Guytron GT100 F/V.(GEAR)(Product/Service Evaluation)

It has been said that the quest for tone is a journey and not a destination. One of the advantages that smaller amplifier manufacturers have is the ability to continue to evolve and fine-tune a design in response to real-world user feedback. Longtime GP readers may recall that I reviewed an earlier version of the Guytron GT100 in January 1998. Since then, Guytron's head honcho and namesake, Guy Hedrick, has further refined the amp's design, and the GT100 F/V reviewed here incorporates a number of new features that were developed during the intervening years.

GUYTRONICA

The Guytron GT100 F/V may look like a typical two-channel 100-watt head, but hidden inside lurks a very unusual and innovative patented design. To create more dynamic, complex, and expressive overdriven tones, the GT100 F/V incorporates an additional low-power output stage between the preamp channels and its 100-watt final output stage. Picture a complete 20-watt amp with a classic long-tailed phase splitter driving two cathode-biased push/pull EL84s into a custom hand-wound interleaved output transformer driving a dummy load. Then picture sending the signal from that output transformer's secondary winding straight into a plexi Marshall. That's the basic concept of the GT100 F/W,, but, as you can imagine, it has taken Hedrick years to refine it to its present state.

Hedrick gigs regularly, and over the years he has tweaked the design in response to his own playing experiences, as well as those of many of his customers. And, like many boutique manufacturers, he has fine-tuned many of these amps to meet specific tonal requests. These mods led to the development of the recently added Focus and Voicing controls, hence the origin of the GT100's new "F/V" suffix.

The new Focus and Voicing controls essentially let you perform your own custom amp mods on the fly. The 4-position rotary switches give you the stock GT100 sounds when they're set to the their first positions (straight up). The other positions affect various circuit tweaks that reshape the amp's frequency response and dynamic characteristics in the following manner:

Focus Switch Positions

1) Stock, unmodified