Bad Cat Hot Cat 30 210 Combo

This amp was made in May of 2004. It's a very versatile amp. It does very clean cleans to light breakup on ch. 1 and can get light crunch sounds to hardcore-esque distortion. This amp can be absolutely brutal! It can do smoother rock all the way to fuzzed out madness. The cleans remind me of a Matchless Chieftain. Balanced, but it can get a shimmering top end.

One feature it has that I think is great is the switch on the back to switch from tube to solid state rectifier based distortion. Solid state rectifiers produce a tighter bottom. I prefer the response and feel of the tube rectifier however.

This amp has enough power for most small to medium sized gigs. I do like that you can be heard over a moderately aggressive drummer and yet still have a low enough amount of watts to get a decent tone at home practicing levels. For me, this is huge.

I wish this amp had a half power switch for bedroom playing (although 30w does work pretty decently at home). 30w is powerful enough for most applications, many people don't understand this (perhaps that's why there are still 100w or more powered amplifiers being built as we speak). 50w is all you need for any application, period. 15w is perfect for the bedroom.

Cosmetically, this amp is really rich. Mine was a custom shop blue sparkle tolexed 2x10 combo (with out of production Celestion G10L-35s). It looks like a professional amp because it IS a professional amp, no shortcuts are anywhere.

There are plenty of knobs to shape the distortion, but since there is only bright and level used for volume on the cleans, it gets some points deducted. The knobs are ultra sensitive and they are dependent on each other. For awkwardness, I have to deduct a point.

I've used it with a few different guitars. My main one I use for gigs is a G&L Skyhawk with WCR "SR" single coils and (soon to be) Genesis sounds "Mr. Browney" humbucker in the bridge. My studio guitar is a Grosh Bent Top Custom w/ WCR "SR" single coils and a WCR "Darkburst" humbucker in the bridge. These two guitars are sonically amazing and I use blend pots in both to coax some thicker, les paul oritented tones.

My style is straight up rock and roll, but I love blues, so I guess you could throw me in the blues-rock type genre. I have a huge variety of tastes, from Hendrix to Pearl Jam to Goo Goo Dolls to Further Seems Forever/ Saosin. I love a lot of different styles, but I tend to lean towards Marshall type tones over Mesa.

It didn't suit my style. It was an amazing amp, but I couldn't get quite the tone I was looking for. The amp is harmonically complex; something that only true boutique amps have. I found the amp to be thinner than what I was looking for. I'd say it had a balanced distortion, but I wasn't able to dial in the thickness or the mids of the distortion as well as I'd have liked. It was possible to scoop or add mids with proper tweaking, but it was a difficult amp to tweak properly. I still feel after a couple of months, that there was settings still left to be found that I just didn't know how to get to.

The amp can definitely get different shades of gain. I got a good british light crunch all the way up to really heavy and griding distortion. It's funny to see such a refined, classy looking amp putting out such power and grinding authority. This is where the amp shines. For high gain, it is unbelievably articulate. Neoclassical shredders must love this amp. Hardcore guys that want a HUGE lowend will flock to this amp (the lowend was amazing on it). However, I'd rather get oldschool Aerosmith than Slayer. I managed to get some pretty good vintage sounds, but when I saw where the amp really shined, it was a shame to keep it for a tone it wasn't really made to produce.

The clean were rather impressive. A lot of multi channel amps have great distortion and lacking cleans... not in this case. The cleans were very Matchless sounding, like I said earlier, similar to a Chieftain. This makes sense because Mark Sampson from Matchless helped design the amp. It's not a blackface Fender Twin or Super Reverb, and it's not a Vox AC-30, but if you've played Matchless amps, then you know what this offers.

Point to point wired. Top quality components. Solid birch cabinet. Yeah, this amp is ready for the road ; ). It is built like you couldn't believe. The craftsmanship is impeccable and it shows that this is a real player's amp and it's extremely roadworthy. I would trust this amp alone 110%. Seeing as I couldn't afford another one, a backup just isn't going to happen (I also own a Fender SF Vibrolux Reverb, but these amps are completely different animals).

I've never dealt with the company before, so I can't honestly review this.

I have been playing for around 8 years. I use a G&L Skyhawk (which I'm modding A LOT of), a Grosh Bent Top Custom (WCR SR/SR/Darkburst)- best guitar I've ever seen/played/owned/heard, a Dean Chafin Del Sol w/ Dimarzio Virtual PAFs (for jazz and rock) and a crappy Epiphone Les Paul w/ a Dimarzio Classic PAF (alternate tunings live).

I never played this amp in person before purchasing it. I would put it up against others in it's price range like the Bogner Shiva, VHT Pitbull etc. I've never played the Shiva before, but it sounds like that might be more up my alley. Think of this amp as a boutique, reworked Mesa Rectifier. Give it more articulate, richer distortion, richer cleans and you'll have this Hot Cat.

My amp I have right now is a Fender SF Vibrolux Reverb and I'm going to be getting a Fargen Epic 30 DC 2X10 to replace the Bad Cat. The Bad Cat was great, but the Fargen I'm getting just suits my music style better.