“I called Supro and said, 'Hey I’m really digging this amp. Is there any way we can just give it a little more horsepower?'” Blues rock ace Tyler Bryant supercharges Supro’s flagship Black Magick combo for his new signature amp
Featuring more power, headroom, and a greater bass response, the Black Magick has been given some major upgrades to suit the guitarist’s needs
Modern rock guitar guru Tyler Bryant has sprinkled a little sonic spice into a trusted Supro stalwart for his brand-new signature guitar amp.
The Black Magick Reverb TB is based on the firm’s flagship 1x12 combo amp of the same name, but packs more horsepower, greater headroom, and a boomier bass response.
Bryant has been testing the source material’s mettle across recent tours, and while he was suitably impressed by what it could do, he saw scope for some tailored tweaks.
The Black Magick TB isn’t messing around, with two military-grade Sovtek 5881 power tubes warming its core alongside four 12AX7 and 12AT7 power tubes. Its power section has also been upgraded to from 25 to 35 watts.
The two-channel tube amp also features a “bright cap” modification on channel one for “extra sparkle” when blended with the original Black Magick preamp on channel two.
These channels are summed in parallel and fed into a two-band EQ (Treble and Bass), which is followed by tube-driven spring reverb and tremolo effects. There is a solitary Verb dial for the former and Speed and Depth controls for the latter.
Each channel has an independent Volume control, and a Master Volume has also been added for taming or unleashing its overall output.
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Dressed in elegant Black Scandia tolex, the amp also comes equipped with a Celestion-built Supro BD12 speaker. Further still, it can be linked up to 1x 16-ohm, 2x 8-ohm, 2x 4-ohm cabs and is compatible with Supro's TRS double footswitch, sold separately.
“This all started with the Black Magick Reverb,” Bryant says of the combo’s origins. “I started taking it out on the road, and then I started to rely on it a little bit more night after night. I loved it in about every situation.
“But I did find myself occasionally [wanting] a little bit more. So I called Supro and said, 'Hey I’m really digging this amp, is there any way we can just give it a little more horsepower?'”
Supro duly obliged, and Bryant is overjoyed with the resulting overhaul they’ve since given the amp. But that hasn’t come at the expense of the amp’s subtleties.
“I'm honored to have this amp,” he says during its demo, which ends with him cranking all its dials to the max. “Even on 10, you can turn your [guitar’s] volume down and it's still tasteful.”
The Supro Black Magick TB is available now and costs $1,699.
Head to Supro for the full shakedown.
The news comes after the release of Supro's “little monster” Montauk combo, described as “a Swiss army knife for the studio and the stage”.
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A freelance writer with a penchant for music that gets weird, Phil is a regular contributor to Prog, Guitar World, and Total Guitar magazines and is especially keen on shining a light on unknown artists. Outside of the journalism realm, you can find him writing angular riffs in progressive metal band, Prognosis, in which he slings an 8-string Strandberg Boden Original, churning that low string through a variety of tunings. He's also a published author and is currently penning his debut novel which chucks fantasy, mythology and humanity into a great big melting pot.
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