New amp gear - Hughes & Kettner Switchblade head

The first new amp purchase coming out of the "Great Egnater Downsizing of 2008" is a fine piece of German engineering... the Hughes & Kettner Switchblade. I went through an H&K phase about 2 years ago where I had a Triamp II, Zentera, and Edition Tube combo, all of which were sold off as part of the "Gotta Pay for all this Egnater Stuff Somehow 2006" event--I'd never had a chance to try a Switchblade then (they were pretty new on the market at the time), but it's remained pretty high on my list of amps "worthy of exploring" based on the positive experience I had with the other H&K models.

The Switchblade's a MIDI programmable tube amp, similar in concept to the Mesa Triaxis, but with real knobs (instead of the 80's-style LED display) and a digital FX section. So each patch consists of an amp voicing (four to choose from: clean, crunch, lead, ultra), associated EQ & volume settings, and various digital effects including modulation (chorus, flanger, tremolo), delay, and reverb. The preamp feeds a 100 watt (4xEL34) power amp. Other cool features include a switchable series/parallel effects loop, built in "boost" feature for more gain on any channel, and an included 4-button MIDI footswitch for easy recall of patches. Pretty much everything but the cool blue neon lights from the Triamp II/Zentera models. :)

Overall, the tones are impressive... it's got the "German sound, " sort of a hot-rodded Marshall vibe with more low-mids. The cleans are ok--while there is some sparkle, there isn't a great deal of tubey warmth. (I've read that H&K's generally cater to folks who play single coils, and that seems to be the case here... there isn't much headroom on the clean channel when playing with humbuckers, so almost all cleans are on the "onset of distortion" without rolling back the guitar's volume pot.) The distortions, however, are great... warm & crunchy with great definition even at high gain levels (and believe me, this amp is capable of extremely high gain levels). Anything from classic Plexi-like crunch to heavy Soldano-ish chunk is available. Good tones are relatively easy to dial in, too... doesn't require spending a couple hours scrolling through parameters with the user manual.

But the preamp section is only half the story... the effects section is more than adequate: The reverb and delay effects are both good, with decent tweakability for delay parameters (time, level, and repeat controls). The modulation is a bit harder to dial in, as there is only one knob.. The first 1/3 of the knob is for chorus effects, the second 1/3 for flanger effects, and the last 1/3 for tremolo effects. Turning this knob seems to change some random combination of rate, depth, and mix simultaneously. As such, it can feel a bit limiting if you're going for a particular combination of rate, depth, and mix that wasn't programmed in by the engineers at H&K--I tend to run my modulations at a low mix rate (10-20%), so I've been struggling a bit to find my ideal tones using the Switchblade. However, knowing that nothing perfect exists and that there will always be some form of compromise, the charm of not needing a separate floor or rack-based FX processor still outweighs the inherent lack of flexibility in the Switchblade's modulation section.

The Switchblade comes with 128 patch storage locations in 32 banks of four... half are factory, half are user-programmable. Only a handful of the out-of-the-box patches really spoke to me... many had either too much gain (again, perhaps optimized for single coils) or too many effects for my tastes. At least the patches are easy to adjust (turning a few knobs vs. navigating through multiple levels of menus), so no complaints there. I dialed in 3 banks of patches... the first bank has a Fendery clean (as Fendery as possible given the limited headroom), a Plexi-ish crunch, a Soldano-ish heavy tone, and a mid-heavy (almost like an Egnater TOL100) lead tone; the second bank has a Vox-ish clean with more chime, a pushed JCM800-like crunch, a somewhat over-the-top heavy scooped-EQ tone, and a similar lead tone; finally, the third bank has several clean tone variations with light chorus, flanger, tremolo, and delay.

All in all, the Switchblade's a lot of amp for the money, perhaps one of the best values out there... all tube tone, amazing flexibility, and fine German engineering. Only downsides in my book are the lack of clean headroom and the limited control over modulation FX parameters. But neither of those are worth losing sleep over.

Before I forget about it, here's a picture of the Switchblade stacked up with other new acquisitions... a Zinky Superfly head and Randall R212CS cabinet:



In the next few days I should have some demo tracks of the Switchblade... it arrived Monday, just in time for Tuesday night's Necessary Distraction recording session. As a testament to how easy it was to get dialed in, I managed to create several great-sounding presets before we started the recording process. So the Necessary Distraction tracks will feature both the H&K Switchblade as well as the Egnater JTM45 head I built back in 2006. Of course, once the basic editing/mixing on the tracks is complete, I'll be posting MP3's here.

--B