2009 Egnater Renegade

Overview

Very early in my guitar playing days, this amp, alongside the Rebel, came out with lots of fanfare and sounded very appealing to me as a hair metal fan. I played one once in a store, but didn’t see them much after that, so I ended up grabbing one about a decade later. I loved the idea of the tube mix knob, which allows the player to blend the mix between two different power tube types. This is a true mix of the tube tones, as opposed to a control like Blackstar’s ISF which has a similar goal, but is just an EQ shift feature. It is pretty cool to hear the differences between two sets of power tubes in real time without changing any other factors, although there are some drawbacks, such as a noticeable volume bump in the middle of the control where all 4 tubes are contributing to the sound. I found I mostly used the knobs at either extreme, 6L6 on channel 1 and EL34 on channel 2.

This amp has some other nice features, such as a digital reverb, switchable master volumes, 65/18w power switches, and some voicing options (bright/norm and tight/deep). The channels are not identical, with channel 2 offering substantially more gain overall.

Channel 1 is a very nice clean sound, but I really only liked it with the gain near max to add some extra compression. Channel 2 on the other hand was not quite as I remembered, with a very smooth voicing and not quite enough gain without a boost to get properly saturated for heavier musical styles. The gain is there, but even in the tight/bright mode, I felt it wasn’t clear enough sounding and got too muddy especially with higher output pickups.

While I think some of the concepts behind this amp were great, it didn’t quite deliver the type of tone I was looking for and I ended up selling it off.