QC BC30 SAMPSON

This Quad Cortex capture pack seeks to recreate the sound of, in our opinion, one of the greatest-sounding amps ever to exist; the Bad Cat Black Cat 30R handbuilt by Mark Sampson himself. After he departed from Matchless, Mark took his talents to Bad Cat and continued his legacy of building some of the world’s finest amplifiers; and his Black Cat 30R is no exception. This amp features the circuitry made famous by the Matchless DC30 with its two-channel design featuring a 12ax7 preamp and an EF86 preamp. The 12ax7 channel boasts classic British tones reminiscent of the early Vox years while the EF86 channel demonstrates its prowess with a more precussive and fatter response. To avoid being an exact copy of the Matchless DC30, Bad Cat paired these amps with their speaker which is a modded Celestion. The magic of Mark Sampson though really comes to life when you push his amplifiers. Mark was famous for modding and overloading his output transformers to allow his amps to have an incredible sweep of gain while maintaining the integrity of their definition and clarity. You can experience all of that magic in this capture pack! This pack demonstrates the wonderful cleans these types of amplifiers are known for, along with inspiring edge-of-breakup tones and also some downright gnarly goodness! If you have been following us for a little while now, you probably know that we don’t usually buy into the hype. However, in this case, the hype is worth it. This is one of our favorite amps we have ever had the privilege of capturing.

This Quad Cortex capture pack is 20 of our best captures of this amp.