2013 EVH 5150 50w Head

Overview

I traded a guitar for this amp at my local Sam Ash many years ago, for a nice change of pace from my Marshall TSL. For a long time, those were the only two heads I had, and it covered a lot of ground. I’ve since sold this amp and moved on to the 100 watt version, but I remember both the Red and Blue channels being superb. The other features of this amp, such as the resonance control and headphone output were great too, something my older 100w lacks. The story goes that Eddie himself preferred the blue channel of these 50w models compared to the 100w, which was voiced a little brighter, and later EVH amps such as the “Stealth” series actually use the same blue channel as this 50w instead of the original blue channel from the same era 100w.

The biggest limitation to me was the shared gain and volume controls between the green and blue channels, which meant that it was difficult to keep a similar volume when footswitching between certain settings on those channels, forcing me to use the red channel instead for songs that have a clean rhythm but distorted chorus or solo. While I love the red channel, it is pretty over the top gain wise and has a voicing geared towards high gain metal, with tons of saturation on tap and fairly hollow mids, and it sounds a little off to me when trying to set the gain low and use it for crunch, which is where the blue channel excels. Later 50w EVH amps have dual concentric gain and volume pots, which allow the green and blue channels to have separate settings for those, but still share the same EQ controls.