Hiwatt

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Hiwatt amplifier with Fender Precision Bass from 1958

Hiwatt is a British brand of guitar amplifiers made by the Hylight Electronis company.

history

Hylight was founded in 1966 by Sound City engineer Dave Reeves. The amplifiers were (and are now again) manufactured according to military quality standards and are extremely robust.

Dave Reeves died in 1981 and the naming rights were sold in 1984. Today's Hiwatt company has nothing in common with the originals. Two parties share the naming rights: Musicground (England) , which also produces the current Hiwatt reissues, and Fernandes Guitars (Japan) .

Products

Hylight produced tops, combos and boxes under the Hiwatt brand . The best-known models are: DR103 (100 W version), DR504 (50 W version). There was also a 200-watt and 400-watt version that were primarily suitable for bass. The Hiwatt amplifiers could be used both as an electric bass and / or guitar amplifier ("AP": All Purpose). It was also not uncommon for them to be used to reinforce keyboards . The Hiwatt boxes were only available in straight versions and were equipped with speakers from the English manufacturer Fane Acoustics. They are also built robustly and therefore very heavy. The combo versions are now particularly rare.

So that a Hiwatt amplifier produces distortion, you have to use floor pedals or something similar. In the 1960s and 1970s, fuzz pedals (e.g. Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face or VOX Tonebender Fuzz) were often used for this. Examples of the “Hiwatt sound” can be found on the following recordings: The Who - Live At Leeds / Pink Floyd - Live in Pompeii.

Current Hiwatt users (“Reissue” models) include David Gilmour ( Pink Floyd ), Arctic Monkeys , The Hives , Joe Walsh , Coldplay , The Kooks , Neal Schon and Wir sind Helden .

Web links

Commons : Hiwatt  - collection of images, videos and audio files