Rivera Quiana 410 Combo

This is the only amp that I have found that handles the style that I play. The initial draw was the warmth and note definition of the distorted tones that the amp puts out. There is plenty of gain but you wouldn't call it "high-gain" like a Dual Rectifier or anything. The gain is very musical. It's warm and colored and it leaves a lot of its character in the player's hands. It happens to work really well for me, but there are a ton of amps out there with awesome distortion. Usually, that's where it ends.

The clean channel on this amp will do anything you tell it. It is capable of very clean sounds, but you can dial in an impressive amount of color, grit, character.. whatever you want to call it. Lots of words come to mind. What it comes down to is that the clean channel isn't an afterthought. It's just as impressive as the higher-gain sounds, and it'd easily wow a "clean player" who didn't care if there was a distorted channel at all on the amp.

If you see one of these things around, play it. I was pretty skeptical at first, but I kind of rolled my eyes and gave it a try. I wasn't shopping for an amp, just kind of messing around, but it floored me enough to lay out the dough. I'm still fine-tuning my tone with it. I'm not sure if I'll swap the speakers out for something new or what. Sonically, it's like 90% of the way there. More importantly (for me) though, the attitude of the amp is f'ing exactly what I've been looking for. I've written more music playing this thing than I could have imagined. It's pretty rare to find gear that's really inspiring, I think, and this is it. Just my $.02 in case anyone else stumbles across one in the back of some guitar center and runs to HC for reviews to confirm what they think they've heard. Cheers.