That neck is very dark and boomy and there is none of the chime that you would expect at the bridge or the in-between settings. Well, of course that never quite happened did it? And nearly 20 years later Peavey have attempted to model a 360 and the result is…pretty poor. I remember hearing the 360 emulation on a Roland VG-8 back in 1995 and being stunned by it – surely this £2,000 black box is the futures of guitars I thought. Easily the most effective guitar modeling I’ve heard on the Revalver 4. The amp you use is vital here, clean and there is just too much digital coldness and the tone becomes flappy with too much distortion but with a mildly overdriven tone, you really have something very exciting here. Chord work has that real Angus grit to it and there is even a decent solo tone there. How does the ACT SG model compare? The neck pickup emulation was a little boomy (all the models would benefit from a tightening of the neck tone frankly) but had a lovely smoothness through an emulated Marshall (there was a rather harsher, digital tone through a clean Fender emulation) but it is the bridge pickup modeling that is a revelation here, there is (at least through the Marshall model) something of the snarl and snap of a proper, full-fat SG. Its been a Gibson SG year this year, I’ve had enormous fun with the soon to be deleted SGJ. So lets give them a go, at £4.99 each, are they going to be a bargain way of accessing some of the greatest guitars of all time? I used a Tele and a Les Paul with these tests to compare how the software handled both humbuckers and single coils – the signal then went through a variety of Revalver 4 amps with no other effects or processing. There are three new guitars to play with and they are all as iconic as they come, Gibson SG, Ricky 360 and – gulp! – the Gretsch White Falcon. But now Peavey have added new ACT models to the package, have they improved the quality? Overall, you could get reasonable sounds that could sit back in a mix but the quality was not quite there for solo work. I found that electric models fared much better than acoustic models and that the ACT technology was happier working with single coils than humbucker. In theory, this analysed the signal from your guitar and would then add the modeled tones of a range of electric guitars. One of the most interesting developments were the introduction of guitar emulation through Peavey’s ACT tech (Audio Cloning Technology). There is a lot of exciting technology in Revalver 4 and a lot of it works extremely well, but there was also huge inconsistencies the quality of the models – I wrote about it all in some depth here. Peavey’s Revalver 4 has now been about for a while now – It’s been ecstatically reviewed by Guitarist and Iguitar, my view was rather more equivocal.

Peavey revalver 4 review