I was given the Tubemeister 18 on loan and put this demo video together - What a great little amp!

Hi everyone,

I'm not too familiar with Hughes and Kettner amps but after trying out this little head, I'm completely blown away. What a great amp! I put this demo together to show what I was able to achieve with it.

I’ve noticed a lot of interest in low power tube amps recently. I was given this amp on loan to try out in my studio. The amp was supplied with the Hughes and Kettner single 12 inch speaker cab.

I normally don’t like such low powered amps as they tend to suffer from a lack of clean headroom. This amp thankfully doesn’t have this problem.

I would highly recommend it for a lot of guys who play at home, in the studio and for your small to medium live gigs.

I put together this demo video showing the amp using the two channels and boost switch.

Hope you enjoy

Cheers

Peter.

Great demo PJH, some interesting sounds and a lot closer to my own area of interest than most. In particular I thought you caught the difference between the Crunch and Crunch with Boost really well. I notice you almost seemed to prefer the neck pickup and both combined over the bridge pickup in the Clean channel.

You mentioned that it responds to overdrive pedals well. Are you aware that the solid state input buffer/Boost stage actually acts as a built in progressive Overdrive/Distortion pedal already when you set it up to do so? The Boost is not only a clean boost at moderate input levels, it also ups the gain of that first stage so higher signal levels make it firstly clips on one side, then with more extreme input levels on both sides.

You do seem to get a much deeper sound out of it than I have from either my TM36 or GM36. I constantly criticise them for not having sufficient bottom end on tap and the Bass control does very little. That is with extensive fiddling re speaker choice too.

bordonbert wrote:Great demo PJH, some interesting sounds and a lot closer to my own area of interest than most.  In particular I thought you caught the difference between the Crunch and Crunch with Boost really well.  I notice you almost seemed to prefer the neck pickup and both combined over the bridge pickup in the Clean channel.

You mentioned that it responds to overdrive pedals well.  Are you aware that the solid state input buffer/Boost stage actually acts as a built in progressive Overdrive/Distortion pedal already when you set it up to do so?  The Boost is not only a clean boost at moderate input levels, it also ups the gain of that first stage so higher signal levels make it firstly clips on one side, then with more extreme input levels on both sides.

You do seem to get a much deeper sound out of it than I have from either my TM36 or GM36.  I constantly criticise them for not having sufficient bottom end on tap and the Bass control does very little.  That is with extensive fiddling re speaker choice too.

Thanks, bordonbert.

Much appreciated. I did prefer using the neck pu in the video for the clean tones as it normally tends to "dirty up" a clean tone a lot quicker than the bridge pu. My thought was to show how well the amp stayed clean on the neck pu.

I am aware that the boost ups the gain as well. The reason that I mentioned the pedals was that there are many users who have their favourite distortion and overdrive pedals on a board and would want to know if the amp responded well to them.

Regarding the bottom end response - I found that by increasing the bottom end via the amp's eq I could literally shake windows. There was too much at the extreme setting.

Overall a really great amp that I'm going to find difficult to part with when I have to give it back.

Cheers

Peter.