BLACK CAT 30: RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF EVERYTHING
We guitar players are very good at turning simple things into complicated things.
We have clean amps, high-gain amps, pedal platforms, British amps, American amps, vintage amps, and modern amps. Most of us eventually decide we need several of them and to be fair, we're probably right.
Different amplifiers do different things, and that's part of what makes this stuff fun. A great clean amp scratches one itch. A fire-breathing high-gain amp scratches another. Somewhere between those two lives an enormous amount of the guitar music we all grew up listening to.
That's where the Bad Cat Black Cat 30 comes in.
I'm not going to tell you the Black Cat will make you stop wanting other amplifiers. We're guitar players. Let's at least try to keep this believable.
What it WILL do is satisfy an awful lot of those cravings.
The Black Cat 30 is a 30-watt EL84 tube amp that lives in that incredibly useful space between big, dimensional clean tones and classic tube amp crunch. It can be bright and articulate, warm and pushed, jangly, gritty, crunchy or surprisingly aggressive.
And that's before we start putting things on the floor in front of it.
CLEAN ENOUGH TO BE CLEAN. DIRTY ENOUGH TO BE DANGEROUS.
There is something about a great EL84 guitar amp as it transitions from clean into overdrive that is difficult to replace with pedals alone.
At lower gain settings, the Black Cat 30 has clarity, chime and definition. There's plenty of room for the guitar to breathe, and enough headroom to actually use it as a clean amplifier.
Start turning things up and its personality changes.
The sound gets thicker. The amp begins to compress. Harmonics start stacking up and the notes develop that little bit of hair around the edges that makes you start digging in differently. Keep going and you're into classic tube amp crunch.
This is where the Black Cat 30 really makes sense to me. There's no giant leap between "clean channel" and "now we have distortion." It's a progression. Clean becomes slightly dirty. Slightly dirty becomes crunchy. Crunch becomes overdrive and all of those sounds still feel connected to one another.
That's important if you're actually using an amplifier to make music rather than standing six inches from the speaker cabinet turning knobs and evaluating frequencies. (Not that any of us would ever do that.)
YOUR PEDALBOARD IS THE COLOR PALETTE
The term pedal platform gets thrown around a lot, and it usually seems to mean an amplifier that's extremely clean and stays out of the way. I've never completely agreed with that idea. Some of my favorite pedal sounds happen when the amplifier already has some personality of its own.
A great tube amp doesn't need to disappear when you turn on a pedal. The amp and the pedal should interact. Think of the Black Cat 30 as the foundation and your pedalboard as a color palette.
Hit the front end with a boost and you can push the Black Cat's natural crunch harder.
Add an overdrive pedal and you've got another layer of gain and compression.
Use a fuzz and things can get weird in all the right ways.
Chorus, phaser and other modulation pedals have a harmonically rich sound to work with instead of a sterile backdrop. Delay and reverb have plenty of detail and dimension underneath them.
And if you're one of those people with seventeen drive pedals on your board, first of all, we're not judging you. Secondly, the Black Cat gives you plenty to do with them.
THE BEAUTY OF THE MIDDLE GROUND
A completely clean amplifier can be a good pedal platform for some things. A dedicated high-gain guitar amp can be incredible at what it was designed to do. The Black Cat isn't trying to replace either one.
Instead, it occupies that huge stretch of territory between pristine clean and modern high gain and it's a pretty great place to live.
It's clean enough when you need clarity. It has enough natural tube compression and harmonic content to make edge-of-breakup tones feel alive. Push it harder and there's enough gain for the kind of classic rock crunch and overdrive that made 30-watt EL84 amplifiers legendary in the first place. Then put a colorful collection of boost, overdrive, distortion, fuzz, modulation, delay and reverb pedals around it and that territory gets considerably bigger.
That's what I want from a pedal-friendly tube amp. I don't want the amplifier to be a blank sheet of paper. I want it to be the first color on the canvas.
MORE TERRITORY TO EXPLORE
Ultimately, that's what makes the Bad Cat Black Cat 30 such a useful guitar amplifier.
It already covers an unusually broad range of sounds before you put any pedals in front of it. The pedalboard doesn't have to compensate for what the amplifier can't do. It gets to take what the amp already does well and push it in different directions.
Start clean.
Push it to the edge.
Hit it with an overdrive.
Stack another pedal into it.
Add some modulation.
Put some delay behind everything.
Or plug straight in and remember why you bought a great tube amp in the first place.
The Black Cat 30 might not satisfy ALL of your tube-amp G.A.S. but it will take care of quite a few of the sounds that have been stuck in your head for years.
-Jon Bingham