With Black Sabbath about to play their last ever show at Villa Park this weekend, Laney Amplification has unveiled a super limited edition replica of Tony Iommi’s signature tube amp head to mark the occasion.
The Black Country Customs TI100 is handmade in the UK, and is an exacting replica of Iommi’s 2012 signature head, complete with the grille plate with crosses backlit in red. Each amp comes with a signed and numbered backplate, plus a certificate of authenticity, limited edition guitar picks and commemorative postcards – and everything you need to nail his electric guitar tone.
A dual-channel amplifier, the TI100 is made for metal guitar, with its Lead channel voiced for down tunings, and does not want for high-gain saturation. But it does a lot more.
The Rhythm channel handles all your cleans, right through to blues guitar crunch. And with an onboard boost section, one per channel, it gives you a footswitchable hotter voice for each channel.
The engineers at Laney’s Black Country Customs workshop configured the boost so that it works just as would in the pedal. When activated, adjust the bright red Boost dials accordingly and they will hit the front end of the guitar amp with some extra decibels.
As Laney's product manager, Simon Fraser Clark explains, when he was co-designing the original TI100 with Iommi, he wanted something different.
“Tony is very much one of these people who hasn’t rested on his laurels,” says Clark. “In 2012, Tony came to us to start talking about his new signature amp, the TI100, and that was used on the 2013 tour, for the album 13, and it was a departure in his sound from pervious tours – he wanted something that was a bit more heavier, had a bit more compression to it, a bit more gain. So that led to the TI100.”
Each channel has its own three-band EQ and controls for Enhance and Presence. The latter is something most players will be familiar with; it allows you to adjust the high-end response of the output section, a little post EQ spritz and polish – it can sometimes give your electric guitar tone the extra sparkle it needs to make harmonics and feedback pop out.
Enhance does something similar for the low end frequencies. Again, it sits in the output stage, and shapes the response. Fully counterclockwise, that response is tight, the kind of tone you might use for contemporary metal styles, full-bore chug and all that animalistic business.
Turn the dial clockwise and it opens up a bit, letting those chords bloom – fine-tuning for doom. It is nice to see independent Enhance and Presence controls for each channel; it is more common to find them as global controls serving both.
Under the hood there is a quartet of 6L6 power tubes, with 8 2AX7 preamp tubes. Altogether you get 100-watts to play with. Laney are only making 50 of these. They come with a protective covering, and all the case candy and extras mentioned above.
But this is an amp that was designed to play. It’s built for the road. Those integrated grab handles are a super practical feature when lugging a 21.5kg amplifier up a flight of stairs.
Other nods to pragmatism include an “ultra transparent” effects loop that can accommodate your pedalboard – and/or rack equipment. The loop has an FX Return Gain dial so you can compensate for any change in gain when effects are applied, and you can bypass the loop altogether.
The TI100 ships with an FS4-TI footswitch for changing channels and turning each channel’s boost on and off. Again, this is replete with signature details, with Iommi’s signature and cross logo on the enclosure.
Around the back of the amp there are all the 1/4” speaker outputs you’d need – 4 Ohms, 8 Ohms, 2x 8 Ohms, 16 Ohms, 2 x 16 Ohms… It’s a serious piece of kit, and they’re only making 50 of ‘em. And Sabbath have only one show left, Back To The Beginning, Villa Park, Saturday July 5.
As Laney says, it was Laney in the beginning for Iommi, the LA100BL pressed into service as he inaugurated heavy metal with Black Sabbath’s eponymous anthem, and it has been Laney all the way since.
Priced £2999, the Black Country Customs Tony Iommi TI100 is available now. See Laney Amplification for more details.
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