Laney GH100L EL34

Some amps don’t bother with a long list of features. They just plug in, turn up and roar. The Laney GH100L is one of those. It’s a 100-watt all-tube head, a single-channel master-volume design with a footswitchable gain boost, built in the British tradition for rock and metal. Its sound is often described as a lightly modded JCM800, with the same tight, aggressive midrange and the same love of being pushed hard. This capture was made with the stock amp loaded with EL34 output tubes, which supply the classic British bark, grind and punch. It’s a fairly simple amp with a lot of range. The preamp runs on four ECC83 (12AX7) tubes, and the power section has four EL34s in Class A/B. Turn the gain down and you get bell-like clean tones with real sparkle. Push it into crunch and it starts to growl like a classic stack. Hit the footswitch and you’re into full-on monster lead territory. **Controls** Gain (G): Sets the preamp gain. Bass (B), Middle (M), Treble (M): A three-band tone stack for shaping the amp’s voice. Master (V): Sets the overall volume of the power section. Turning it up drives the EL34s harder. Presence (P): Adds or removes sparkle at the top end. Resonance (R, switchable: 0=OFF, 1=ON): Adds more depth and punch to the low end. Drive (D, switchable+pot, OFF when not in the file name, otherwise the value of the knob is denoted after the D): Switching it in enables an extra “Drive” tube stage in the preamp and the knob sets how hard that extra stage works. The Hi / Lo in the file names indicates which of the inputs was used and the files here are divided in two groups based on the input while each group is sorted based primarily on the gain (G) value and secondarily on the drive (D) value with alternating resonance (R) states. Personally, I found settings with the gain at zero and drive switched on quite interesting. The amp was captured through a Suhr Reactive Load on the 8 Ohm output. I recommend watching Choptones' video on YouTube which tends to be one of the more professional sounding ones and also compares EL34 tubes against 6L6 (see below).