This is the Brit-style 18 watter I always wanted. I gave it the Brit-style, TopFuel preamp from many of my other amps. I kept the cool part of the 18 watter design, the power section. Two EL84 tubes, "Class A-style" cathode biased and fed by a EZ81 tube rectifier. All this hooked to some Brit-style, American-made transformers from Classic Tone. I make all my turretboards in house and this one's a beauty.

On the topside there's two inputs, controls for gain, volume, highs, mids, lows, and dark. These all work pretty much like you think they should. The Speedster doesn't get real gainy right away, there's some clean headroom in the gain control for some super sweet clean tones.

The "dark" control rolls off highs in the power section. Now you can turn up the dark!

The more/less switch adds gain and lows in the preamp. Here/there switches between an American/Fendery tonestack or a British/Marshally sound, a bit hotter and more mids.


The backside has an IEC power cord jack, 3 amp and 1/2 amp fuses, two speaker jacks, and a knob to select 4, 8, or 16 ohm output. The amp also features a 12" Jensen Tornado speaker, making it sound killer and light too! Honestly, this has been my favorite gigging amp this summer!

I always liked the way Marshall-style combos looked, but we couldn't leave this amp "stock-looking". That just wouldn't be our style;-) For this one we went with a nice 2-tone. Navy Blue tolex with Ivory tolex front panel and cane grillecloth. Very tasteful! The Ace Pepper Custom Amplifiers nameplate on the front is laser-etched aluminum, as is the control panel. The cabinet is finger jointed Birch plywood with treaded inserts and machine screws holding the back panels in place. This is a tough, pro quality gigging amp!