Four valves in the front end, 180-watt power section, reverb and tremolo. Only 1.7kg / 3.75lbs – a guitar amp revolution!

V4 The Duchess partners a V4 Series all-valve preamp with a solid-state, 180-watt Class D power amp. Its ultra-compact size and negligible weight disguise the huge tones it can produce. It's great for home and studio players looking for an elegant solution on a small cab or desktop, or for touring musicians who need a great-sounding, dependable pedal platform amp.

Volume & Master

Balance the front end preamp gain with the overall volume output. It will overdrive in the preamp slightly should you want that, but the main goal is higher-headroom tones and power.

Three-Band EQ

Powerful bass, middle and treble controls to shape your tone. These also have an effect on the gain character and drive levels – just like in any valve guitar amp.

Reverb

Lush sounding digital reverb gives you ambience aplenty. Run it low for a subtle feeling of space, or max it out for washy, splashy hugeness!

Tremolo

From slow and pulsing to fast and staccato, we’re suckers one of the oldest effects in the book. Turn it on/off on the chassis, or remotely.

Series Effects Loop

Sits between the preamp and power amp. Run your time-based effects here for maximum clarity.

Balanced Line Out

Send a direct feed to a separate speaker simulator, front of house or wherever you like. Can be used with or without a speaker connected.

9V DC Power Output

Want to power some extra pedals and stick this on your board? We've included a 9V DC centre-negative output that will put out a maximum of 500mA. This is more than enough for the vast majority of drives, fuzzes and analogue delays and so on.

Speaker choice is critical with V4 The Duchess Guitar Amp

V4 The Duchess can put out a staggering 180 watts at 4-ohms (through the Victory V112 Neo cabinet, for example). However, 4-ohm speaker cabs aren’t exactly common, and nor are single speakers that can take 180 watts, so please proceed with caution with a 4-ohm load.

However…

The nature of Class D, solid-state power sections such as this means that the amp’s output is dependant on the speaker load. If you use a more common 8-ohm cab, output power drops to approximately 90 watts. 16-ohms gives you a still-very-healthy 45 watts.

The principle reason we went with the 180-watt output is because lower-powered solid-state devices can run out of volume and headroom very quickly once you get to 8- and 16-ohm loads.

No such problem here: there’s plenty of power no matter what cab you use.

Amplifiers and Cabinets