Description
A brand new Benson Monarch Reverb finished in blue tolex with wheat grille. It features a deep, warm clean tone that transitions into a harmonically-rich overdrive tone--all topped off with a lovely true spring reverb. A fantastic and versatile grab-and-go combo.
From Monarch Amps...
"The Monarch was my first design, and largely what my other amps are based on. When I worked at Verellen Amps in the late 2000s, several amps would come in for repair every week....high powered vintage monsters all the way to low powered newer boutique amps. Here's an annoying thing I did....instead of working hard like I should have, I took them apart and studied their circuit designs. If I liked a particular aspect of an amp I would try to figure out what it was. This eventually grew into an understanding of how harmonics are built up, how a circuit is filtered and gain staged, what components sound like, what engineers were trying to achieve, and how they succeeded and failed. It was also an education in what fails on the road and how to make something that is easily repairable.
I had a donor metal chassis sitting under my bench at the time....an old Bogen PA head....that I would incrementally build snippets of circuits I was particularly interested in...it probably went through hundreds of permutations. Often I would tack solder circuits together, often while it was powered up, (Which I don't recommend). One day all the pieces fell into place, and I got a euphonic clean tone that transitioned into an aggressive harmonic distortion and I about fell over. I showed it to my bandmate and we freaked out.. That design became the Monarch"
Overview
-Power Output: 15 Watts
-Tubes: 5AR4, 6V6 (2), 12DW7, 12AX7 (2)
-Speaker: 12" Benson Custom Ceramic (by Weber)
-Controls: Volume, Tone, Reverb
-Dimensions: 23.5" x 18" x 10"
-Weight: 35 lbs
Features
-Point to point construction
-Custom Soursound transfomers
-2 Tone Modes (US/UK)
-Foot-switchable reverb
-Dovetailed pine cabinet
