Victory VX The Kraken
A cute-looking amp housing monstrous tones
The company might be relatively new on the scene, but Victory amps has been making serious waves. While its amps have previously been aimed at rock players and shredders such as Guthrie Govan, the latest addition to the range is aimed at not just at the metal player… but the extended-range metal player. The Kraken awakes…
So, what makes Victory confident enough to delve into the metal market? Well, it hasn’t entered unaccompanied, for when designing the amp they wisely drafted in fine purveyor of extended-range tones, Rabea Massaad (who himself had been experimenting with a multitude of different amp setups for his baritone guitars), to help tweak the amps voicings. Rabea is guitarist with Rob Chapman-fronted rockers Dorje (see p46) who, prior to the birth of The Kraken, had a setup consisting of a Marshall JCM900 and a Peavey 5150, and it’s those two iconic amps that provided the inspiration for the two-channel Victory we find before us, with gain one (or channel one) representing modded Marshall territory, and channel two metal-friendly American style high-gain.
Plugged into channel one on a moderate gain setting, we’re surprised to find that there isn’t a huge amount of gain at our disposal. Instead, classic rock tones reminiscent of Zeppelin and even Soundgarden flow into the 6L6 power stage and out of the compact but powerful 2x12 vertical cab. But as great as that sounds, we’re keen to, ahem, release the Kraken with our eight-string Strandberg Boden.
The Kraken’s ferocity is very much housed in channel two, and what a brutal beast it’s been hiding! If you’re a fan of Meshuggah, Periphery and the like then you will almost certainly be familiar with the super-tight monstrous riffing of their eight-string wielding guitarists, and running our own eight-string through the Victory, it proves impossible not to conjure up similarly heavy and dextrous polyrhythmic riffs. The tones are incredibly well-focused, even on the low F#, and positively punch through the cab without ever losing power and clarity. Likewise, solo work is sharp and aggressive on channel 2 especially, with mountains of gain on tap. Even with the gain dimed, the amp, while noisier, retains an astonishing clarity and simply refuses to sound over-saturated.
Alongside Fractal’s all-digital Axe-Fx, there are a number of long-established American-made metal amps that dominate the stages of our metal-playing heroes, and it will take quite some amp to knock them off their perch. Coming in at less than half the price of its competitors, The Kraken could well be that amp. Controlled ferocity in a tiny package, it very much lives up to its name and given the opportunity, could very well devour the opposition! Darran Charles
The tones are incredibly well-focused, even on the low F#