Budda Superdrive 30 Series II review
By Rob Sandall
| Posted in Guitar
The Budda Superdrive 30 Series II is an amp head that has already found favour with numerous celebrity endorsees, and continues to impress professional and amateur players alike. The hand-wired head can count artists including Foo Fighters, Buckcherry and Stone Sour among its fans, so it’s fair to say that those of you with a hard-rocking disposition are in for a treat.
The 15 year old manufacturer has fast become a much-revered name among guitarists of all genres, although it first made significant headway within the blues rock fraternity. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength, and while British exposure to its amplifiers is certainly significantly less than in the States, there’s already a strong crowd of believers in Blighty.
With this professional-level head, Budda has specifically aimed for a couple of classic tones to share out between the two switchable channels. On the one hand, the rhythm channel aims for a chimey Vox sound, with a deep sonorous ring-out for your guitar’s harmonics to take full advantage of.
For the high-gain channel, however, inspiration has been drawn from the Marshall Plexi – expect a ballsy tone that can scorch through the mix with bags of searing trebles. The circuit has been specifically wired to add extra bite to the higher-gain tones, so you get a lot more bark for your bite too.
The Superdrive 30 Series II is the bigger brother of the Superdrive 18, naturally, and therefore has four – rather than two – EL84 tubes providing the tonal ammunition. You also have a custom transformer, which means the output can be tethered to either 4-, 8- or the full 16-ohms depending on what you’re pushing the sound out through.
There are two push-pull pots on the control panel, one adding a bright tone to your rhythm, the other allowing a more modern application of mids on the high-gain channel. Bass, middle and treble controls allow you to affect the nuance of each channel, and separate volumes for each make for boosting possibilities when you’re switching mid-song. An effects loop is also included so that you won’t tarnish your tone by cluttering your guitar signal.
It’s clear that Budda has busted a gut to produce an amplifier that will withstand the needs and rigours of touring, while offering enough tonal versatility to allow any guitarist with harder aspirations to find the blues, rock and metal sound they want. The EL84s provide a beefy American tone that pushes out an incredible amount of volume, and even at low levels the harmonics are full and rich. There’ll be little disappointment to be found from the Budda’s Superdrive 30 Series II.
Tags: Budda amplifiers, Budda Superdrive 30, Superdrive 30 amp head