Heart of a Worshipper International Expounded Upon

The Tech 21 Trademark 60 is available all over the place online, so I purchased it brand new from www.americanmusicalsupply.com at one point, and kept the amp for several years. I used it many, many times at various gigs, concerts, recording sessions, and practices. Needless to say, I became very familiar with the amp, and can easily give a qualified review here.

The Trademark 60 was shipped in a Tech21 NYC box that was made specifically for the amp. It was well protected and arrived in perfect condition. I noticed that this amp was very easy to pull out of that box. It only weighs 36 Lbs. Man that is light! even so, just because the amp is light doesn't mean that it isn't made well. The construction quality here is actually very good. The tolex is installed well. The amp has nice chrome corner protectors and rubber feet on the bottom.

A particularly impressive part of the construction of this model, is the whole actual housing of the amplifier and control section. It looks to be a brushed stainless steel, and from my experience is very tough and solid. Built like a tank! The footswitch housing is also made of metal, as are the footswitches. This amp is made to be used, and gig worthiness is not even an issue. I gently put it in many a trunk and back seat taking it to gigs. We also used it weekly in church services.   I carried it all over the place, and never ever had any issues with it's construction. Tech 21 has an amp here that is very tough. It's made tight and clean, and is absolutely one of the best made 112 combos on the market at around $500.00. Tube or Solid State. 

Features

Tech 21 has thought this out, and blessed the Trademark 60 with features that most users will appreciate, and use regularly. First of all, they include a well crafted 3-button footswitch free with the amp. To me that is absolutely necessary. I hate it when amp manufacturers make you pay extra just to get a basic footswitch for the amp (such as Carvin and Peavey.) The footswitch controls channel switching, boost/reverb, and effects on and off. On our model, each switch also had an led light which I find very useful. Especially on dark stages.

Explaining the way this amp works is a bit difficult. For some reason, Tech21 have chosen to label things in a cool but hard to grasp at a glance matter. It definitely strays from the norm. For example, channel one has controls for Drive, Punch, Level, and a button for Bite. O.K., Drive and Level I get easy enough, but what the heck is "Punch and Bite?" Channel 2 has controls for Drive, Level, Growl, and a button for Weep. "Growl" and "Weep?" Is there another name for this amp that refers to an animal of some kind? Well, it all looks a bit weird, but there is a sort of simple explanation. First of all, let me tell you that all these controls are active, and a little change in the control goes a long way.

Explanation 1:     On the clean channel, Punch is basically an active midrange control. That's different huh? Well actually it is, because that one control completely changes the sound as you go through it's sweep. And all the sounds you come up with are useable in some way. It's not like a normal mid control on an amp. As I said, sort of difficult to explain. The Bite button sort of acts like a presence and a brightness button combined into one, and really tightens up the bottom end and brightens things up at the same time. Nice. But still labeled weird!

Explanation 2:       On the dirty channel, Growl is your active midrange control. It also completely changes the sound as you go through it's sweep. The Weep button is something I always found very useful. This is a button that when engaged, really increases the dynamics/harmonics and makes the sound fuller. Engaging this button makes the amp act a lot like a tube amp in response and feel. It seems to sustain more and just becomes warmer all around.

The other controls on the amp are in the Master section. There are controls for Boost, Reverb, Low, High, and a button called Link, which connects the Boost and Reverb together. It's nice to have individual level controls for each channel, but something I always missed when using this amp, was a Master Volume control. I probably would've traded the Drive control on the clean channel, for a Master section Volume control. Again, these controls are very sensitive. A little movement changes the sound quite a bit. The Boost button can bump the volume on either channel up by about 9db, and it doesn't seem to mess with the tone of the amp at all. That is nice for solo breaks, where you want a bit of a volume boost, but not a tone change. 

This isn't a modeling amp, so there are no savable presets of any kind. Tech 21 does include a useful laminated top mount card for the amp, which as you can see in the picture, provides some good reference points for getting certain types of sounds. The settings on the card are a good place to start if you are trying to get any of those kinds of sounds. After I got used to the amp, I put the card away in a safe place, so that I could give it to the inevitable next owner at some point.

On the back jack panel, Tech 21 gives the user the expected inputs and outputs such as a Footswitch Jack, External Speaker jack, Effects Loop, and even a Headphone jack for practice (Nice Bonus!) The Headphone jack can also serve as a 1/4" Line Out jack, but this amp gives you something waaaay better than that! The Trademark 60 has a Sansamp XLR Direct Output on the back panel. I found this output to be extremely useful, and I can't stress that enough. There were so many times that I was able to just walk in with the Trademark 60, and plug into the house sound system via the amp's XLR output. Doing it that way, ensured that I would be heard, even at big events, and that there would be no feedback issues.  The Sansamp output is worth the price of admission for this amp in my opinion, but I'll explain more about that later on in the sound part of the review. It even has a ground loop.

So the Tech 21 Trademark 60 is equipped with a very capable feature set. The idea for the weird tone control and button names has met with some criticism, but hey, you can never say this amp isn't different. I owned the amp for quite a while, and never could get used to those control names. "Weep" and "Bite" seem to make sense, so I would've just left it at that, and called the other things "Active Mid" controls.

To be blunt, this amp could have weird names, and it still would not interfere with it's desirability. It's feature set, with the Sansamp direct out included, makes up for any inconvenience in control names.

Sound/Tone

Let me tell you something. I have compared this amp side-by-side with quite a few amps. Marshall, Peavey, Traynor, Carvin, Fender, Behringer. So I have a lot of experience playing it, and then listening to another brand in the same room, at the same time. I have compared it to tube amps, and solid state amps. I've even compared it to 2x12 versions of much more expensive amps. So the question you're probably thinking is "Does it sound better than the others?" Read on.

This amp is plenty loud for small to medium sized gigs, but after that, I would definitely use the XLR out into the house sound. Heck, I use the XLR even at small gigs that had sound systems just for the uniform sound. I compared it to several 100 watt amps, and it just wasn't in the same volume ballpark. But, for a 60 watt 1x12 analog combo, it's quite loud.

This amp gets better tone than anything else I've played through that is not tube, and it honestly sounds better than some tube amps. With the Weep button engaged, it even sounds very, very close to a tube amp, if not exactly like one. I can't tell you the times that I played this amp out, and people thought it was a tube amp. I got so many compliments on the tone coming from the Trademark 60, that I just got used to people complimenting me on how great the amp sounded, and sort of took that for granted. It has a big sound for a 1x12 combo. The clean channel can get a very Fender like clean, which can be a little dirty if you want it to with the Drive control. The dirty channel can get lots of warm sustained crunch. There are all kinds of tones here from just a bit of gain, to a Metallica like distortion.

I don't think anyone would consider this a great amp for Metal though. It just doesn't get that mean in my opinion, and the open back makes for too open of a sound to be used for Metal. This amp has great Blues and Rock tones in it. You would swear you are playing through some sort of well made tube amp on some of the settings. It sounded particularly good with Stratocasters with the pickup selector in the second position. The Trademark 60 is warmer than your typical modeling amp in both channels, and the distortion is absolutely not that too crisp/sharp clipping type distortion you find in Line 6 Spider amps and others of that ilk. Many of the people that really love those amps, do so because the amps are so great at doing a very hard Metal distorted type of sound.

So the live thing with the Sansamp output is great, but it's even better for recording, which is really where the Sansamp output shines. Going direct into the recording console, this amp can transfer it's tone right to "tape." I compared it's recorded tone to several other amps, and most of the time I went back to the Tech21 for the final recording. This amp lays done some great recorded sounds out the XLR out, because the original Sansamp, was specifically designed to be a great sounding device used for recording electric guitar. It's awesome to have it built right into the amp like this. Most every amp out there has a pretty unconvincing direct out if they have one at all. Some of them are supposedly voiced like the cabinet, or have speaker emulation or whatever, but the Tech21 is the real deal. Your recorded sound actually sounds like the amp. Enough said. No? Check out the sample recording files (lots of 'em) at www.tech21nyc.com, and you'll get the idea of what this amp sounds like recorded. Don't judge by listening through cheap laptop speakers though; at least hook up a decent computer speaker system or better yet headphones to get some decent sound.

This all sounds rosy, but my experience with the Trademark 60 was not perfect. The fly in the ointment for me, was in the effects loop. Because of the noisy effects loop, when recording, I ended up having to add time based effects through the mixer. It worked out fine, but it was just an added step that really shouldn't have been necessary. No matter what I used, be it rack effects or pedal, I could not get the effects loop to be dead quiet like it is on other amps I've tried (like Traynors.) It was noisy enough for me that I considered it a non-option. I know others have complained about the same thing, but then there are some owners who like the effects loop. Maybe mine just had some issues and needed repair, but it was always a little too noisy right out of the box. The amp was just O.K. with pedals attached in front. They seemed to change the whole wonderful character of the amp also, so I usually just ended up using the amp at events with nothing added. Of course these are the times when I got the compliments on the great tone. Interesting. The amp sounds best with nothing but a guitar attached. That way, it's not noisy at all.

I called Tech 21 and asked if the amp had a problem, and they told me that it was just the nature of the Trademark 60, and the effects loop was only designed to be used with high end rack effects. Well I tried those, and it still was too noisy, so who knows. I think I may have been just a little too picky, because after explaining my issues, the guy at Tech 21 didn't think there was anything wrong with the amp. In the end, that issue caused me to sell the amp and move on, because I really wanted to be able to use my new floor effects and still be happy with the tone. I was so impressed with the Trademark 60 though, that I am planning on trying it's big brother the 120 watt 2x12 version, or waiting 'til Tech 21 comes out with the next model that replaces the 120. Maybe the effects loop issue won't be an issue for me anymore. We'll see.