Gallien-Krueger Backline 100

This is amp was made in 1992 approximately. It is really versatile. I only paid $150 for it in San Francisco at Real Guitars. I have been looking for one of these for a long time. It has three channels that you can footswitch through and a really nice reverb. Although the amp is transistor it has a feature the makes it sound like a tube amp. It is really cool. I have been playing funk, R and B and blues for over 35 years and I have a bunch of really nice amps including fenders, boogies and musicman. This amp for the money kicks butt. It weighs about 25lbs and has 100 watts and great head room.

The three channels are blues, distortion and clean. There is great eq. If you can get one of these cheap it will do a good job in the club or medium venue. You can also use the dI to go to another amp and use the onboard overdrive.

I am very impressed with this amp. The other guys the wrote negative information must have had a lemon. I put this up with my Boogie Mark iv but it weight 70 pounds less and will never need tubes.

Starting with the clean channel you can get a valve sound and there is three band active eq as well as a eq switch with gives a boost to bottom and high mides. The over drive has two types, one is blues and one is metal. You have great versatility. The amp breaks up at about 60% on the clean channel, but trust me that is at about 60 watts and is too loud for most live performances I would use it on. I am impressed with the headroom.

Just played this amp for about four hours and I can see no reason to believe it will not be reliable.

For $150 this is the best investment in an amp I have ever made. Now let me explain that I am a producer, I have a record deal with a company in London and I am also a tenure professor and can afford any amp or guitar I want. At this point in my life it is about tone, size and weight and I would put this up right next to my mark IV, or lonestar and it definately has a better overdrive then my Boogie F30. This is a great amp to leave in a rehearsal hall which is what I am going to do.

I have no idea when this amp was made, but it is still in good shape so i don't care really. The amp is very versatile, tweakable is the right word for this amp because you can get a huge variety of sounds from it. It has one clean, and 2 overdrive channels, reverb, prescence, double tone controls. I don't miss any features.
It is powerfull, but i never crank it all the way up like a tube amp, i mainly use this for recording. Everybody seemes to like my tube sound on recordings, produced by this amp hahaha.

I am not using it on a bass guitar, i use it with my fender stratocaster, and a modified H/S/S metal guitar. The amp sounds very good on both guitars, it gives me a wide range of possibilities to play with, a feature i really like.
I like the more brutal lead channel the most for solo parts, hoewever, the clean channel sounds ok with my strat, very honest sound. I give it a 10 because it does very well keeping in mind what the amp has inside. It's not a tube amp i mean, but it does very well.

Very reliable, dot!

never dealt with them, but the paperwork with this amp is ok, scheme's and very good written manual.

I am playing about 20 yrs now, i also have a marshall bluesbraker, Fender deluxe reverb and a jcm800 2205 head with cab.
I like this amp a lot, it is affordable and it gives me more sounds possibilities then my tube amps, but, i use it for recordings mainly because of that. I would like to compare it to the peavey bandit 112 transtube, electronics are basically the same, and to the marshall 19" jmp1.This amp is just great value, very usefull for beginners and professionals.

I realized that people only seem to write reviews for products that they really like, so I'm writing this about an amp that I truly dislike. The GK backline 100 combines the worst of many types of amp into one. It has a billion features and built in effects of which not one makes it sound good. I rate it at six, because at least they're trying, and I was impressed by the company's ambition.

I've used it with a wide variety of guitars, and it was the house amp at a club for a while, so I've heard at least 20 people try to get a good tone out of it. The clean channel is weak, thin, and hollow. The distortion is heavy, mushy, and empty. It's unresponsive, slow, and what would be it's only positive feature: it's awesome volume, is a drawback as it invariably sounds bad. Jazz players wouldn't bother turning it on, funksters would be dissappointed by it's slowness, blues players would hate it's hollowness, death-metal distorted sounds, and cheap reverb; Even metal heads would hate it for it's bland lead tones, lack of overtones, and lack of any chop. It's a muddy mushy useless waste of space.

It lasts and lasts. built really well... it will disgust you for years and years.

dunno

Junk. Not suitable for anything but perhaps sitting on while you play a different amp. My friend bought it, and gave it to me when he left the country. I was too poor to replace it for a long time, and was tortured by it for years. It put me off practicing the guitar for a while, and eventually I traded it to some moron for a mesa boogie! I tried to tell him, but he wouldn't listen! The boogie was too heavy for him... that was his reason for trading! I'm sure the GK is now holding a door open, or propping up some other junk in a closet somewhere (or at the bottom of a lake, if there's any justice).

This small, compact amp has all the basic features and then some: two foot-switchable channels (clean/overdrive) with separate EQ, effects send and return, a line-out for direct recording, headphone jack for late-nite practice sessions, and a jack to drive an external speaker. I'm mostly a "garage and basement" guitar player, so this amp has all the features and versatility that I need. When I do mixing and recording with friends, I mic the amp or else just use the line-out (it sounds pretty good when going right into the mixer). The amp also has a traditional spring reverb that is shared by both the clean and overdrive channels. This is perhaps the one feature of the amp that I don't like very much (because of its sound quality), so I just always turn it off.

Holy cow. I mean, what can I say? I've had this amp almost 8 years, and it's by far my *favorite* and most prized piece of guitar equipment. I would be totally lost without it, and I would amputate limbs to replace it if it were lost or stolen. I have a custom strat with rosewood fretboard and EMG Select (passive) pickups. The bridge pickup is a humbucker. The EMG pickups are very quiet and work excellently with this amp. Even the single-coil pickups don't generate any hum or buzz. I am not a person that really strives for traditional vintage sounds. I tend to like a very warm but clean "overdrive" growl for my distortion sound. I also generally like to play and solo with only about 30% distortion and 100% presence. In conjunction with the EMG pickups, I get what I consider to be the "perfect" sound out of this amp: a smooth "growling" overdrive with squeaky attack and presence that transitions seamlessly into a bright, ringy, clean sustained sound... I think the closest I can describe it is similar to Alex Lifeson's guitar tracks on Rush's "Power Windows." It's a more modern sound that is not vintage, but it is warm, punchy and brilliant. I just absolutely love it, and have never found any other device that has allowed me to recreate this exact sound or feel with my custom strat. I think it is trully unique the the GK solid-state design.

Like I said, I've had this amp for about 8 years. I've never had any problems with it, and even though I absolutely love it, I have abused it a few times (by accident). But it has never given me any technical troubles, and it is still sturdy and holding together well.

I've never had a customer support issue with this product, so I can't comment.

This amp is so precious to me, that I value it more than my custom strat. The reason is that I'm rather confident I can get another strat with similar action and tonality, and I'd probably put the new EMG HZ passive pickups in it this time. But the really sad thing is that GK doesn't do 6-string guitar amplifiers anymore. So if I lost this amp, I would not be able to find a replacement. The only exception is if I was lucky enough to find a used one in good condition. But if other Backline 100 owners like thiers as much as I like mine, I don't know that they'd be willing to part with it! I think this GK amp has such a great sound, it's a shame that GK decided to go exclusively with bass technology. I've even contacted them in the past to tell them they need to ressurect the 6-string Backline series... or at least offer a preamp version that can be used to drive a separate cabinet. Well, if GK never comes round and enters the 6-string market again, then I'll be playing this Backline 100 until "death do us part."

wow i dont know many of the features but i will tell you from the front plate it seems to me like enough
two channels dirt&clean
presence
REVERB
a nifty little footswitch that i like
and 100watts of power trough 1x12 or click the switch in the back and plug in a 4x12 and you have a very versital amp indeed
send and return for the FX loop
line out (never used it)

well i got this from my guitar teacher and the sound he got was awesome and i havnt even plugged it in for myslef yet.
i play all kinds of music for BOC to anthrax.no noise yet i use humbouckers.the distortion has tons of tone and hits you like a freight train out of hell its just to much!

just got it i treat thing very well and all of my equipment i use is still in imaculate comdition

na-na-na-na-na-na-NO

i play a RG-270 DX through a boss hm-2 to a DD-6 with one line going to my yamaha 100w 2x12 and the other line going to the GK (stereo effects rock my socks)

I am quite happy with the range of features on this amp. It's got clean and dirty channels, two distorted lead modes, independent EQs for clean and distortion, and a shared reverb. It also has a DI out for direct recording--one of my favorite features. It actually sounds pretty good going direct. And I can record at 3:00 in the morning without getting evicted! You can get a lot of different tones out of this amp. It's quite versatile and LOUD. I've been playing one of these for about 7 years now.

I'm using a Jackson Rhoads Pro and I play old-school metal (Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc.). There is plenty of distortion in there for this kind of music (I think many players overestimate how much distortion they need anyway). I'd say the distortion is pretty warm for a solid state amp. Though the distortion is very tweakable, no matter what I do to it, the tones I want just don't quite come out. No surprise--I like tube distortion!!! It approximates good distortion, but doesn't quite capture it. As my ears have become more tone-sensitive over the years, I've become less happy with the distortion I get out of here. It's far too dirty for me. To me, good distortion should be even, creamy, warm, and in a sense, somewhat "clean". The distortion I get here sounds uneven, and a bit too fuzzy for my taste. That said, I think it fairs well in comparison to other solid state amps in it's price range.
The clean channel, on the other hand is something of a disaster in my opinion. It's cold, flat, and lifeless no matter how you tweak it. I had to try to avoid playing clean in my music because I just couldn't stomach listening to the thing.
The reverb is also not particularly impressive. Thin and cold.

Well, I've had to get it fixed twice due to bad soldering of the connections (you'd think they'd get it right the first time). And this isn't from throwing it around at gigs--this is from playing it in my bedroom. There was also a problem with the channel switching. All in all, it's been a fairly buggy amp.

I've been playing around 12 years now. I'm ready to upgrade to a new amp--probably a Marshall tube amp. I shoulda gotten a tube amp in the first place. Solid state just doesn't cut it for metal in my opinion. This amp has really nice features, but none of them sound all that great. I think there are better things out there for the money.

The clean channel has a punchy clean sound even to very loud volumes. The dirty channels have enough grit to cut through almost anything, not a Marshal stack sound but very versitile.

Not had any problems with it through 5 years of gigging.

I have been playing through this amp about 6 years I have about 3 other amps but this is the best sounding one I have. I tried every other amp I could get my hands on but this one was the best overall sounding. Even my wife thought it sounded good. : ) the only complaint is the dirty channel can't quite get the "brown sound" but it does come close.

This has everything that I need in an amp right now. It has two channels (clean and dirty) and the ability to switch. I really like it being able to give a boost (lead 1 and lead 2) to get extra gain and sustain for guitar solos. It has a headphone jack, also. This is a very powerful amp with a lot of volume.

With what I play, it sounds great bordering on amazing. I really love this amp. I use a standard Fender Stratocaster with three single coil pickups. The problem with that is, though, is that I get a buzzing sound when using it. But so far that has only been on bridge pickup combos with single coil pickups. There is no real buzz when used with Humbuckers, so it's probably my pickups more than the amp. The clean channel stays clean no matter what you put it on and sounds awesome with the reverb. I play a lot of hard rock stuff from the likes of Steve Vai and such, and this amp provides the punch in distortion that I like.

The only repairs I've had to make were the results of things I did wrong. This is a very tough amp

I'm fifteen and have been playing for five years, and I would definitely look look to replace it if it were lost or stolen. I love this amp.

This amp is great for home recording studios. It has several features that I liked. First were two channels to chose from, the typical clean & dirty. Next is the direct line out. Then the effects loop. And lastly the headphone jack.
The dirty channel had a boost to it so that during live performances you could enhance the solo, if you wanted, with that extra saturated gain that we guitarist love! However for recording it had several killer features. The "line out" would provide you with a line level signal that works great for going direct to a mixer or recorder.
The "effects loop" helped free up the Aux Sends on my Mackie 1604 mixer. The whacky sound transformations were conveniently droped into my line level signal via the "line out." The headphone jack worked great because I could play or record at 3:00 in the morning.

The guitars I use are a Ibenez and Ovation(hard body one-piece!). On the clean at low or high volumes it is awsome very crisp and very tight. The dirty however lacked a thickness that you get from typical tube amps. The distortion is there but its just to thin for my blood. I've gotten chunkier guts from Crates!??
The presence and reverb knobs are great and offer some versitility to the clean. The dirty I tried but I wound up getting a peddle its just that simple. In my rating I give this guy a borderline 7 because of the distortion otherwise it might be a 10.

It has been quirky with me. I traveled through the desert then the freezing mountains with no climate controll in my van. So it may be my own stupidity or just a shaudy solder job. Who knows? From my experience with electronics though flexations in temperature don't make too much of a dent in how a product works. What happens is at low volumes the signal cuts in and out. But just crank it and the sound kicks back in. (maybe a bad voltage regulator)

The warranty was out when the amp started cutting out however they have authorized service centers all over. The people I spoke with at GK were more than helpful they were friendly and treated me with great respect just the way Mackie people do.

I've been playing for 15 years or so. I've own a sunn amp peavys and fender. If I ever lost it I'd probably opt for a nice tube amp. Probably a fender. I do like the durability of the cabinent and speaker but can't get over the problem I have with the distortion. But it is great for the price and looks and sounds better than alot of amps in its "field." I wish it came with a schematic!!!! DOSE ANYONE OUT THERE HAVE ONE??? I've been searching all over the internet and can't find one for the life of me.

Every wedding band musician's dream come true. 3 channels, volume & tone in a lightweight, solid state, combo package. I cover everything from Sinatra to Bush and the Backline makes my '65 strat more versatile than it has been for the last 30 years. The clean channel breaks up at higher levels but it's a "sensitive to the nuances of your attack" type of disortion. The crunch channel can sound clean with the guitar turned down or bring up the guitar level for a bluesy but not too overdriven sound. It depends on the amount of drive you dial in. I leave the master up around 7 and turn the overdrive to about 3. Then the Lead channel taks you over the top with a singing distortion that sounds even better with a Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer. Actually, I believe that the Dan Armstrong unit is one of the best kept secrets in the biz. Check it out. The Backline has both an effects loop and a headphone output. The internal 12" speaker can be disabled for use with an external cabinet. The compensated line out beats miking anyday. There are presence and reverb controls but I wish I didn't have to patch in a chorus pedal since I usually go wireless. For under $500, the GK Backline has got to be a serious contender for the maximum versitility market. I also own a 250 ML by GK. Another reliable product for the tuxedo wearin', hotel playin', jam with anyone whore I am!

Being a jobbing musician, I require compactness and versatility. The Backline covers that base. There is better tone on the market, but for less than $500 you'ld be hard pressed to find it. The distortion sound is more vintage than grunge.

The only time my amp neede a repair is when rit fell out the back of the truck and the printed circuit board cracked. Otherwise, so far so good after 3 years.

I'd buy a more powerful version and I think it exists as a head only. I'm told by reliable and respected sources that the next best thing to the Backline would be the Peavey Bandit. The Bandit's a little cheaper but not as versitle.