Sheldon TrueTone Junior Reviews 4

I took up guitar as an adult, three years ago, having played other instruments before. I play 60s, rock, punk for fun and in a fairly informal band.

Bought from Sheldon's own shop in Birmingham, UK, for 499 GBP. The aim was to get a UK-made, small tube amp that could be turned right up without deafening me or annoying neighbours too much.

It is a simple, no-nonsense unit with just two knobs and a power switch. It has a great tube tone played clean, though not much volume clean. On its own, it can do a nice moderate vintage overdrive. The single tone control is very clever - not just a dumb treble-cut. With a clean boost pedal, very good rock overdrive is easily available. The volume when overdriven is *much* more than you'd expect from a nominal 1 watt (yes, really) - that's good or bad depending! The unit is light and portable. It also looks superb, in quality red tolex. Plus, you can talk to the men who made it - by hand - and they answer all your questions.

You can't play clean at all loud. But you can't play overdriven quietly either. Both of these are probably just features of the simple design. There's more hum and hiss at maximum volume than I expected; don't get me wrong - it's not bad, but I expected near-silence given the low power and high price.

Most of the construction is excellent, but the out-of-sight parts of the cabinet are rather roughly finished.

It's a portable, nice-sounding, pretty, UK-made amplifier for home and recording use. You can't do metal but you can do most other styles.

Pete rated this unit 4 on 2006-11-23.

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