Session 15:30

Award Session are not the most well-known or sought-after guitar amp manufacturers in the world but they have a very loyal and ever-growing fan base. Their founder and owner Stewart Ward is somewhat famous for extolling the virtues of solid-state amps and believes most of the sonic benefits of valve amps are more likely to be attributed to constant current speaker drive and have little to do with the valves themselves and that this is something that can also be achieved with the more reliable and cheaper to build solid-state amps.

It’s therefor interesting that the first amp he produced was in fact a fully valve driven amp, the 15:30.

First built in 1971 there were around 400 made. Its name can be attributed to the interesting design feature of being able to switch between 15 and 30 watts - although in reality the amp has such a clean sound and is so loud there is very little sonic difference between the two settings unless you turn the volume to extremely high levels.

The 15:30 was first conceived from the growing need for small recording amps and could be described as one of the first ‘boutique’ amps.

Despite being largely unheard of this amp is one of my favourites in our collection, its clean sound and extremely well balanced tone, which can be partially attributed to the efficient Celestion G12-65 speaker has very full bass and responsive highs. Whenever one of the other amps in the collection are not working for the song in question I know I can always fall back on this amp and perhaps combined with some pedals achieve the sound I’m looking for.

Much like our Gibson Falcon the 15:30 has what they call a “slave” output at line level with the idea that you could take an output and feed it into a stack of power amps for that huge 80s guitar rig on stage but again, due to the clean tone of the amp this feature has little use in the studio.

Early adopters of this amp were Geoff Whitehorn and Martin Barre of Jethro Tull.