Peavey 6534+ Orange 4×12 Demo

Here is a quick demo of the Peavey 6534+ played through an Orange 4×12. Good morning world of music type people. As I state in the video the 6534 is basically the 6505 but it uses El34’s instead of 6L6’s in the power section. Does it make a difference? I think so!! In many cases I think the difference between EL34’s and 6L6’s is very slight sonically. And more importantly I think that unless you’re cranking your amp to the sun you’re even farther away from telling a difference. But really in my opinion it’s the pre stage that really makes the amp. But in this case switching the power tubes made the head that much better.

I felt that the 6534+ maybe had a bit more bottom available than the 6505+ but it wasn’t huge. I also liked the clean just a bit more. While people always tend to gripe on forums about how crappy the 6505+ clean is, I personally didn’t mind it. And played it in a band that had a lot of clean parts. Again, the differences were very slight. That being said, I am a bit biased as I ran a 6505+ for a long time and is still to this day my favorite daily driver. And one that I regret selling every day!!

Why did I like it you may ask?? Well, a lot of heads that I also like require a lot of tweaking to get a sound that works for my ears. Take your average Mesa head. Everyone loves the recto sound but for me I always felt it was a bit too sloppy, squishy, fizzy sounding. Now the way to rectify that (no pun intended) is to toss an old trusty TS-9 in front of it and that sucks it all up in a nice tight package. Again, that’s just me personally. But I never ran anything tone effecting in front of the 6505+. I had Clean, Crunch and Dirty and it didn’t matter if I was playing metal or just hard rock that head just fit. And fit where in my mind a head should fit IN THE MID-RANGE!! And that’s really what guitar sound is about, sitting in the middle that’s what it’s designed to do.

Also, I think this is fairly low noise for a high gain head. Granted if you crank the gain to 10 it comes apart like any other head. But I probably ran mine between 6 and 7 and didn’t run a gate live. I really just didn’t need it. So in a nutshell, would I recommend this head?? 100%!! Sure you can get more features out of other heads, but really I think this a workhorse that everyone can play on. If you’re the classic rock cover band all the way to the death metal bands, this head will work and I don’t think you will be disappointed either way. But, what is a good head without a killer cab.

This video was shot through an Orange 4×12, which by the way, simply put the bad mamma jamma on the block. And it should be I think it weighs just as much as I do! Well, maybe 1/3 of me. I think they tip the scale at about 110lbs. Which is massive to lug around from gig to gig. But you know that really using the Orange cab you’re pretty much done with that part of your rig. I can honestly say I’ve never heard anyone say, “Man my Orange is ok but I sure wish I had a ….” That just doesn’t happen. As a matter of fact after playing on a couple of Orange cabs I can say that jumping to them would be a simple decision. Unless of course you’re not interested in a cab that sounds killer, is built like a tank and just looks dead sexy.

Below are some Guitar Center links for the 6534+ and Orange cabs. At least go test drive one!!

Peavey 6534+ Guitar Center HERE
Orange Cabs Guitar Center HERE