Peavey Bandit 65

Check all above reviews for features. Mine is old, bought it used about 8 years ago.

When I first bought it, I had only been playing a year or 2 and needed an amp with more balls to it for my band. Well that's what I got. The distortion is heavy, but farty and muddy if you're looking for tight riffing, like some Metallica, or basically any type of metal. Great for power chords or punk music though. So for 7 of those years I used a Marshall Shred Master and Morley Wah. I got great sounds, when I coupled it with the spring reverb which was great. Now I use a Digitech RP2000, so most of my sound comes from that, but I play everything from Pantera to Vai, so it was great for anything. Especially now, with the board. For the beginner it offers great sounds and even for someone who's playing a little longer it still can pass the test.

Like I said, 8 years used and still kickin. Plus it fell a few times off a bench when I was playing with my band...I though "oh shit, it's over" but this bad boy kept coming back for more. Gone through 3 or 4 bands and it's delivered each time. This baby is tough!! I know I can always count on it. I'm receiving a Carvin Legacy cab soon, and I'm still going to keep the Peavey for some extra punch, and run em both off the Digitech. If I could I'd give this the Spinal Tap rating of 11.

Never used, as this was bought used. But I hear they're decent. Especially if you own EVH gear.

This has been a great amp, through bands, jamming with freinds, and just jammin at home. I'd be pissed if it were stolen, and would go Indiana Jones lookin for a new one, Last Crusade style. Like I said, I have the Digitech, gettin hooked up with a Carvin and I'm still keeping this lil mofo in my arsenal. In case anyone cares I also mainly play 2 Ibanez', a JS1000, and a Jem7DBK, and on occasion my Les Paul and 2 BC Rich's. They all sound great.

I think this amp was made in the mid 80s. Has your standard Bass/Mid/Treble controls, with a presence knob and reverb. Has Pull Bright on the clean gain, and Pull Thick on the High EQ knob. 2 Footswitchable channels, clean and lead, with pre-gain, post-gain, and saturation (controls amt. of distortion) knobs. Has 2 inputs, an FX loop, and I think thats it. I like to play mostly Metal, but I keep an open mind. This amp is pretty versitile for what I like to play. Sometimes I get minor feedback, but during playing its usually never there. No headphone jack, but with some materials from radio shack you can wire one in. Its 65 watts through a 12 inch speaker. I play in my room, so its definately enough.

I use an Ibanez RG170, soon to be through a Dunlop Crybaby Wah pedal, and like to play mostly heavy stuff. My guitar has an HSH pickup configuration with a 5 way selector switch. It works great for what I like to play, though sometimes I get a little hiss. Thats with my guitar tone set to 10 on the Single Coil pickup, though. I spose the amp can make all kinds of sounds, though I always keep my EQ/saturation/presence set to 10. Clean channel is nice and thick, not tinny. Many people bitch about the distortion. Ive only been playing for about a year, so maybe my ears arent that good yet. Of course this is going to look bad against a Mesa/Boogie or Marshall, but for now, the distortion works wonders for me.

This is built like a fuckin tank. I would definately gig w/o a back up. This things been going for 14 years, why stop now? Never broken, as far as I can tell.

Never delt with peavey.

If this was lost I might buy a crate, but to me this is a fantastic amp to own for beginners. I love the distortion; warm, cruchy, great. I dont really hate anything about it, but it could use a headphone jack. I compared it to the audition 110 and the envoy 110.

this amp kicks ass. it shakes my house on volume 5 (200 watt power for ya) it has reverb and saturation. it's an awasome amp.

it sounds great. 200 watts.

ive had it for only a week so i don't know the reliablity

go buy this amp...it kicks ass

i have no idea what year..probably in the 80's. i got it for free beccuz my dad did a job for some guy and the guty gave him the amp in return then my dad gave it to me.it is versitle enough for n e thing from hard rock to blues.2 channels.clean and distortion.the distortian sounds like shit so i usuall leave it on the clean channel and use my boss metal zone distortion box.

sounds really clear but it has a slight humm when using high gain/.

never had a problem in over 5 years..except in the selector footswitch thin a wire cam loose and i had to solder it back on.

very great first amp or practice amp.

This has been covered below. This amp is either a joke, or a useful tool, depending on how you run it. If you use it as is, by itself, it's QUITE a joke. If you establish your main tone with something else, and line into the Bandit to bring the volume up, then it can be very good sounding and useful. In regards to features, it has more than I'll ever use. I'm especially fond of the spring reverb. That's the best sounding thing about the amp

I'll decline to give a numbers rating. By itself, the clean channel is very flat, which can be a good thing if your trying to get your main tone from an outside source. All the tone controls work well for fine tuning. The distortion channel is totally unusable IMHO. I forget that it's there. The way that I'll be using it is as follows: Either my Morley JD-10 amp emulator, or one of my small (5 or 15 watts) tube amps with a homemade line out, into the Bandit's clean channel. So far, I've only tried it at the house, or while giving a guitar lesson. I'll put it on the bandstand this Friday and put it through the paces. It was suggested to me that I put the JD-10 into the loop, bypassing the preamp section, but this caused me to lose my reverb, and also lose a lot of volume, so I'll continue to put it into the front end. As I mentioned before, the reverb is really beautiful. Not as good as, but closer than anything else to an old blackface Fender's verb.

Now here's the good part. You see these amps in pawn shops all over America. As a matter of fact you see ALL kinds of real old Peavey solid state stuff all over for dirt cheap. That's because that stuff just WON'T DIE. Any trouble with any of this stuff would just be minor surgery - nothing serious. I've got a couple of scratchy pots and that's all. I think that you could push it out of a fast moving vehicle and it would still fire right up and work fine. These amps were actually used by some well known players who didn't want to tote their good tube amps out on the road. Roy Buchanan, Son Seals, and Eddie Clearwater are a few who used them onstage.

I can't say for sure, but I know that Peavey has a good site, and an excellent question/answer forum.

I've been playing for 30+ years. I'm a tube amp man, but not so much of a snob about it to blow off an amp like this. You just have to know how to get the best out of it. The secret is using outside help. I've been lining small tube amps into larger amps (both tube and transistor) for many years. This amp previously belonged to my keyboard player, who used it for his electric mandolin. He let me have it for $10 because he needed gas money! He told me that it was given to him, so he made $10 off of it. I'll use it for small gigs where I don't want to drag out a lot of gear, or burn up the tubes in my good amps.

I'm not sure what year the amp was made, I'm assuming sometime in the mid 80's... however, I bought it on consignment for $150, pretty good deal if you ask me. It's the second amp I've ever owned. If you are just starting out on guitar, and want an amp tht will be useful for you for a long time, go with this amp. It's got a clean and dirty channel, an effects loop, but no headphone jack (my roomate wishes it did...) It's PLENTY powerful for me... this amp can get LOUD. I used it to play in front of like, 400 people (it was pretty quiet, but a BIG room) and didn't set the volume any higher then 4.5, and that was more then enough. I can see this amp easily having enough power for me for a long time (till I can save up the $$ for a Marshall stack :-)

Because left-handed guitars are so freakin rare and expensive, I have a terrible strat copy with three single coil pickups. I've been playing for about 5 years now, and I'll play anything from Punk to classic rock. The amp has pretty good sound when played clean, but I'm not a big fan of the distortion. It sounds really really muddy, and it hums a LOT too. One interesting thing about it... it might have been the area I lived in or whatever, but I managed to pick up short-wave radio through the amp...?? Anyway, the amp does have decent sound overall, and I fell in love w/ it when I first played it.

This amp is SOLID. Trust me, I've dropped it (accidently), and have gone back and forth to college with this amp, you would never know. When I bought it, the footswitch was a little unreliable (it, unlike the amp, looked pretty old when purchased), and stopped working shortly after I got the amp. This sucks if you don't have any other pedals to go from clean to dirty. But the amp itself is solid.

For the last 3 years, this has been my amp, and I've been relatively happy with it. It hums pretty loud, picks up religious radio, and is about the heaviest thing I've ever picked up (someone said something about the Bandit 65 being a pound per watt... same applies here). However, for the price, this is one amazing amp. It is NICE and loud, has a great clean channel, and is a great amp to get you through those first couple of years when you want to sound good and play loud, yet don't want to drop $1000 on an amp. If it was stolen, I would probably by something else, not because I don't like this amp, but because I like to play around with guitar equipment.

I'm not positive when it was made, but I bought it brand new in late 1986. It was, for all intents & purposes, my first amp. It has separate dirty & clean channels with channel switching only on the footswitch, an effects loop and a spring reverb that sounds like a loud crash when you accidentally hit the amp. Each channel has its own master volume and a brightness boost. The dirty channel has a midrange boost. She's solid state and 65 watts.

I was playing every guitar I owned through it... Strats, an old Ibanes RoadstarII and my Wolfgangs. It was my main amp until a few months ago when I got rid of it. I had outgrown it a long time ago, but I couldn't part with it. Basically, I only used the amp as a power source for my ADA preamp and my Quadraverb. I don't use those anymore, either... just a few pedals in the effects loop of my 5150 head. The amp itself was never great sounding. The distortion was plain awful and very fuzzy. The clean tone was clean, but had no real body. She's loud, that's for sure. I did have some really neat sounds through it over the years. It started with some pedals (A Boss OD1 was my drive), then a Rockman, then a Boss ME5, then the ADA/Quadraverb combination. It just got to be that I had neat sounds, but had to work really hard at them and knew there were better sounds to be had. It made me good at tweaking... that was for sure. The bare amp was nothing to brag about.

I had this for a little over 13 years without *one* problem. The treble boost on the clean channel started to flake out a little, but I never used it anyway. It never broke. I went through High School parties, various shows, bands, etcetera and there was not one problem.

I never used it for this amp, but they've been great with my for my 5150. They've been instructed to smooch you on EVH stuff, though. Since I never used it on for the Bandit, I'll give no opinion.

I've been playing for a little over 13 years. This was really my first amp. It makes a great first amp with a lot of power at a low price since you can now pretty much find them only used. I wouldn't buy another one at this point in time, but it was a great first amp. I bought this instead of a Champ12 at the time simply because of the price and the power.

Bought new in 1987. 2 channel solid state, requires footswitch for clean channel and reverb switching. High and low gain input, pre-amp out and power amp in. 4 Band equalization. Reverb. "Bright" and "Thick" sounds via pull knobs. Not a studio grade amp, but decent for practice and small gigs.

I've used it with several guitars. A Gibson Les Paul Studio Lite, a Charvel Model 4, and a Larrivee Solidbody Electric. It was a great amp for all of them. Not as much low end as I wish, but enough power for my garage band days. After about 5 years, the distortion seemed to sound like crap to me. To this day, I don't know if something is wrong with the amp or if my ears just improved to the level where I realized it was crappy sounding distortion. Anyway, I've been using it with the clean channel and stomp box distortion ever since. The clean channel is very strong and clear.

At 12 years old, this amp is still great. Other than having lousy distortion, I have no complaints. It still has great tone as a power amp.

This is the 2nd amp I ever bought (the first was a horrible Ross amp which sounded like %$&# and had constant deesback) and it is the only guitar amp I own today. I love it. It's the best money I ever spent. I won't be the least bit surprised when this amp is still kicking at age 20.

around early 80's - This is a great practice amp. I just add a "Real Tube" overdrive with a 12AX& and I get all the warm blues needed for a practice session - 65 watts..reverb, two inputs, some push pull knobs, overdrive saturation, all solid state circuitry, 1 12" speaker, great tonal combinations.

I put my Les Paul Custom, Strat, and Tele through it. I play bluesrock. This amp, for practice, has excellent tonal capabilities. Not loud or versatile enough for playing out, but as an in home amplifier, it is great. Nice clean sounds. Its fuzz saturation sound is OK, but just add a device of your choice. Mine is the "Real Tube"; and it sounds great.

It has been very dependable. I have played out with it too but; if you have a sort of loud band with other guitar players and a loud drummer, then you will have to crank it and can't really cut it. It should be catagorized as just a practice amp.

Don't know...never needed them.

If it were lost or stolen, I would replace it. Need an amp to stay at home while one is the road amp. It has suited it's purpose as a practice amp.

I don't know what year it was made but I think this amp is not that old. I think the bandit has too much bass and not enough treble to it. Like it doesn't sound very clean. I have a Digitech pedal board that I use with it. It sounds Pretty good with the pedalboard but without it, it sounds like shit. The amp fits my style because I like to play loud and the bandit is loud. The bandit has 1 channel. so It doesn't ahve any channel switches or nothing like that. I wish it had more channels, a cleaner sound, and thats about it. I use the amp in my room where I like to just kick back and play for hours. I used to have a band but I don't play with them anymore. The amp has a lot of power. the amp has MIDI inlets in the back.

I use an ibanez guitar with like I said a digitech pedalboard the pick-ups: I have two hummbuckers and a single coil pick-up ,theyy sound great with the amp. The amp is a little scratchy time to time but otherwise it is wonderful. The amp has a bassy clean sound which is what I don't like. the clean channel sounds like s**t . The distortion sounds like shit too. Thats why I have the pedalboard.

I can really depend on it . but I would never use it for a gig. I have had the amp for 9 months and it has never broke down on me

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I have been playing for almost 3 years. If it was stolen I would be pissed cuz that ampp means alot to mean