PRODUCT REVIEW
Black Dog 50
BY CHRIS BURGESS
Don’t judge an amp by its cover: that’s
apparently the lesson I have to keep
relearning. There’s been plenty of anticipation about Richard Goodsell’s promise to
branch out into new territory (for him at
least) with his new Black Dog 50, and the
high-gain crowd has certainly been wondering when Goodsell was going to produce
something just right for them—but I’ve had
so much on my plate lately, I had to put it in
the back of my mind to look into later.
As a result, when the amp came out of
the shipping box I made a number of
assumptions about how it would sound
based solely on the way it looked. The
Marshall-style big box head cabinet said
only one thing to me—classic hard rock—
so with only a few minutes to test it out
that day, we hooked it up to an Egnater
4x12 closed-back cabinet loaded with
Vintage 30s, and plugged in a Richmond
Dorchester with Lace Alumitone humbuckers. We dialed it in for “heavy” and immediately got the tone we were looking for:
a meaty midrange grind with an assertive
low-end thump. We also immediately
