Cranial Discharge

Peavey Triumph PAG 60 1×12

Another “didn’t expect to use it as much as I did” story. I bought this in a down-sizing spree when I sold the 100 watt Carvin and looked for something smaller. I was hesitant to buy Peavey, even though I hadn’t had a bad experience with them. I can’t say how many dozens of amps I tried. The nice thing was that I wasn’t in a hurry. I took months. I first heard about this model from a local gigging musician who said he liked it in contrast to his Marshall and that he liked the high gain sound. I was hoping for the usual – a one-size-fits-all-swiss-army-knife type of do it all amp. Funny how that approach almost never works. Still, it’s what I wanted. I wasn’t planning on using it to play out, I just wanted something with a pretty good clean and a nice drive that I could record at home with.

The PAG 60 is a three channel amp with 2 6L6 tubes and a number of 12AX7s in the preamp. The reverb sounds good for my purposes – which is to say I keep it on all the time, but quite low. No Dick Dale sounds here. While it is set up as a three channel amp (normal, crunch, and lead), the crunch and lead channels share EQ, which can be problematic at times.

I’ve heard complaints about the sound quality of the Triumph series of amps, but for me this one worked out well. Maybe I was lucky with the tubes? When I got it serviced at one point, the tech said the two power tubes were probably about half the value of the amp! Either way, the amp was flexible and very usable. This amp and the Carvin guitar can do Santana all day long, as well as get close to bunches of other sounds. I liked the Carvin best with this amp. My Strat didn’tdrive this amp as hard as it likes to be driven. My Les Paul sounded good with it too. The PAG 60 is very much in the Mesa-Boogie Mark vein.

The biggest down side of the amp is that it can be awfully hard balancing the volume levels of the three channels when playing out. The normal channel has a gain control which increases volume, but also increase “dirt” somewhat, although it never gets’ really dirty. It works quite well I think. Both crunch and lead channels have a “pre” and “post” control. In both channels setting the “pre” high and the “post” lower results in increased noise and distortion. I assume this is all 12AX7 preamp distortion, and it can get quite irritating at certain levels. The amp has one master volume and that’s where the trouble lies. In theory you should be able to set your three channels the way you like and then use the master to set the overall volume – perfect to go from bedroom, to practice, to gig, right? Nope. Adjusting the master completely changes everything else. All the other levels need to be reset when the master is changed. I assume this has to do with the interaction of the preamp and poweramp sections, and how the tubes react at different volumes.

Still, with a little effort the sound can be quite good I think. While it is a fairly loud amp, it’s actual volume seems to stop increasing with the master at about 12 o’clock (half way). After that the sound becomes more saturated, which can sound really good on the clean channel, but can get quite hissy and noisy, especially on the lead channel.

Overall, this amp is a solid choice for a gigging cover band or other situation where you need multiple sounds in a compact (but heavy!) package. For my purposes it proved very reliable, and the great thing is that they go for absolute bargain prices. They have none of the pseudo-vintage cache of the Peavey Classic 30 or 50 (which are both also great bang-for-the-buck amps), and they were never used by anyone famous as far as I know.

Peavey stopped making these a while back, and they came out with the Peavey “Ultra” series, which seemed to be nearly identical in operation to the Triumph PAG 60. The sound of the newer amps was definitely darker – perhaps bowing to the folks that want more of a “rectifier” sound, or maybe just newer amps with different tubes? The “Ultra” series was dropped fairly quickly, so I guess they never sold that well.

I sold the Peavey and replaced it with a used Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, which I only used for a short time, replacing that with a Mesa Blue Angel.

Peavey Classic VT Series 2×12

In the summer of 1976 I had hoped to save up enough money to buy my dream combination – a Gibson 335 and a Fender Twin. Well…with the usual expenses and lack of significant earnings of Post-High School/Pre-College life, I just wasn’t able to scrape enough together for either one of those, never mind the combination. I spent weeks at Rondo Music (back when they were a real music shop) and other area shops trying out amps and guitars. I eventually decided to go with a Peavey amp, and look elsewhere for a used guitar.

From the start I viewed my Peavey as a “poor man’s” Twin, although it only resembles the Twin in size and speaker configuration. As I recall it cost me less than $250.00 brandy new, as compared to about $500-600 for the Twin, and $325 or so for an equivalent Yamaha. As far as I know mine was a fairly early version of the Classic VT series, with silver knobs and a built in phase shifter. It was a two channel amp that allowed the channels to be combined into, effectively, a third “channel”. The power section used two 6L6 tubes, and the preamp was entirely solid state. There was a problem blowing fuses when I first got the amp and I had to return it for servicing. It took about two weeks because the problem was apparently a defective circuit that was new to this amp. I owned the amp for about 10 years, and never had another problem with it.

Sound-wise the amp could hold it’s own. It had plenty of volume, although not as much as Peavey’s larger Deuce and Ace amps. The clean channel didn’t have the sparkle of the good Fenders, and the distortion was no Marshall, but it did both and that was fine with me. I used the amp extensively for blues jams, frat parties, and later, gigs with an originals band.

The biggest draw back to me was the the sound didn’t “project” as well as better amps. That may not be the correct term, because the amp was plenty loud, but the sound seemed “stuck” inside the amp as opposed to really jumping out the way it does with some amps. Improved speakers might have helped that, but I never tried swapping them out.