Park P18H Park 18 (1974/Tremolo)

The P18H is the head version of Park's 18 watt circuit, hand-wired from the sixties British design Jim Marshall built when portable valve combos were the thing to beat and revised by Mitch Colby into something considerably angrier than the original. Two individually voiced channels, each with its own Volume and Tone, can be used on their own, jumped with a patch cable to blend the two voicings, or cascaded internally from a front-panel switch when you want gain rather than volume. Channel two carries a footswitchable valve tremolo with Speed and Intensity controls.

A pair of EL84s puts out 18 watts, and the power-scaling switch drops that to 9 watts or 1 watt without hollowing out the dynamics - which is the whole point of an amp this size in a studio or a small room. Two speaker outputs switch between 8 and 16 ohms, so it drives a 1x12 or a 4x12 without an adapter, and the output transformer is a UK-built clone of the Radio Spares part the vintage amps were wound around. It is small enough and light enough to carry in one hand.