Acorn Amps has taken the brain and guts of a retro Peavey practice amp put them into preamp/amp pedal that might just square the circle for us mere mortals who have spent years trying to recreate Josh Homme’s elusive electric guitar tone.
The Solid State is a “full circuit recreation” of a Peavey Decade. Of course, the Decade we all know and love is a 10-watt practice amp with an eight-inch speaker – a compact combo that now fetches over 500 bucks online after being revealed to be Homme’s secret weapon with Queens Of The Stone Age. The Solid State, however, houses all this tone mojo in a standard 1590BB enclosure.
The Solid State has a pair of output jacks, allowing you to use it as a preamp pedal, saucing your guitar amp’s sound and using the unit as a de facto overdrive or distortion pedal.
Alternatively, you can power a speaker, for the Solid State has all of the original Decade’s TDA series class-AB power amp circuitry. Indeed, you can run the Solid State through your pedalboard signal path and drive a speaker simultaneously.
The pedal’s controls are arranged just like the Decade’s. There are Pre and Post Gain controls, plus three-band equalisation courtesy of Low, Mid and High dials.
The Solid State has a pair of footswitches. One to turn the pedal on and off, the other to toggle between Normal and Saturation modes, with the LED glowing red when in the latter mode, green when Normal.
There’s also a mute switch, and a toggle so you can choose whether to send your signal out before the power amp circuit or after.
The Solid State is true bypass and is powered by an 18V DC power supply. It’s priced $299 and available now. See Acorn Amps for more details.
