Hartley-Thompson amps: Difference between revisions

ALAN: My main amp is a Hartley Thompson used in tandem with a pair of Lab L5 amps with built in limiter, my only concession to effects. The L5’s I use on heavy gigs with delay, splendid for fat chords.

Actually, since then I’ve gotten different equipment, because I had to sell the guitar and amps I used on the album in order to pay for it. I used two Hartley Thompson amplifiers and two Lab series L-5 amps. With the Hartley Thompsons I used two cabinets, each with two Goodman GP-12 speakers. They’re the best speakers, but they’re hard to get in America.

I’ve been using a couple of Fender Twin Reverbs for the chords as well. I also have two new Fender Princeton IIs and a Super Champ. I’m really knocked out by them. They’re amazing. In fact all the new Fender amps seem to be really good. And because I sold most of my equipment back in England, except for the Hartley Thompson amps, I had to kind of piece everything back together. Grover got two Marshall 4x12 cabinets, which worked fine for the solos, but the speakers couldn’t handle the chords. The Hartley Thompsons would just kind of blow them up. So I had to stop using the Hartley Thompson clean channel, and I started using the Fenders for the chords. Since then, Jeff Berlin has showed me his stuff, which is Yamaha. I was very impressed with it, and have since obtained one of their 200-watt power amps. It works fantastically. It has two channels, and I run the DI outputs of the Fenders into it. It’s hyper-clean. I’ve arranged to get more Hartley Thompson equipment, and change the speakers. Everything w ill get simpler once I’m able to select the speakers I want that will do both jobs. Then the Hartley Thompson will actually do everything, and the amps wont have to accommodate the types of speakers. It’s fine, because I love to experiment, and I’ve found a lot of different ways to do things.

I think when I get the two Hartley Thompsons and the speakers sorted out, I’ll be as close to satisfied as anybody could be. They’re the best amplifiers in the world.

‘I was endorsing two products but I’ve stopped doing it because I was getting terrible ear bendings from both companies and it seemed like I was losing my freedom and I couldn’t use what I wanted. Being a man of contradictions, Allan does actually endorse A/DA stereo delay units. These form part of his stage rack, coupled with another pair of delay lines to get a longer delay, namely a Lexicon PCM41 and a Dynacord DDL 12. A Yamaha E1010 analogue delay completes his set of five delay lines which Allan needs to use with his set up. For solos he has a pair of Hartley Thompson 100 watt amps (shortly to be replaced by a pair of the 200 watt variety), and for chords a pair of Yamaha PI2200s, which are 200 watts a side, plus a pair of Yamaha PGI pre amps.

‘The Hartley Thompson is a solid state amp and in my opinion it’s the best guitar amplifier in the world, they’re insane! To me it sounds better than any tube amp I’ve ever heard. It’s infinitely better than a Boogie, it does things a Boogie can’t even come close to, they’re so . . .000 QUIET! I put them through four Yamaha 4x12 cabinets, two of them have the original speakers, and two of them contain Celestion Gl2s. With a Boogie set up I had to run the amp so hard that the output tubes couldn’t cope with the clean signal, and there was no way I could get the clean chords that loud. ‘The Hartley Thompson has two entirely separate channels that give a sustain on the red channel that leaves every other amp I’ve tried, in the dust. On the green channel you can play chords twice as loud and twice as clean as the red channel with individual EQ and separate reverbs. They’re light years ahead of anybody else, I don’t think anybody else even comes close.