HEART’S DESIRE
With the enforced closure of so many venues only now coming to an end, you’d think that the pandemic would have been pretty bleak for amp companies. But today James Laney, head of the iconic Birmingham amp brand that powered Tony Iommi’s Sabbath sound, is pondering a more welcome problem: how to win over new players to the classic sound of valve amplifiers.
“In the last year or so there’s been more playing at home than ever before,” James says. “And we’ve seen this phenomenon where there actually seems to be more guitar players because of the pandemic rather than less. But quite a number of those are brand-new [not returning] guitar players.”
New players want very different things from amps than previous generations of guitarists, James explains, partly because they are starting their playing careers in front rooms and bedroom studios rather than pubs and clubs. The traditional rite-of-passage of playing your first proper valve amp turned up loud in the Dog & Duck doesn’t happen as often as it did – and certainly not during a pandemic – meaning that new players can be unaware of the magic of a cranked valve amp and turn to inexpensive digital modelling devices instead. For all the convenience
