Review: Laney GH100L

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review an amp which I have played for years, since it was in the rehearsals room we were going to weekly with my band: the Laney GH100L!

I must admit that I didn't love this amp (or its smaller version, the GH50L, which was in the room as well), and it's partly because I didn't really understand it.

Laney is a legendary British brand, one of those that really created the British guitar sound (along with Marshall and Orange), and the GH100L was their answer to the Marshall JCM 800.

The amp is a very heavy (21kg) 100w tube beast, with EL34 tubes and which belongs (together with the other classic British amps) to the old school, a school in which the power amp roar is even more important than the preamp one, and it belongs to a time in which the preamp did not have a huge amount of gain, but it was the interaction between the preamp and the power amp that was creating that typical rock n'roll sound of the '80s, with that creamy sustain given from the tube saturation, and with the best tone achieved at unbearable volumes.

The amp, tone wise, had a lot of high end definition, not different from a Marhall, but it had also a rattling, clanging type of response to the picking, which was quite distictive.

The gain was quite old school, meaning that the distortion was a bit less defined than a Marshall, but not as fuzzy in the low end as in an Orange, and it tended to become noisy at high levels, making it an amp difficult to tame for high gain styles.

What I would have done now is to lower the preamp gain, to use a noise gate and an overdrive to boost it, and I'm sure I would have loved the powerful, roaring EL34 power amp...

...But back then I was trying to play metal just plugging the guitar cable, and the amp wasn't just enough to play it decently.

The amp is now discontinued and it has been replaced by the GH100R, which is a similar version but that features many more functions (MIDI control, Digital Reverb, push-pull mids, cabinet simulator etc), and I'm sure that if I would have the chance to play it today, I would obtain a totally different tone, and I would build a better memory of it.

Thumbs sideways!

Specs:

- Channels: 1: with footswitchable Gain

- Class: A/B

- FX Loop(s): Yes (Switchable Insert / Side Chain) with return level

- Inputs: Hi & Lo Jacks

- Link Jack (Line Level Slave): Yes

- Master Presence Control: Yes

- Output Valves: Premium EL34

- Power: 100 Watts

- Preamp Valves: Premium ECC83

- Speaker connections: Connections for 1 x 16 ohm, 2 x 16 ohm, 1 x 8 Ohm, 2 x 8 ohm

- Switchable Resonance: Yes

- Switchable valve bias (5881 EL34): Yes

- Weight: 21 Kg

- Unit Dims - for int. case (HxWxD mm): 240 x 678 x 253

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