Last weekend Catharsis played a few shows in Europe. We made arrangements to borrow amps, so here’s a rundown of what I used. Originally I was planning to bring a small pedalboard with a tuner, overdrive, and distortion pedal, but that was too much to fit in my backpack. I took my distortion pedal and a Snark clip-on tuner instead.

BLITZ – Oslo, Norway: Sunn Model T reissue

I was excited to see this on stage when we got to the venue. I used the clean channel (channel 1) and it didn’t sound so good. The distortion was a little too gritty. Thinking back, I should have tried cleaning up the dirty channel and using my distortion pedal as a boost. Lesson learned.

 

LUTAKKO Fest – Jyväskylä, Finland: Engle E656

I was intimidated by this amp. Too many knobs, switches, and options for my liking. But we had almost an hour to set up and line-check so I took my time and explored the amp. I ended up using channel 3, which is a high-gain channel, but I turned the gain as low as possible, using my pedal as a boost. The cleans weren’t very clean, but it was okay. This amp sounded way better than the Sunn.

 

Cyklopen – Stockholm, Sweden: Marshall JMP 100

Would you believe I forgot take a picture of this classic amp? Sound-wise, meh… It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t what I expected. It sounded good, but I think my issues were with the room; concrete floor, metal walls and ceiling. There was a weird boomy mid-range to everything, and I had trouble controlling feedback.

EDIT: Someone posted surprisingly good video footage so you can hear (and see) it in action.

 

Köpi – Berlin, Germany: Sovtek Mig 100

This amp ruled! It sounded great, and was plenty loud. No uncontrollable squeally feedback. I was so impressed, I’m seriously considering buying one (after selling one of my current amps, of course).