Nashville Amp Show: Reinhardt Amps

First let me say this is the first amp show I’ve been to that was held in a hotel where each exhibitor has their own room where you can walk in an demo the gear. This in my humble opinion is a really cool way to do a show and it lets you walk around and try a bunch of cool gear all in one place at levels that you couldn’t in a store or large hall type room.

I didn’t get around to all the exhibitors due to an injured leg so walking around was harder and pretty tiring so my apologies to those builders I didn’t get to. I’m really hoping this will happen in Nashville again next year and I’ll be able to cover everything.

That said, here is the first post about the gear that to me was some of the highlights of the exhibitors I got to visit.

I had heard of Bob Reinhardt and his amps through the various guitar forums and let me say he lives up to his reputation. Bob is a very cool guy who you can tell takes pride in what he builds sells to his customers and in my opinion offers some really great sounding amps. I had before getting a chance to play his amps bought one of his 2×12 slant cabinets like the ones you can see in the picture above which was built perfect and sounded great. Overall Bob was a real pleasure to deal with.

I’ll classify most of his amps as more “classic” in flavor but he does have a couple of models that cover a little more modern vibe and in gain levels. Bob builds a pretty wide variety of models ranging in power from 18 watts up to 100 watts with various options like “power scaling” and for some models an effects loop. I’d say most of  his models are the more British camp tone wise but he does have his own take on a “Trainwreck” style circuit and now a Dumble style amp which I’ll mention a bit more about later. You can visit Reinhardt’s Site for more info on models and clips.

Since I didn’t want to hog  the room for hours on end I focused on a couple of the models to review here that had caught my attention from clips and reading on the net. These were the Storm 50, an amp that Bob built for Mark Knopfler called the Strom 33 and the Vintage 50.

First I tried the Storm 50 and from the first chord I was hit with nice rich classic tone. It had that classic British punch and clarity that keeps you an honest player. When you picked every note in the chord it just jumped out and rang clear. The single note leads were thick, full, and just sang and evolved nice into musical feed back. I remember just turning and looking at my friend with a big grin on my face and he mouthed back under the riff I was playing “That sounds really good.” As for features there is a foot switchable gain stage, so what you really have is a nice plexi without the extra gain and a nice thick JCM800 tone with it in. One thing I noticed was when adding the extra gain it didn’t compress the amp a lot nor did it change the feel or the overall tone at all. I really liked that because I’ve had amps that when you add extra gain,  sometimes you lost something in feel and or tone. Another feature was the “power scaling” that allowed you to dial down the power the goes to the tubes. This knocks down the volume but helps keep the feel and within reason the tone. I’ve found that it doesn’t matter if it’s a master volume, post phase master volume, attenuator, or power scaling…. you drop the volume or amount of power pushing the speakers the tone is going to change. There is no way around this as guitar speakers aren’t designed to stay the same at all volume levels like hi fi stereo speakers. All that said I did think it worked well for keeping the feel where as some masters and attenuators I’ve used really affected the feel.

Next was the Storm 33 where I was again met with the same richness of tone and features but with a slightly different feel and tone in that the mids seem to sit in a little different place. But really it was not much different than the Storm 50 except you could open this one up a bit more and not have it be really super loud but still plenty loud.

Lastly, I tried the Vintage 50 with his Willard pedal which is Bob’s take on the classic Rat pedal. First, the amp still had that same nice tonal richness I found in the Storms but a touch more classic in tone and of course doesn’t have the gain of the Storm models. Kicking in the Willard gave me that classic Rat distortion so if you are looking a good pedal that is in that vibe I can highly recommend the Willard.

Since I was needing an amp that covers the ground the Storm 50 does and it did it so well the Storm 50 came home with me. So when I went back to Bob’s room to get the amp we bumped into Jeff Cease who was in the original line up of the Black Crowes from 1988-1991 and is now playing with Bucky Convington on the road. Jeff and a friend were in there jamming. Jeff was playing a strat through Bob’s new amp that’s a take on the Dumble style circuit. Let me just Jeff is such a good player he can make a lot of amps sound great but the tone that was coming from that amps was so thick and rich but it also cut. Bottom line… it was just flat out nice. If you like that Dumble flavor you might want to contact Bob and try what he has to offer in that vein. Also I’d like to mention one of Jeff’s buds was on bass playing Bob’s bass head and it had a very warm, fat, tube bass tone. I wish my brother who plays bass could have heard it. I think would have been all over it.

Bob is making some great stuff  that left an impression on me and my friends who went with me. For us we think they are very much worth checking out. Here is Bob’s site in case you missed it earlier… Reinhardt’s Site

Be sure to check back later for clips and demo of the Storm 50 later on this month.