Award-winning Nashville amp maker and guitarist Todd Sharp has streamlined his JOAT 20RT by removing the original amp’s complex reverb circuit, and compacting it all into a grab ’n’ go 1x12 combo that lands at a somewhat more accessible price.
Award-winning Nashville amp maker and guitarist Todd Sharp has streamlined his JOAT 20RT by removing the original amp’s complex reverb circuit, and compacting it all into a grab ’n’ go 1x12 combo that lands at a somewhat more accessible price. Sharp is just getting the model into production post-Summer NAMM, and sent us a prototype for testing, albeit one that’s true to the final design ethos. The combo retains the sonic core of the flagship design, however, and the full-bore build quality—exemplified in meticulously hand-wired construction, using top-flight components—to the end of delivering the same juicy, rich tone and sublime touch sensitivity that players like Keith Urban, Vince Gill, and John Oates have praised in Sharp’s work. As with the previous JOAT models (which include a 20-, 30-, and 45-watter) the front end of this amp is based around a little-seen 6AU6 pentode preamp tube (and an NOS GE example at that), pumped into a circuit that eschews conventional tone controls for a series of multi-position switches that reconfigure voicing capacitors and the like. A Bite switch determines high-mid edge, Attitude adjusts the 6AU6’s gain and body, and Low Cut and High Cut do just as they say. Inputs 1 and 2 are tailored toward single-coils and humbuckers respectively, although you can certainly mix by type to achieve other desired sonic ends. The bias-modulating tremolo circuit has Speed and Depth knobs, and, as a bonus on this combo edition, there’s an HR switch (for “headroom”) that limits the driver-tube current to about half power to enable faster breakup from the