The Marshall GV-2 Guv’nor Plus Effects Pedal is a sweet distortion/overdrive pedal. The Guv’nor has control knobs for gain, deep, bass, mid, treble, and volume. The cool thing about this pedal is the volume is a very effective clean boost that can easily boost your preamp into sweet overdrive.

With the tone controls you can easily cut or boost any of the four frequency ranges much like a small EQ pedal. With a turn of a knob or two I can get any type of overdrive or distorion I want. I can boost the mids, or scoop them out for a very heavy tone. I was also thinking about the Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal but since this can give me really good blues tones with the overdrive and also take me into raging distortion I decided on this pedal instead.

This pedal sounds great on all of my low wattage tube amps and sounds incredilbe when paired up with the Marshall Reflector Reverb pedal driving two amps. I’ve been playing this into two small class A tube amps and the tone is incredible.

Since none of my low wattage tube amps have built in reverb I decided to check out a reverb pedal. I purchased a Marshall Reflector Stereo Reverb pedal after reading a lot of reviews on reverb pedals. From the moment I opened the box I was impressed with the quality of the pedal. Its housed in a really nice metal case and built like a tank. Once I plugged it in I was amazed of the sound qaulity of the reverb.

Since the unit is stereo I plugged the main channel into my Fender Vibro Champ and the secondary reverb channel into my Kalamazoo Model Two. Both amps are about 5-6 watts of class A tube sweetness and they sound great when played together. I plugged my butterscotch blonde tele into my Marshall Guv’nor pedal set as a clean boost and from there to the reverb pedal.

I set the two amps about 5" apart. Without any pedals on I adjusted the volume levels on the amps so they were as close to equal as possible. With these amps the tone circuits are very simple, they don’t boost anything, they only take away so I turn them on 10 so they don’t remove any tone from the amp. I control all my tone from pickup selection (neck/bridge) and from the tone controls on the Marshall Guv’nor pedal. It has 4 bands of pretty decent EQ, enough for my needs and its far better than the tone controls on the amps.

The Reflector Reverb pedal has 4 different reverbs you can choose from. Hall, Plate, and two Spring settings. You can also control the duration of the reverb, the depth and the level. Hearing this reverb in stereo through these two amps was simply amazing. I don’t use a lot of effects, I like just a hint of reverb to add some sparkle to my tone.

After trying all the different reverb settings I like the plate reverb the best. I have the level set rather low and it sounds great, it really adds body to my tone coming through the two amps in stereo. The over all sound is fuller and richer with an incredibly sparkly tone.

For many of us we are looking for the perfect tone at low enough volumes to play at home. For a real sweet blues tone of course you want a tube amp. The problem is most tube amps don’t have any kind of headphone output. This makes practicing at home a challenge since even small tube amps can get quite loud through a good speaker.

So far I have three low wattage tube amps in my collection. A Fender Vibro Champ, a Kalamazoo model two and a SIlvertone. All three are about 5-6 watts each and hand wired class A tube amps. The Fender is a Silverface Vibro Champ with sweet singing clean tones and plenty of headroom. I recently upgraded the speaker in the Vibro Champ with a nice new Weber AlNiCo speaker and it sounds incredible.

The Kalamazoo sounds a lot like an old Tweed Champ, it goes into overdrive much faster than then Vibro Champ. It’s a good dirty blues amp with a lot more natural overdrive than the Vibro Champ. The Vibro Champ gets a nice edge to the tone, but even at full volume with my most powerful pickups it doesn’t overdrive any where near as much as the Kalamazoo.

I also have an old Silvertone tube amp that it about 5-6 watts. This one is much like the Kalamazoo with the easy tube overdrive. I pulled it out of an old organ and I am modifying it for guitar. Right now there isn’t any tone circuit, just a volume control and I love it. I bought a cabinet with a 15" speaker I was going to use for the Silvertone but after more research I think I’m going to restore the amp thats currently in the cabinet and put the SIlvertone in another cabinet. I really wanted a 12" speaker for the SIlvertone anyhow but I got a good deal on a Polytone Mini SB-115 so I couldn’t pass it up.

From the research I’ve done on the Polytone it seems that they are rare and very well loved by jazz players for guitar and lots of bass players love them because they are small and light, yet powerful. Once its restored I’ll finally have a bass amp and I can use the speaker as an extention for one of my tube amps if I want.

Of course for any amp you want good speakers for the best tone. With blues you have quite a few choices for speakers, people use everything from 8"-15" speakers and get incredible tone. I’ve played through them all and they each have thier place. I remember playing through an old fender tube amp with a single 15" speaker and it was blues heaven. The tone was thick and bluesy and sounded great with a good neck pickup.