H415

The Harmony H415:

Here's what Afficionado Dave Hunter had to relate on the Harmony H415:

"Although he passed away in 2006, a little bit of the electronic DNA of the legendary Ken Fischer of Trainwreck fame lives on in the two contemporary makers above, since he contributed circuit designs to both Komet and Dr. Z. Back in 2005, though, Ken recommended the humble Harmony 415 to me as a hidden gem.

'Particleboard cabinet,' Fischer commented, “but it does come with two Jensen C12Rs. It came from the factory with two Mullard EL84s, and just plugging straight in, it doesn’t sound like that much, but plug an overdrive into it and it’s a killer-sounding amp. And the Jensens they used were painted black, so people don’t recognize them as Jensens. And that’s an amp that’s selling for $75 or $100, maybe $150 [in the late ’90s and early ’00s].”

Any particular overdrive pedal? Fischer was fond of the Menatone Blue Collar for this application. “Put that into the Harmony and it sounds great. I had a Marshall 18-watt combo down here that I was working on for a friend, and we put a guitar straight into that Marshall, then into the Harmony through that Menatone pedal, and it just devastated the Marshall. So there you’ve got $300-worth of amp and pedal killing that $6,000 Marshall. We put the overdrive into the Marshall and it sounded fine, but it still didn’t sound as good as it did with the Harmony. So there you go.”