Grumpyrocker

Since selling my HT5 and getting a Bugera V22 amp instead there's one thing I've really lacked - a good Marshall-like tone. I love that midrange bark you get from a hot Marshall (or clone) but with no money for a chunk of Northampton's finest, I was at a bit of a loss.

I like the drives on my Line6 M13, you can get a good Duel Rec high gain sound from a couple of them. But nothing in the more British line.

Then a couple of months ago I bought a Marshall Guv'nor 2. Cheap as chips and does a really good impression of Plexi to JCM800 tones. I used it at the hotter end - my V22 will already do a good Plexi impression on the lower gain end of the drive channel.

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In my review of the Peavey Vypyr 75 I pointed out that to get the full functionality of the amplifier you would need one of the two Sanpera pedals. The larger and more feature rich version - the Sanpera II - is the feature of this review.

The pedal board is housed in a sturdy metal chassis that feels like it could cope with some hard gigging. The two expression pedals also feel tough and all the foot switches are solid. It certainly seems a sturdier system than one might imagine at this pricepoint and the build belies the slight silliness of the design.

While the Vypyr allows you to store and recall 12 presets, adding the Sanpera II opens that up to 400 presets. The Sanpera also opens up the functionality of the looper and gies you pedal control over volume, pitch shift and wah.

The looper functionality is somewhat disappointing but Peavey has promised to address this in the next firmware update for the amp. The problem is that the loop always play back too loud, even almost muting it via the volume pedal while recording is not ideal. This isn't an actual problem with the Sanpera II though, and the pedal controls for recording/play and stop/reset work perfectly well.

So to do the other pedals which allow you to change the delay tap tempo, move memory banks up and down, and choose from one to four presets in each bank. Pushing forward on the volume pedal allows you to enter tuner mode. The other pedal is initially inactive but pressing down on it enables the wah, or pitch shifter if that's what you've selected via the amp effects section.

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