011-08-27 02:28:08)

  • Registered: 2010-05-21
  • Posts: 121

Re: Reeves Amps

I have a Reeves Custom 50 with powerscale. It's capable of playing far loader than expected, but luckily I'm happy with the lower tone as well:-) I get a beatiful feedback with my pedals (especially the Rat-pedal) and very easy to control. The cleans are beatiful, and yes, it's very close to Hiwatt, both the looks and sounds. And it should be close to Hiwatt, since Dave Reeves was the man who designed the old Sound City and Hiwatt amps. Reeves amps started in 2003 (?) and aimed to bring back the high quality of the old Hiwatts.

I also have a fx loop which works very well and let me control both send and return levels for the loop.

To get destorted sounds out of it, you must play very load! You don't buy this kind of amps if you wants lots of gain from the amp without using pedals. It takes pedals very well. I'm thinking of trying it together with my Jubilee. Reeves with a pedal and endless sustain, not very gainy (maybe a Rat) with reverb/chorus and a Jubilee with lots of gain with a delay in the loop ..... hmmmm.... should be a good combination!

There's several clips on Youtube and tests on misc. web-sites.

If you buy one, I'll guarantee that you'll be happy! It's of course instant Gilmour, but many famous rockers use Reeves/Hiwatts as well.

Rock on!

Andre'

3 Reply by havoc41 (edited by havoc41 2011-08-27 08:11:02)

  • From: NH - USA
  • Registered: 2010-11-08
  • Posts: 149

Re: Reeves Amps

Thanks so much Andre, really appreciate you taking the time to reply, very helpful. I was wondering about the amp being pedal friendly and had read about the headroom being very high on these amps... nice to hear it from someone who actively uses the amp.

Rich

havoc41's Website