::Gabriel Sound Garage – V18 Head (front)::

(from left to right)

STANDBY
The Standby switch that turns the amp on. Turn on approximately 5-10 minutes after you turn the tube heaters on (from the ON/OFF switch). Tubes need to get to their optimal temperature to operate with full efficiency.

ON/OFF
Turns the tube heaters (filaments) on. Use this switch first when you power up the amp. Wait approximately 5-10 minutes before you turn the STANDBY on (read previous control).

BRIGHT CHANNEL (EF86 pentode based)

The ever-remembered and referenced AC15-ish EF86 pentode based channel delivers the well known sweet and warm British tone with plenty of sparkly harmonics, excellent note-separation, keeping a tight and round bottom. Not a hint of harshness in its high end, the tone keeps breaking up subtly as the Volume is pushed, delivering the well known organic character. Teles love this channel! Easily tweakable with the CUT and CONTOUR controls giving the last fine-tuned touches with the TONE knob. Enough headroom for all your clean tones (insert your pedals here). Pushed harder in VOLUME, (after approximately 9:00 o’clock) the tone gets that sweet bluesy elegant break up good enough to make your audience cry… As you go higher, you enter the land of Overdrive Kingdom where rock or blues leads sweep you off the floor, keeping the same touch-sensitive character over all range sweep. As some people are saying, “This channel is a gainy bugga’!”

CUT
This is the common CUT control found on vintage AC15 or AC30 amps and has the same role of cutting top frequencies off your tone. Extremely helpful in dialing in a bright tone but without being irritating.

GAIN
This GAIN control works in conjunction with the Dual Gain Footswitch. Has the same exact role as those on the Dual Gain Footswitch, but it is taken out of the circuit once the footswitch jack is inserted in the rear of the amp. In case you go to a gig and discover that you forgot to take your nifty Dual Gain Footswitch with you, don’t panic – you will still be able to control the amount of gain from the GAIN knob on the front control panel of your amp. This GAIN control is wired right after your guitar input and has no extra gain stages whatsoever that may alter your guitar tone character. Acts exactly as your guitar’s Volume: you roll it back, the signal cleans up – you roll it back up, you have full overdrive power. Of course considering that your amp’s VOLUME is for example past 12:00 o’clock.

TONE
A very dramatic-sweep tone control lets you add your final touches on the path of your tone. Think of it as a “fine-tune” tone control after you dial in your desired tone setting on the 6 – position CONTOUR tone selector.

VOLUME
And finally the very exciting VOLUME control. Since this amp is a low-gain amp which has its overdrive formed in the power tubes (as opposed to hi-gain amps where the main overdrive is formed in the preamp tubes), the Volume dial dictates the amount of volume/overdrive. In the early VOLUME sweep you’ll get a clean sparkled tone exceptional for jazz and anything “clean”, rhythm-driven songs, but as you turn it up, together with volume, your tone will start to break up gradually producing the much coveted power tube creamy, rich un-equaled by any amp-modeler distorsion. This is simply because the human ear was designed to accept with great pleasure even-order overtones such as this – not muddy, with a tight bass, and organic!

Hi & Lo INPUTS
A high and a low impedance input.

NORMAL CHANNEL (12AX7 pentode based)

“Tradition! Tradition!” – this Marshall-ish crunch channel is all that. The simplicity (yet intricately mysterious) of the VOLUME and TONE controls let you dial in what ’60s crunch is all about. Make no mistake about it. It is the typical British crunch, with enough upper-mids that gets you going as soon as you strike those chords!

TONE
A very dramatic-sweep tone control lets you add your final touches on the path of your tone.

VOLUME
And finally the very exciting VOLUME control. Since this amp is a low-gain amp which has its overdrive formed in the power tubes (as opposed to hi-gain amps where the main overdrive is formed in the pre amp tubes), the Volume dial dictates the amount of volume/overdrive. In the early VOLUME sweep you’ll get a clean sparkled tone exceptional for jazz and anything “clean”, rithm-driven songs, but as you turn it up, together with volume, your tone will start to break up gradually producing the much coveted power tube creamy, rich un-equaled by any amp-modeler distorsion. This is simply because the human ear was designed to accept with great pleasure even-order overtones such as this – not muddy, with a tight bass, and organic!

Hi & Lo INPUTS
A high and a low impedance input.