Mojave Scorpion Amplifier
Mojave AmpWorks is a company down in the high desert of southern California. Victor Mason is the brainchild behind these wonderful amps, most know Victor from the famous Plexi Palace a showroom place for all vintage English Amps.
The Scorpion is his take on a 50 watt Marshall JMP. He uses 100 watt trannies in this model to give it more headroom than a common 50 watt head. The amp has the regular layout of bass, mid, & treble and uses hi mid for presence. It also has a bass volume and a treble volume for mixing tone as well as volume, kind a like the normal & bright channels on a vintage Marshall amp. There is no master volume control but they have a built in dampener that acts like a wattage control that brings the volume down but keeps all that sweet tone intact.
For Those About to Rock…
I ran this into a Fane 1‐12 and now use a 2‐12 open horn cab. Running the dampener about 3/4 way has delivered very good results. The cleans on this amp can go from a bottle ping plexi all the way to a modern JCM 900 just by blending the volumes. The crunch is a thing of glory, full of vintage vibe and never that hissy pre amp buzz, but more of a power tube crunch. The inputs also have a big difference in the crunch factor. The low is for AC/DC type crunch and the high input can give you very aggressive high gain crunch and leads.
The Lead tones are some of the best I have ever had at my fingertips. I do run an OD pedal for my lead tones just to put them out in front of the bands mix. The lead voice is very fluid and has that old Marshall grind with all those Van Halen harmonics flying all over the place. This lead voice is also very quiet and has a studio quality to the tone. Every model guitar retains a voice that really shines, a Tele, Strat, Les Paul, all sound just like they should.
This amp is also breathtaking when looking at the build, my god its gonna last a lifetime for sure. This is the 2nd Mojave I have had the pleasure to play on, the first was the Plexi 45 model and I loved that amp as well, but this Scorpion model has much more aggressive tones to be had. This could be the end all amp for me and believe me I had so many throughout the years.
Mojave Scorpion Amp Rating
I rate this amp at a solid 9.5. It just really doesn’t get any better for that classic English rock tone.
Check them out at http://mojaveampworks.com/