Maintenance (continued)
Weak or dull tones from your amp may indicate that the tubes are old or tired and need
replacement. The tubes in your amp are like tires on your car. They do wear out. If you notice
change in tone and tactile response from the amp, it’s most likely that the power tubes needs to
be replaced. As advised earlier in this manual, replacement should only be done in complete
matched sets. Preamp tubes will last much longer than power tubes, but these should also be
checked occasionally. Preamp tubes tend to go micro-phonic and also produce undesired results
when old or not working properly.
Preamp Section
The Hot Cat 30R features a unique preamp section that offers a wide-range of clean and
overdrive tones favored by discriminating guitarists. This is a dual-channel amp that offers more
tone shaping options than many other two or multi-channel amps. Please feel free to experiment
with Bad Cat’s unique tone shaping circuits via the 5-way rotary tone knob of the clean channel,
the separate Treble and Bass EQ controls, the Edge control of the overdrive channel and the
master Brilliance control. Coupled with your guitar’s volume and tone controls and the unique
attack and touch of your own playing style, the Hot Cat 30R should be able to provide you with a
wide variety of sounds to meet the requirements of various performance situations.
The Hot Cat can operate in three modes: clean channel, overdrive/distortion channel and a
combination of both via the included footswitch. The volume and EQ setting of each channel can
be set independently, allowing you to dial in the clean and overdrive sounds exactly to your
liking. Combining both channels gives you a unique full sound, adding fundamental note clarity
to distorted sounds or singing sustain to your clean sound depending on how you set the controls
when mixing the two channels.
FRONT PANEL
Input Jacks
Input jack 1 is the normal input when using the supplied footswitch. Input jack 2 is to be used
when you are not using the footswitch and you want to access the overdrive channel. These dual
inputs also work like the inputs of the original Hot Cat (15, 30 or 100) if you do not use the
footswitch. With a standard A/B/Y switch, you can choose either input or both, but with the Hot
Cat 30R’s included footswitch, it’s most likely that you will not need to use the old method used
to select either input on the original Hot Cat amps.
Volume
The first knob on the left when you face the amp’s front panel is the volume control for the clean
channel. This is the input stage where the preamp tubes first “see” the guitar signal and goes
through the first phase of amplification. Although designed as the clean channel, you can crank
up the volume pot and your picking attack to get varying degrees of clean and overdrive sounds.
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