Hotone Nano Legacy Heart Attack 5-watt guitar amplifier head

General

For many metal guitarists, a Mesa Rectifier is surely the pinnacle when it comes to guitar amps. These amps have played an important role in modern hard rock and heavy metal. Because the sound remained tightly defined even with heavy distortion, it became possible to play with much more gain than previously thought possible. The Hotone Nano Legacy Heart Attack has been carefully voiced to approach the sound of a Dual Rectifier as closely as possible. Or as Hotone itself puts it 'Extreme High gain in an extremely compact configuration'.

Controls and connections

Hotone has kept the controls simple and effective with a gain and volume control and a three-band tone control. This simple suffices to get all the hard rock/metal sounds you want. For example, you can use the tone control to obtain the 'scooped mids' sound known from bands like Metallica. On the back you will find the speaker connection (4-16 Ohm), an 'aux' input for an external sound carrier and a headphone jack that can also serve as a line out for recordings. Despite its small size, the Hotone Heart Attack is very capable of driving larger speakers. If you like it compact, we can recommend the Hotone speaker cabinet designed especially for the Nano Legacy amps.

Hotone Nano Legacy amplifiers

Where other manufacturers increasingly use modelling technology for their (practice) amps, Hotone takes a surprisingly new approach. The Nano Legacy transistor amps are designed in such a way that each model closely approximates the sound of one legendary amp. The amps are carefully voiced after their great (tube) example. The result is extremely successful as both the cleans and drive sounds are very convincing. Hotone itself describes the Nano Legacy amps as 'tiny amps with a massive sound' and no word of it is a lie. The amps are indeed tiny and the sound, especially when you consider the low power of 5 watts, is very impressive.

• The last picture is of the another Hotone amp top from the same series and is meant to give you an impression of the small size of the Hotone Nano Legacy amps. The pedal in the picture is a standard-sized BOSS DS-1 (which is obviously not included).