Rob Chapman’s gear empire is expanding with the Chapman Guitars founder announcing that he is launching a tube amp, the Cloudhammer.
A 40-watt all-tube head, finished in tweed and for the moment bearing the Chapman Guitars name, the Cloudhammer was hand-made in Belgium by Benjamin Genot of AmS Amplifiers, whom Chapman befriended the old-fashioned way – after too many drinks after a gear expo. That, as we all know, is often when the best ideas happen.
“Ben said to me, ‘Rob, I wanna make you an amplifier!’ And I was like, ‘Okay, let me come and see your amps.’ This was on shot three, we’re a little bit tipsy, shit’s going down,” explains Chapman. “So the next day at the show I went down to check out his amps and they completely blew me away, I mean, superb. Ben is amazing, really, really cool – full of passion and energy, and the amplifiers were second to none.”
Taking to his YouTube channel, Chapman introduced the Cloudhammer, demoed it, and gave us the story behind it. As it turns out, he has wanted to do a guitar amp for years, and having given Genot a list of his dream specs, the Cloudhammer turned up at his door.
What we see in the YouTube demo is close to what the finished amp will look like. Some details might change – the name on the front for a start. This prototype was put together with whatever was available to Genot, and so it bears the Chapman Guitars logo.
You can be pretty sure the tweed aesthetic, which calls to mind golden era Fender amps, is here to stay. Chapman loves it. “I’ve fallen in love with the tweed,” he says. “I think it looks really cool.”
Under the hood there four EL34s doing the legwork in the power amp, with a pair of 12AT7s and a pair of 12AX7s in the preamp. There are two channels, with a user-configurable boost circuit that not only lets the player dial in how much of a boost they want, but also how much compression and brightness is in it.
The electric guitar tones are inspired by the sounds Chapman has chased in the studio. On one channel you’ve got super-high headroom cleans. On the other, you’ve got “heavy, chewy, saturated gain structure”… Chug, for want of a better word. It’ll squeal too.
Chapman might spend much of his time on the latter channel but he has put a lot of time into this clean.
“I am not the biggest utiliser of the clean tone but it is incredibly useful, for me, more as a pedal platform,” he says. “So I wanted the clean side to have a really, really warm, clean, super-high headroom, buttery clean.”
If vintage Fender inspired the Cloudhammer’s looks, it sounds like the voicing of the amp is more Marshall-inspired. The key word is versatility.
“It’s an M-type kind of vibe but it can be very clean or it can get incredibly dirty, so it’s flexible, and it’s beautiful,” says Chapman. “I don’t like brittle cleans, and this is not that clean channel.”
The Cloudhammer is not going to be cheap. Chapman says it will be around £3,000 but it is hand-wired and you get you what you pay for.
“It has been such a long time coming. I’ve wanted to make a Chapman amp for years and years and years,” he says.
There’s no product page for this on the web site but you can sign up and register your interest at Chapman Guitars.
