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 Cruising through one of his fave local hangouts – Guitar Brothers – GEARED plugs into a SUHR BADGER 30 mini-stack, cranks it up and likes what he hears.
A revered name among boutique six-string aficionados, US luthier John Suhr (whose immaculate guitars we’ll also examine in this issue of Geared) isn’t exactly averse to amplification, as his OD-100 and Badger series demonstrate. Seemingly being a perennial n00b when it comes to top-level boutique stuff, I actually found about those amps’ existence on the day I drove up to Guitar Brothers to check out the stuff they were raving about to me earlier – and lo and behold, there was a brand-spanking-new Suhr Badger 30 sitting next to the guitar wall. Which is to say – the story starts here.
Suhr’s first low-watt amp, the much-praised Badger 18, can either do the full 18W or go down to half a watt and still retain its killer punch – as any discerning player in the know can attest... What, you want names? Well, here you go then: Billy Idol’s guitarist Steve Stevens – one of ‘80s rock’s more underrated players, the person who played those emotion-drenched licks on Michael Jackson’s Dirty Diana and who knows a thing or two about tone – was so enamoured with the Badger 18 he wrote John a passionate testimonial. As for me... well, this could be mine for the similarly unpretentious-looking Badger 30.
Er... what was I talking about just then? That’s right – as I was admiring the exquisite Suhr axes at Guitar Brothers, I was encouraged to plug a couple of them into the same mint Badger 30 I spotted. Cue a gorgeous single-coil and then a ‘bucker-loaded guitar into the amp and some vigorous dial-twiddling, hard riffage and pentatonic blues scale abuse (but no Led Zep this time!).
Like the 18, the 30 is a no-nonsense, one-channel amp. Despite its name, the little kicker is actually 38W strong. Featuring punchier midrange and more headroom than its predecessor, the 30 neatly bridges the gap between low-wattage amps and 50/100W heads – with the requisite lush cleans and meaty overdrive, but without the booming bass normally associated with hi-watt amps. With similar dimensions to the 18 (20.5” wide, 9.25” high, 8.25” deep and weighing in at 25 pounds or around 11 kilos), it is ideally suited for small-to-medium-sized rooms – in fact, it’s proven massively popular among the church worship bands in the US, which also doesn’t deter from it also being a great barroom amp. As Jim White wisely sings, “the bar is just a church where they serve beer.”
The Badger 30 front panel features six controls – the usual Gain, Middle, Treble and Bass for tone-shaping and Power and Drive for power scaling (here’s a little about the power scaling technology itself: this feature, licensed by Suhr from Canada’s London Power, lowers the wattage to the power amp, which allows the power tubes to clip – which in turn makes them run “cooler” while still retaining the tube-speaker interaction. This means the output power of an audio amp can be dialed down from 100% to less than 1%. Now try that with your Marshall head and see how far you can go... just sayin’.). The power section houses two EL84 tubes while the 4, 8, and16Ω outputs on the back of the amp make it compatible with any type of speaker cabinets, and... that’s pretty much it. Whether you stick the Badger on top of a matching 1x12” or a quadbox, you’re bound to feel its toothy bite.
So with all the above, what does it actually sound like? Answering that question on the spot proved pretty difficult: the Badger 30 definitely has a British vibe to it, but not entirely in the Vox/Marshall/Orange way. The range of sounds on offer was simply too wide to simply class it as an “English” or “American”-type amp; I even heard a hint of Brisbane’s own Vase in the cleans while on the other hand, the turned-up Gain and some tone shaping unleashed the fierce growl normally associated with Mesa/Boogie combos. When I played a Suhr Classic guitar, the single-coils were as sharp and transparent as glass shards and dirtied up beautifully, and when I plugged in a humbucker-equipped Suhr Modern, cranked the Gain all the way up and hit the first power chord, I was met with a thick, sweet crunch which instantly brought a smile to my face – f**k yeah!
One more thing to say in conclusion: as well as being a pretty damn loud amp, the Badger 30 is remarkably quiet – with very little hum or hiss even at a high volume. It’s truly a labour of love and it’s got plenty to give back.
RRP $2,999. www.guitarbrothers.com.au / www.suhrguitars.com
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