VICTORY AMPS

With notable users including Guthrie Govan, Richie Kotzen, Chris Buck and Bill and Brent from Mastodon, VICTORY has gone from strength to strength since launching just over a decade ago

- Amit Sharma

WHETHER YOU PREFER the sound of vintage blues, indie crunch, harder rock or progressive metal, you’ll probably have seen a Victory amp on stage at one point or another. Given the bar of quality that stretches across their impressively wide range of products — from stacks and combos to pedal amps and solid-state stomp boxes — it’s no surprise their designs have been popular with all kinds of players, as demonstrated by their growing list of high-profile endorsees.

For Chief Designer Martin Kidd, who had already built a solid reputation as one of the finest amp builders in England through his work at Cornford, it’s been a case of listening to what artists want and ensuring that their needs are met at every stage. By his own admission, the brand’s inaugural releases — hand-wired V100, V50 and V10 heads — didn’t make a big splash on the market, but by the time they started working with Guthrie Govan on designing the V30, interest began to soar.

Below, he explains how the company went from relative newcomers to one of today’s most popular amp brands, producing equipment to suit music of just about every kind.

When did you get serious about amp building?

I mainly taught myself. There was a local repairman who talked to me [as though] I could understand when I really didn’t, but the few things I did understand from school physics inspired me greatly. Another friend experimented with the post-phase splitter master volume mod from The Tube Amp Book [by Aspen Pittman]. I decided to try that on my 1969 Marshall. They weren’t worth a lot of money in those days. It worked; I didn’t burn anything down… I’m still here.

How did Victory start to take off?