A musician's life is always full of crossroads... One of them is hauling as little as possible without giving up a great sound. Of course, it depends on the circumstances; that is, if you're on a mega-tour with three backliners for you, who set everything up and you find it all ready when you arrive, your choice of gear will be structurally about tone. That means that if it sounds spectacular and fits the repertoire, we'll decide to use it... That way, weight and transport stop being a concern. However, if you find yourself in a situation where you have to load in, set up, play and pack up, sound won't be the only value to consider, since you'll also have to think about transport. That's when we need to consider small amplifiers that weigh little but perform at 110%. That's the case with our small but mighty character today, the Gigmaster 15W combo E310 from Engl, together with its 30W cousin, which will let us deal with transport calmly but will also stand up to any powerful amp.

Introduction
Engl amplifiers are known to everyone... Surely, at some point in your life you've run into them, whether the legendary Screamer or the Blackmore signature. You may also find one as the house amp at a concert venue, or available at various rehearsal rooms by the hour. However, for those who don't know them beforehand, or who do but want to know what the company's new products are, let's take a quick walk through the brand. The company is based in Germany, and it is there that it began to grow and started producing amps/cabinets/preamps/etc. that have gone around the world.

Some of its legendary amps are: the Powerball, the Screamer or the Savage. However, it's in the signature models that we find a more extensive and interesting catalog. Guitarists such as Steve Morse, Richie Blackmore or Victor Smolski have their own amp built to the specifications those artists agreed on with the developers. The company has now started to enter the world of low-wattage but high-quality amps. That leads us today to interview the brand's youngest children, the Gigmaster line.

What Are They Like? What Do They Have?
Let's begin by discussing what the amps are like from a construction standpoint and what features they have. We're talking about the two little brothers: the 15W and the 30W, although we'll focus somewhat more on the 15W, since many things about it carry over to the 30W.

When you have the amp in your hands, you notice it is compact, very small and above all very, very manageable. It isn't traumatically heavy, and it gives a feeling of security and strength... If you dropped it from a second-story window, the sidewalk would probably break before the amp did.

The metal grille, the house trademark, gives it a completely rugged, armored look and lets it withstand the bumps in the van with the rest of the backline gear perfectly. You can also see four hefty screws holding the grille, giving it an even more rigid look. It's clear you'll hardly need a flight case to use it properly.

But what does this amp have inside? One of the questions we always ask about amps is which tubes it uses, since a large part of the sound comes from there. In our case it has to come with something not too big since the enclosure is small. In the power stage it gives us two EL84s in pentode and in the preamp it brings ECC83s, offering that characteristic sound especially at semi-saturated levels. The “beast” comes split into two channels, one clean and one overdriven, not counting all the modifications you can make with the different switches on the front panel. Let's describe it as we start to dissect the amp for our guests:

Input Gain: Input gain that is common to both channels. Here we begin with many things to keep in mind, since with low-power amps we must be very careful about how we set the amount of input gain, to make it sound more or less saturated.

Lead Drive: This control works on the second channel, the overdriven lead channel, and so, together with the input gain, it lets you get more or less saturated or clean sounds.

Bass/Middle/Treble: The amp has a three-band EQ shared by both channels. So you need to keep in mind the main sound you want and, from there, work toward saturation or a cleaner sound.

Lead Volume: This control lets you manage the volume of the overdriven, or lead, channel. In that case we have to consider how much lead volume we want and how much lead drive we've assigned, as well as input gain. We therefore have to take into account the relationship of the three elements in the chain. Note that the volume sits pre-loop, which means it affects the chain of effects we put in the loop.

Mid Boost: Here we find a switch that assigns a boost to both channels. It therefore increases the signal and saturation of both channels. The lift comes somewhat more from the midrange frequencies than from the rest.

Clean/Lead: Gives us the option of choosing between the clean or overdriven channel from the front panel. As you can guess, the amp can be connected to a channel-switching footswitch. If the footswitch isn't connected, we have the option of handling channel changes from the front.

Master: Master is the amp's overall volume, giving us the option of controlling the volume of both channels. However, we need to keep in mind that it is directly related to all the volume controls, from the input gain to the lead volume in the case of the overdriven channel.

At the same time, the 30W Gigmaster has a few extra controls that can be very appealing:

Reverb: On the 30W we get a reverb control to select the amount of reverb we want, which reminds us that the 15W amp has no such effect.

Gain Boost: A switch that, when pressed, gives us a large amount of extra gain for both channels.

MVB (Master Volume Boost): A small addition to the master control, allowing the amp's overall volume to be raised on both channels. This is perfect for splitting our sounds into rhythm and solo with a simple MVB.

Power Tube Fuse: This LED is a very nice feature on the 30W, since it tells us whether a tube has stopped working as it should, or simply whether we've just lost it.

Let's see what it brings us at the back, that is, let's look at what connections we can make:

Footswitch Input: This is the connection for a conventional channel-switching pedal. That's great, since we can use practically any one that has two switches, one to control which channel we want and the other to choose whether or not to activate the mid boost.

The 30W amp is even more specific, as it lets us run three outputs to connect the footswitch pedal however we want. We get one output to control or activate the channel, another for the mid boost or the MVB, and another to control the effects loop or the reverb.

Effects Loop: For both models we have a direct send and return so we can route it to any effect and use it between the preamp and the power stage.

Balanced Line Out Frequency Compensated: This is the amp's final output, that is, the output after the power stage. You can also send it straight to a mixing console or to an input for recording in the studio. On the head-and-cabinet models, the same output provides enough load without needing to connect it to a cabinet. And without smoke ending up coming out of the amp after 20 minutes powered on.

Speaker Outputs: On the combo we get one 8-ohm output and two 16-ohm outputs so we can play around and select the output that suits us best.

Power Soak Panel: This is a very interesting control, so much so that a good part of the amp's importance lies in it. With it we can choose how much power we want to work with. We have the full power option, which assigns the amp's whole output, 5 watts, where the machine generates only that amount of power, and 1 watt, where the beast gets very relaxed, and the Speaker off option, where the speaker emits no sound. However, you don't need to connect it to any speaker output to reduce the power without ending up burning out the amp's output transformer.

What Do They Sound Like? How Do They Respond?
Let's finish what we began in the previous section, where we've been outlining the sound of each of the amps we have today. As we mentioned, the main goal of this kind of amp is that, being so small, it should try to sound as big as possible. In this case, we can say the sound we can get from it is really good, and at no point can you say any frequency is missing, or that it gets thin in a particular position. In terms of power, the amp can produce enough volume to play any concert in any indoor venue. A great feature you'll notice is that although the beast has two channels, the feeling is that it seems to have been conceived as a single channel, which goes one way or the other depending on which channel is active, but the amp's color is always present. The pots work perfectly and the amp responds according to the control of each one. There is a very important square when it comes to getting sound out of the amp, and those are the input gain, the lead gain, lead volume and the Master. With these four controls you can get practically any sound you set out to find. The Mid Boost control is a great help for boosting solos, etc., since it lets us rise above the band so you can be heard. The last element to consider for getting more sounds is the power soak, which, depending on where you set that parameter, will heat up the tubes more and therefore give you a much hotter sound, offering a palette of more or less saturated sounds.

Conclusion
To wrap up the description of both amps, physical and tonal, we can say they are super valid if you have to play and sound 100% without breaking your back on transport. Their tonal color makes them sound very workable and, of course, they take pedals great. If you're thinking of getting a portable and very capable amp, you should try either of these two relatives.