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LA Amp Show: Wizard Amplifiers

October 09, 2009

Images

The Wizard Amplifiers room might be my winner for best tone of the show – the tone was something else altogether and the best part is these amps are made by my Canadian brethren. Wizard was showing their Vintage Classic and Modern Classic Amplifiers and three different 4 x 12 cab styles (straight, slant and tweed covered). Steve Segal from Wizard Amps ran through a demo of the Modern Classic (see the video) and gave me the rundown on Wizard Amps:

“The founder of the company (Rick St Pierre) has been the amp tech for AC/DC for the last 24 years. The way the amps got started was he always had to babysit their old Marshall Plexi amplifiers and at the end of the night Angus would ask him why the sound of the amp would be so good at the beginning of the night and then sound different by the end. He told Angus that this was due to the fact that the transformers in the amp would become heat saturated so much so that you could cook an egg on them! So Angus asked if he could build an amp that would not suffer a change in tone over the course of the night and that was the start of Wizard.”

The amp’s volume was astounding! Steve was playing with the volume set to 1 and it was still nice and loud. The cool thing was that even with a volume setting of 1 the amps still sounded full, rich, and had tone for days. At the end of the demo Steve rolled the volume up to 4 and let it rip. I had to stuff my fingers in my ears due to how loud the amp was – and it was only on 4! Steve had told me that the dynamics and the tone gain a substantial amount of complexity the louder the amp gets, and from listening to the recording I made, I would have to agree whole heartedly. Steve was playing a 1958 Gibson Flying V (one of my favorite guitars) plugged directly into the Wizard and the tone was unbelievable, it also didn’t hurt that Steve is an amazing player (Check out the video to hear what I mean). 

Wizard offers two guitar amps: The Vintage Classic and The Modern Classic, both are available as a 2 x 12 combo and 50 or 100 watt power rating.  Wizard offers a good amount of options for their speaker cabinets with 4 x 12 and 2 x 12 varieties.  There are plenty of speaker options and along with cab design options: open, close, convertible, etc. 

About the cabs construction:

All cabinets are of 100% Baltic birch in construction. Recessed steel handles, high quality speaker mounting hardware, aluminum jack plates with Switchcraft jacks, and high grade Tolex covering add to the combined class and ruggedness of all Wizard cabinetry.

The Wizard Amplifier Company has a very impressive list of artists that use them: AC/DC, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, James Hetfeild, Satriani, and on and on. You can check out the very impressive list of artists HERE.  These amps are obviously not for everyone as they are very loud and powerful (and on the expensive side) but for those of you out there that are looking for a big amp with unbelievable tone then you will need to check out Wizard Amplifiers.