Want a clean amp pedal platform? Need a truly great clean sound for any genre of music? And you want it in an easy grab and go package? Soldano has you covered!
I dropped by Soldano Custom Amplification last Friday and got to see and hear their brand new amplifier! It’s a completely clean, straight forward design particularly for those looking for a pedal platform, or just a truly great clean tube tone. It’s called the Little Luck.
The Little Luck is a 50 watt head based on the Lucky 13, but is a single channel clean sound only design. If you’re familiar with the Lucky 13 clean channel, the Little Luck is similar with a very rich black face Fender Bassman based tone.
The concept for the Little Luck began when Mike Soldano got a request from Prince for a completely clean pedal platform that was just as well made and reliable as his other Soldano amps. Prince was wanting a change from his usual high gain Soldano heads and wanted to do everything via foot pedals. Soldano built two such heads based around the Lucky 13 clean tone and put them in a couple of 100 watt Avenger chassis. These are the amps Prince used the last few years of his life and can be seen in his last SNL performance from a couple years ago.
Soldano ended up building a half dozen of these heads for Prince and then got a request from a session player in Nashville who had heard about the amps. Soldano sent him a prototype and soon came more requests and finally a decision to put the one-offs into production.
I got to hear Mike Soldano play through it at both high and low volume levels and it sounds fantastic!
Simply put the huge 3D cleans were gorgeous, lots of harmonic content and swirl to the notes, really vintage sounding. Ideal for blues, classic rock, country, and of course anything else you wanted to play through it. Deep bass, warm mids, and soft yet sparkling highs. It almost sounded like there was a hint of reverb coming through the speakers but it was just the way the amp sounds–pure.
The Little Luck is a mini head around the size of the Hot Rod 25 and features a simple straightforward layout: preamp volume, bass, middle, treble, and master volume. Two 12ax7 preamp tubes and two 5881/6L6 power tubes. Seems to weigh around 20 pounds or less.
Soldano said the amps will be available through dealers and Soldano’s website http://www.soldanodirect.com very soon! They already have at least a couple dozen circuit boards complete and awaiting installation and the Little Luck, handmade in Seattle, WA, should be for sale for under $1500.
Nevis 