Fender Hot Rod Deluxe
My first shot at getting a replacement for my Peavey Triumph. I found an HRD (40 watt 1×12) for a great price locally and jumped on it. I gigged with it (alternating with the Peavey) for about a year before finally selling it to the singer in my band. I still see and hear the amp regularly.
My take on the Hot Rod Deluxe: It’s a nice amp, with a pretty good clean sound. I liked the clean sound better than the Peavey at low to mid volumes. Reverb sounded good to me, but I’m not a big user. The drive and more drive channels were all but useless to me. It was nearly impossible for me to get a good sound out of them. That was ok. I tried the amp with a number of preamps and overdrives. Fulldrive Fulltone II, Chandler Tube Driver, Tech 21 GT2…Those guys did a fine job of dirtying up the HRD.
The two problems I found were 1) when you need a “little more” clean volume, it’s just not there. At outdoor gigs and louder indoor jobs where things get cranking a little more than they probably should – the clean sound went out the window. The dirtier sound wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t the strong point of the amp either. Not like an old cranked deluxe reverb or anything. The second problem 2) was that overall the amp does not seem very well built. It may just be me, but my peavey (only about 10 more watts) outweights the Fender by a *lot*. Part of it is the big honking speaker magnet, but it’s also a much more solid cabinet, and what appears to be more solid components. I can’t tell you how many times the tubes in the HRD loosened up on the way to the job. I never had that happen with any other amp. To this day the singer will fire the HRD up at a gig and every so often it wacks out. It’s almost always a loose tube. Quick shut it down re-seat them all and fire it back up. There hasn’t been anthing seriously wrong, just my feeling that something could go wrong at any moment. I’m way too paranoid for that!
Update! – While loading out from a gig, this amp took a hellacious tumble down a flight of concrete stairs. It was a terrible sight. The remarkable thing is that other than some minor bumps and bruises, the amp performed perfectly. No problems whatsoever. Unbelievable. I was sure a fall like that would destroy this amp, but it did no serious damage at all. High marks for that. To this day the tubes still seem to loosen up on their own though.