HoTone Nano Legacy Mojo Diamond
I bought this little amp for home use together with the palmer greenback cabinet.
First impressions;
I seems surprisingly sturdy built, and has a nice weight to it. Housing is all metal. Good rubber feets that attach very well to the surface you put it on. Pot-meters has a nice resistance and feels tight when you turn them. In the package there is labels you can put on the pots for easy locations of them, because the labels underneath is really small and hard to read. However you don’t need them. All you have to remember is that Gain is on the left, Volume on the right, tone is the ones left in the middle. It will look way better without the stickers. Ok, so then I plugged it in and fired it up. As I am mainly interested the clean sounds. I put the gain on nine o’clock and volume on full. All tone controls on twelve o’ clock. Together with my Ibanez jazz box it brings me really nice and jazzy cleans.. Volume adjusted to neighbour friendly volume with lowering the output of my pickups.. Just great!
Ok, so now the other way around; Gain on full and volume on nine o’clock. I am a fan of tube amps, mainly because it is so easy to find the sweet spot where you have really nice clean sounds when you pick the strings gently, and when you use a little more force it breaks up in a beautiful, mellow bluesy way. Well, this is not a tube amp. You have distortion, and you can to some extent control it with your attack on the strings… I’ts just not a tube amp in the way it breaks up. The amp has an FX-loop and a line out which I haven’t tried out yet. The «tube amp problem» could probably be fixed with a pedal in the tube screamer family, but I haven’t tried it out yet.
My preliminary conclusion; It is a great litte amp for home use. It will probably not keep up with a loud drummer without breaking up. I wish it had a built in reverb. It seem a little bit harsh to not give it five stars all over, but it is what it is. For me at this point in life, it is just perfect. The over all must be five stars considering the price point. … Oh, and I almost forget to mention that it adds no hum what so ever.
