Interview by Dan, Fret Success Guitar Show
If you know British guitar tone, you know Hiwatt. Pete Townshend, David Gilmour, Jimmy Page. The brand has been synonymous with that punchy, high-headroom clean sound for the better part of six decades. But for a while, Hiwatt drifted. After founder Dave Reeves passed away in 1981, the brand changed hands multiple times and lost some of the prestige that had made it legendary. It was even, at one point, owned by a company with a pretty poor reputation in the guitar community.
Then, around 2016, two Canadians changed that. Darren Atkinson and Alexander Back took over Hiwatt and relaunched it in 2018 with a clear mission: bring back the original craftsmanship that made these amps famous in the first place. Since then the brand has expanded significantly, adding handwired UK custom shop amps, a more accessible production range built in Asia, and taking on two more iconic British names in Park Amplifiers and WEM.
At NAMM 2026, I got to sit down with Tom Hannon, Hiwatt’s Custom Shop Engineer, to go through the full story. Watch the full interview here: https://youtu.be/Zku60VDS1TA
And yes, Rudy Sarzo walked in halfway through. We kept it in.
The Secret Sauce
Tom wears a lot of hats at Hiwatt. Custom shop builds, speaker R&D, pedal design. But the thing he kept coming back to throughout our conversation was the original 1966 circuit and what made it special.
When Dave Reeves designed the first Hiwatt amplifiers, he was obsessed with build quality in a way that set him apart from everyone else at the time. Military grade wiring, huge transformers, ultra clean circuitry. While other brands were chasing crunch and breakup, Reeves was building amps that could be cranked incredibly loud without breaking up at all. That was completely counter to what everyone else was doing. And it turned out to be exactly what players like Pete Townshend needed to cut through on stage in the days before everything was miked up.
The Hiwatt custom shop range today is still built to essentially the same 1966 specification, using UK-sourced parts as much as possible. Tom described it as trying to capture the exact same secret sauce that Reeves stumbled upon all those years ago. That means the same circuit topology, the same approach to transformers, the same sonic character that turned up on some of the most iconic records in rock history.
For a pedal player in particular, Hiwatt’s reputation as a platform is unmatched. The headroom is so significant that you can run multiple drives and fuzzes in front without the amp starting to color the signal or compress before you want it to. You hear your pickups, you hear your pedals, you hear everything. It’s transparent in a way that can be a little jarring at first if you’re used to amps that do a lot of the work for you, but once you adjust it opens up a whole new world.
The Range Today
One of the clearest themes from talking to Tom was how deliberate Hiwatt have been about building a range that covers all bases without compromising on who they are.
At the entry level, the Leeds range is solid state, named after the legendary live recording from the early 70s. The Leeds 25R, which I reviewed earlier this year, is under $200 Canadian and delivers a remarkable amount of that classic Hiwatt clarity and punch for the price. The clean tones are genuinely impressive and the high gain is tighter and more articulate than you’d expect from a budget transistor amp. The Super Leeds models step up in power and features for players who need more headroom or stage volume.
The T-Series sits in the middle ground, offering a more modern take with a switchable overdrive channel for players who want versatility without relying entirely on pedals. It’s a slightly different character to the classic Hiwatt sound but deliberately so, designed to appeal to a broader audience including players who might be coming from Katana-style modelling amps and want something more organic without the steep learning curve of a pure clean platform.
Then there’s the Hi-Five, the 5 watt tube combo that Tom described as more than enough five watts. It has recently been upgraded from a ten inch to a twelve inch Hiwatt speaker, which makes a noticeable difference to the bottom end and overall feel. It is available with two individual boost stages on the tube section for more gain options.
The Production DR504
The one that generated the most excitement in our conversation was the production version of the custom shop DR504. The Pedalsmith 50, as it is known, has been five or six years in development and is now ready for the world market. It is half the price of the handwired custom shop equivalent.
It uses the same preamp section as the custom shop version, with a three-way voicing switch giving you extra treble or bass options depending on what the room or the music demands. The channels are internally linked so there is no need to use a physical jumper between inputs. You get the instant, recognisable Hiwatt sound without the customs shop wait time or price tag, plus an effects loop built in for the first time, which Tom acknowledged has always been a request from players who are used to more modern routing options.
As Tom put it, not everyone is ready to take the old classic stuff out on the road. The Pedalsmith 50 is built to take the knocks.
Park and WEM
Hiwatt are also the custodians of two other iconic British amp names. Park Amplifiers, originally started by Marshall, and WEM, created by Watkins Electric Music, who were responsible for some of the most memorable amp stacks at British festivals in the 60s and 70s.
Both brands are now back in production under the Hiwatt umbrella, carrying their own distinct characters while benefiting from Tom and the team’s engineering expertise. At NAMM 2026, the Park stack with its blue cabs was one of the most visually striking things on the show floor.
Who Is Hiwatt For?
This is the question I find most interesting because the honest answer is more people than you might think.
Hiwatt have always been associated with a certain classic British rock sound and a player who wants pure, uncolored headroom as a foundation. That is still very much the case. But as Tom talked through the range, what became clear is that the brand is actively expanding what that means. They are working with psych and doom bands, with IDLES, with the heavy metal crowd turning to Hiwatts, and with players who are coming from modelling and want to experience what a real backline feels like for the first time.
The other genuinely exciting thing is what is happening at the entry level. Tom talked with real passion about not wanting anyone to have to go through the experience of a bad first amp. The same care that goes into the custom shop goes into the Leeds range. That is a bold claim and from what I experienced with the Leeds 25R, it holds up.
The Oasis Connection
Tom also touched briefly on the Oasis reunion tour and the role Hiwatt played in building Noel’s rig. That story gets into the full interview in more detail, but it is worth noting that Liam’s stage setup created some unique challenges around volume and monitoring that took some creative engineering to solve. The kind of thing that only comes up when you are dealing with an artist who has been playing on huge stages for thirty years and has very specific ideas about how things should sound and feel.
Final Thought
The story of Hiwatt is genuinely one of the most interesting in British guitar history. A brand that was at the absolute peak of the amp world in the 70s, fell away after the death of its founder, and has now come back with something to prove. What Tom and the team are building feels like a proper revival rather than a nostalgia project. The range is wider than it has ever been, the prices are more accessible than they have ever been, and the original secret sauce is still very much intact.
If you have been curious about Hiwatt but assumed they were out of reach, now is probably the right time to look again.
Watch the full interview with Tom Hannon from Hiwatt on the Fret Success Guitar Show here: https://youtu.be/Zku60VDS1TA
You can also read my full review of the Hiwatt Leeds 25R here: https://fretsuccess.com/hiwatt-leeds-25r-review/
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