| Once again, in the inimitable prose of Mike "Metal" McAvan,
here is a review of the Koch Supernova Head!!!
In my years of playing guitar on the pro circuit,
I often get bombarded with advertising about new, latest, greatest amp-that-will-do-it-all.
Often when I get face to face with the product, I end up feeling somewhat
like a deflated balloon and very much let down by the claim. Very rarely
do I get truly excited these days about high performance tube amps. When
I discovered Koch amps half of a decade ago, I found an amp that worked
for what I do and how I play. It’s like Dolf Koch designed the Koch Powertone
with me in mind. Enter the latest greatest by my fave amp company, the
Koch Supernova. With the advent of companies like Mesa, Diezel, Egnater,
VHT and Marshall putting out multi channel, high performance amp heads,
Koch chose to sit back observe, take notes and perfect their own entry
into the do-it-all-amp race. Many amps claim to do everything under the
sun. With the Supernova, it’s almost as though the user gets the choice
of 5 distinct amplifiers in one. I’m always suspicious of these claims
and always fall back to my standard cereal commercial spoof of “Mikey hates
everything”. As dizzying as the wide array of knobs are on this monster,
they are quite user friendly and intuitive. Here’s a rundown of the channel
and their characteristics:
Clean: This is the cleanest of all the
channels. Think of all the sparkle of a Fender Blackface Twin with an extra
bit of low-end thump. Tons of headroom and clean volume, it breathes with
gobs of tone even with the EQ set flat. Like all the Koch amps, this channel
also loves pedals.
Crunch: This is the channel that oozes
Fender Bassman/Marshal JTM 45 meets a Matchless DC30 tone. It can be clean
and it can be mean. The complex array of tones on tap in this channel is
enough to warrant its purchase. It performs the cleanest of cleans to a
very authentic sounding vintage gritty blues sound. It’s perfect for those
SRV/ Roots rock tones.
Gain: This channel echoes the tones of
Marshall JCM 800 2203-model head. It’s the perfect tone to achieve all
the classic rock and hard rock tones that have put bands like Thin Lizzy,
Van Halen, ZZ Top, AC/DC, and Motorhead on the map for pinnacle rock guitar
tones. As a side note, I was amazed at how close I got to the Van Halen
brown sound on “I’m the One”. This channel is very similar to the raunch
tones of the Twintone II.
High Gain: Taking its cue from the Gain
channel on the Powertone head, this channel oozes attitude, thump and gain
beyond the crunch zone. There is tons of saturation here for all Gainiacs,
but it never gets completely out of control when juiced up to obscene gain
levels. It perfect for the chunky metal tones that you’ve all heard on
albums from Whitesnake to Metallica to KORN and all the way to Steve Vai.
Ultra Gain: This channel takes the Gain
Train to new levels. There is a stupid amount of gain but it never get
fuzzy and noisy. When cranked, a super-saturated guitar hero tone is achieved
that screams for the user to tap into their inner guitar god. It’s a breath
taking sound that is dynamic, punchy, awes inspiring and border line obscene.
This basically is the Ultra gain channel from the Powertone head and had
me conjuring up some truly devilish riffs and inhuman leads (Insert evil
grin here______________).
There are more features than one shake a stick at here.
From MIDI interfaces to 3 way speaker damping all and all the way to a
neat feature that uses a single ended power amp with drive and volume control
that will simulate a power amp going into total meltdown and compression.
Between the 128 storable sounds and all the complex tone contour controls,
there isn’t a tone that is missing in this amp. For once in a longtime,
I can truly say “Mikey doesn’t hate everything”. |
