This past fall I sent the Lightning on down the road in exchange for a North Carolina based builder’s take on classic Fender style amplification. The amp I’m talking about is the Swart AST Pro. AST stands for Atomic Space Tone. That means the amp comes from Pittsboro, NC with simple controls- Volume, Tone, Reverb, Speed, and Depth. There’s an on/off switch and standby switch and purple jewel. Unlike most modern amps all of the controls are rear mounted and rear facing. This means you’re forced into set it and forget it mode. There’s not a lot of on the fly tweaking you can do when playing this amp live. Reaching around back to flip the standby into on brings forth a warm, thick tone that sounds juicy when a Strat is strummed through it and spanky with a Telecaster. Hum buckers sound good in this amp but tend to push it into the thick smear tone that I prefer to get from the bridge pickup of any single coil guitar in the fold. Don’t get me started on P90s. They sing through the combo of two 12AX7s, a 12AT7 for reverb, a pair of 6V6s and a NOS 5Y3 rectifier. The Celestial Gold I installed after getting it adds the icing to the tonal palette with a nice compression and chime.
If you’d like to hear some samples of it in a live setting follow these link. That’s a good example of the reverb and tremolo.
5guitarsandtenfingers 