VERELLEN
MEAT SMOKE
BY JORDAN WAGNER
With the amp industry focusing a lot more attention on small-wattage
tube amps these days, it’s rarer to see a new
high-wattage tube amps on the scene. The
benefits of small-wattage tube amps in the
studio are many—from ease of recording to their portability. But they aren’t
capable of producing the extreme amounts
of headroom and heft that you get with a
really powerful amp. Seattle’s Ben Verellen
recognizes this, and his amps have been a
huge hit with the high-power, underground
crowd of rockers, from Andrew Seward
of Against Me! and Mike Sullivan and
Brian Cook from Russian Circles to Dave
Knudson and Cory Murchy of Minus the
Bear and Bryan Richie of The Sword.
Verellen was inspired by the under-
ground rock and metal scene of the early
’90s, when players with less-than-stellar gear
put a lot of creativity into Frankensteined,
six-stack rigs. The resulting sounds were
something that really hadn’t been achieved
before—brash and extremely loud. And
in the spirit of all things heavy and loud,
Verellen’s 300-watt behemoth—dubbed the
Meat Smoke—is a monster offering to the
rock gods, with a vintage tinge in its voic-
ing, an extremely clean power-section, and
a design that enables use with both guitar
and bass.
All That Is Heavy
The design behind the Meat Smoke could
be considered rather unconventional in
today’s market. In the ’70s amps were built
around the notion that a massive amount
of volume was needed to fill vast auditoriums and overcome inferior PAs. Famously
powerful amps like the Ampeg SVT and
Marshall Major were the end result of these
needs. Yet many guitarists have found that
the considerable amount of headroom available with these amps produces its own array
of tones that just aren’t possible with lower-wattage amps—and the Meat Smoke is a
prime example of an amp that can kick out
exemplary clear tone at very high volume.
The Meat Smoke’s innards are completely tube driven, beginning with a trio
of 12AX7 preamp tubes. The signal is
then fed into the power section—fueled
by a sextet of 6550 power tubes—that
generates a whopping 300 watts. A power
transformer, filament supply transformer,
choke, and an absolutely massive output
transformer are expertly coupled to the
amp’s 14 gauge, cold-rolled-steel chassis.
Apart from the considerable amount of
weight they add to the amp’s already hefty
poundage, they’re physically huge—
seriously, the output transformer is almost
as big as my head, which suggests that
the transformer has a wider-frequency
response bigger, tighter low end, and
a snappy top-end attack. Verellen also
designed the output transformer that way
Normal and Overdrive channels with separate
Volume and Gain controls for each
Bass- and Treble-
shift switches
Shared 3-band EQ
