Gadgetory

all right everybody today we're bringing you a rockin episode here on tech of tomorrow we're gonna show you guys a really cool amp from a company called Panama now these guys are based actually at the bottom of a volcano in Panama and all of the woods that they use are all very very unique very exotic woods they don't use just your standard run-of-the-mill stuff all of the amps are boutique hand-built dams that are made their Factory in Panama and today we're going to be checking out the fillet go hot rod 18 watt amp and this particular ramp is really made to be versatile now a lot of times a lot of guitar players including myself I look at an amp it's only 18 watts and I'm like oh man it's not really gonna have like the cojones that I want it to have you know I mean it's not gonna have that really low end you know brow that you really get with those higher end tubes well this particular amp has actually been completely redesigned so that even though you're only having 18 watts it still has that bottom end like a hundred watt amps it's pretty crazy now this particular amp features three different channels there's a clean child that offers you two different types of things in the clean channel you have a bright mode then you have a mode that's just game and then you also have a high gain mode now on the two different channels you can actually make a lot of different sounds now in the particular clean channel you can go all the way from pristine cleans to all the way to driving up to where you're getting like ac/dc type sounds and on the main drive channel the overdrive Channel that's really built to sound like the early Eddie Van Halen amps so if you're looking for that early you know Jose or the Cameron Brown sound this particular amp really kind of meets that mark and in fact as I've been playing around but I've noticed you can get a lot of different tones just from the amp alone with that any type of pedals whatsoever and the amp also does work really well with bells will forget into as we go further into the review now on the front of the amp you can see all the controls are really easily laid out every different channel has its own base its own trouble its own mid-range you share a couple of other features between the two channels you can change the way the drive is the way the game is literally a lot of different things that you can do now on the intro that you heard that was me on the dirty channeled the game Channel and I have it actually in its high game mode and I had the middle knob turned right to 12 o'clock I had the treble turned to about one o'clock and I have the bass pretty much all the way buried as far as it'll go because that's just how I like my particular sound especially on this particular amp so let's go in real quick now let's take a real close up of the amp what it's made of and those type of things and then we'll get in to the tones take a look at the front of the amp you guys can see it this thing just looks really nice it's not your run-of-the-mill thing at all the cab is very well made I really like the red and black and the spalted maple front just looks really nice and the Panama logo also fits just perfectly on there now if you're wondering hey man how big is this particular amp they lurk well it's 18 by 9 by 10 inches and it weighs 20 pounds but the cool thing about it is it actually comes with a five-year warranty now starting off the left-hand side you guys can see there's the input jack this is where you put your quarter inch plug for your guitar now another thing you're gonna notice is that most of the controls for this amp are the same on both the clean channel and on the gain Channel you get your gain your treble your middle then you also get your bass and then you get your volume now there's one thing about both of these channels that they share and underneath the little brightness switch this is the presence control if you guys know what the presence is it kind of adds a little bit of treble to your mix now the brightness button that's right above that that's for actually changing how bright the clean channel is now you're gonna notice that in between both of these sections you have a couple different buttons that change it from clean to drive and then on the drive channel you have high or low gain so on your clean channel you can run it all the way completely pristine clean or you can give it a little bit of Drive and crank that gain up and get that ac/dc type sound now if you're looking for like high gain stuff you're looking for like Van Halen all the you know early eighties bands that's all gonna be done over on the game Channel and you can change that like I said from a high gain or too low gain now this particular amp I don't think does like new metal and stuff like that but if you're do iron maiden ringing that type of stuff this app is definitely gonna be able to hold its weight now underneath the gain control knobs you're gonna notice there's a little button now this is for your selectable tone stack frequency on your gain channel it changes the range from vintage or to modern now taking a look at the back of the amp you guys can actually see the tubes clearly through the back of the amp now on both sides of the amps you see the two separate transformers to the far left you see the two el84 tubes then you see the three different preamp tubes there's a single EC 83 and two 12ax7 tubes to the far left of the amp is the power connected then we have the foot switch and then you're gonna see the speaker output now this particular amp does all the way from 4 ohms all the way up to 16 ohms so no matter what kind of cab you have this particular app is gonna work with it because 4 ohm 8 ohm and 16 ohms those are the standards now you also have a standard effects loop plus you have a pre in and pre out so if you like running your effects in an effects loop and also like running pries at the same time you can do this with this app making it very flexible so those are the basic specs of the amp and what the amp looks like now one thing i really want to point out about this particular amp is that you can actually change the tubes in this amp and i mean the power section to different tubes now it does require that you send it to technician so they can make an adjustment to the amp but if you want to make this amp an even more powerful amp you can change out those el84 tubes and actually increase the power of the amp and take it from you know what it is that 18 watts all the way up to a higher power amp so that's actually something pretty cool so now we're gonna go into the sound demos and what we're gonna show you today is strictly the amp itself i'll show you a couple of different things on dirty channel and a couple different things on doing clean stuff and you guys obviously know there's gonna be a lot of flexibility so for me to go over every single solitary different tone thing about this amp we'd be here all day long the main thing that you guys really want to know is the flexibility between the different sounds of the amp that's really what's most important and I know a lot of guys they just bring a video to you or they're just they they show them playing something and they show the drums and then they really don't talk about the amp and they consider that really a review I don't know if that's really a review maybe you want mic you want to call it a sound demo but everything that we're bringing you guys today I am not using any type of patches any type of filters anything unless I'm telling you so so we're gonna start off right now we're gonna bring you guys some stuff in the clean channel then we'll bring you guys some stuff in the dirty Channel with a couple of different things going on so you guys can hear how it sounds we're using an sm57 microphone we're going into my iMac and we're using Logic Pro and that is all there is in the channel so it's the amp to the cab to the mic into the DA into the recording with no BS and we're not adding anything to it no effects so what that said though let's jump in and let's check out those tones on the hot rod and here we listen to a little ditty played on the clean Channel let's check it out in this next particular set of sound demos I'm gonna be doing something a little bit different first of all I'm using my bugera power soak and if you guys don't know what that is it's a power attenuator it makes it so that you can turn your amps volume all the way to its maximum so you're getting the best tube soap that you can get but you can also play at a living room volume so right now we're gonna show you the game Channel we're gonna show you it in a couple of different ways we're going to show it to you with everything set at its 12 o'clock position and we're also going to be showing you guys this in both the modern and the vintage game so when the switches to the left it's the vintage when the switches to the right it's in the modern then I'm going to show you guys how I use the amp which is I prefer to have both the bass and the treble turn up to full blast and leaving the mids in the middle and then last but not least we're going to show you guys what it sounds like with that scoop mids ATS type sound I know some people wonder hey how does this particular ramp sound in a mix and I have to say that inside of a mix it sounds really nice although what you're going to be hearing now is with all of the effects and everything turned on and also I eacute it so it's a lot more trouble than you're hearing directly out of the amp alright so there you guys have it the Panama bow a go hot rod an 18 watt little boutique amp um actually right now I'm kind of blown away I saw that on this company called reverb I'll have a link down below they have one of these amps on sale right now for like 420 bucks normally easy things are like in the six and seven hundred dollar range but they actually have a couple that are four hundred and twenty dollars right now so we'll have a link down below now this amp is kind of unique in some ways because like I said it is completely built out of very very nice tone woods you guys can see on the front here it's just really really nice this is a mango type of wood who's the root of a mango and a building an app you know I mean it looks really nice the tones that you can get out of it are definitely a little bit different than your standard run-of-the-mill amp now what I say this is like the absolute best amp in its price range I couldn't say that I'd say this amp is probably a BM there are some amps that I've tried before that I really didn't like whatsoever some that I really thought were really great I think this amp sits right in between all of those other ramps for the price level especially if you can get this amp perform 20 bucks it's literally a steal if you're having to pay $6.99 $700 maybe not so much but check this out Panama is really cool too um reverb is a really good place to get the Panama amps because you can make these guys offers they even have some on eBay as well and if you guys make Panama a decent offer they're liable to just accept your offer and let you have the amp because they're really right now into getting the name out there and getting the amps in the hands of the musicians out there so they can play these amps and just know what they're all about overall I'd have to say that I give this amp an 8 out of 10 it's a really nice amp um me personally I kind of like that there's you know reverb inside of an app this app doesn't have any type of stuff like that but you know with the effects loop and everything else that you can do with it and the way the pedals sound inside of the amp I definitely think it's something solid you should check out so if you're looking for an amp that's very portable that's very original looking and something that really not a lot of people have this might be something that you want to check at him by the way throughout this entire video we've been using one of their scarlet cabs now this particular cab I have down here this cab has 2 D 3 speakers in it these are kind of like European 30 speakers but the really think ool about this particular cab is not only is it book matched and you know totally matches the amp head completely it also has a feature on it where you don't have to worry about playing super loud in your house that's right it's got a built-in attenuator inside of this particular speaker which makes it really interesting so that means you can crank up the volume on your amp use the attenuator and see how it sounds so we'll bring you guys a separate amp of just the cab itself so you can check that out today we really want to just focus on the head and let you guys see it but just to know what we were playing through hey it was one of their matching cabs now like usual with every video I will have links down below for all the different stuff so if you want to check out more information see more vids there's a lot of guys out there doing vids on these things right now I think you'll be pretty impressed with what you're seeing so if you want something original something that's not totally run-of-the-mill check out Panama amps I'm at work you guys been watching taken tomorrow we'll see you guys back in the channel cuz we got lots of more stuff coming here on the channel peace