Carr’s new Bel-Ray combo packs the essence of classic British amp tone together with a tremolo that’s out of this world.
BY DAVE HUNTER
NEW & COOL
THE CLASSIC BRITISH sounds of the ’60s and early ’70s have never fallen out of fashion, and it’s hard to imagine they ever will. The real trick for many guitarists in the 2020s, though, is achieving the sound of a cranked and raging Marshall “Plexi,” Hiwatt stack or Vox AC30 in a format that jibes with today’s often restrictive playing situations.
It all comes together beautifully in the new Bel-Ray, a three-in-one tribute to the best of British tone from Carr Amplifiers. Proprietor Steve Carr is known for his uncanny ability to compact classic sounds into extremely portable packages, and the Bel-Ray is the latest of his seemingly magic presto-changos.
Onto the foundation of a 16-watt output stage driven by two EL84s with an EZ81 rectifier tube, the Bel-Ray grafts a three-mode front end that replicates these familiar voices from the late ’60s and early ’70s. The trio might seem to go against another line in the Carr ethos — uncompromising originality — yet the maker has gotten there in the past by following classic inspirations, and the Bel-Ray does so in a way that is still undeniably its own. Rather than simply cloning the circuits of the tonal targets, with switching to flip between them, Carr comes at it from a unique perspective, adapting gain and EQ stages using two 12AX7s and one EF86 pentode preamp tube to mimic the tones he’s after.
“I needed a challenge,” Carr tells GP, “and I had unfinished business with a wonderfully notorious preamp tube, the EF86. The EF86 pentode is a tube with a ton of character, more immediate than the omnipresent 12AX7, with wild energetic excitement, plus huge gain. In early 2023, I was considering a new model with loose Vox inspirations. The EF86 was used in the lower wattage early mid–’60s Vox amps — the AC4, AC10 and AC15, most notably — so it was back on my mind. The Bel-Ray grew from there.”
In the Bel-Ray, the EF86 is used, rather unusually, as the final gain stage before the “concertina” phase inverter, following the 12AX7 in the first position and another used for the cathode-follower tone stack. And while this tube is often notoriously microphonic, as Carr mentions, he hasn’t found it problematic in this position, a situat
