Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

Over the last few days I have been reviewing the Peavey Horizon II. I took a great interest in this guitar when I saw it on the rack because of the low cost, great condition and made in USA status.

One of the first guitars that I owned many many many years ago was a Peavey Patriot that looked hauntingly like this guitar.

This guitar was the first guitar I owned with "blade" pickupsm and the first American made guitar that I owned. I loaned the Patriot in the early 90's to an aspiring musician who wanted a guitar to practice on and never saw it again. Since then I have always had my eye on 1980's era Peavey guitars. I had seen a few in the stores, but most of them have excessive wear and some were not even playable.

1980's era Peavey guitars do not typically have a good resale value. The horizon can be found as low as $99 in average condition, and I have seen T-60's on craiglists around $100, which is an excellent value for an American made guitar.

This instrument was auctioned at a government auction:

I am seeing a niche of people wanting old Peavey guitars to make into Guitar Hero Controllers, which is an actual waste of a fine instrument. I have also seen some so beat up that maybe all they are good for is a Guitar hero controller (ha ha)

Summary:

Value: for around $200 this guitar is definitely worth the money. Many tonal combinations for around the price of a cheap import. Stability in tuning, and not bad condition. I would carefully check fret wear and necks of guitars.

Playability: easy to set up, I have seen a couple of models that are pretty poorly set up, but this model has a few extra tweaks that can bring it back in line easy enough.

Gigability: Not a bad guitar for a gig, I would not use it as a primary or without a backup. Twenty five years is not necessarily without a set of issues in stability.

I hope you have enjoyed the review and I hope to have more new reviews soon!

Part III of the Peavey Horizon II review includes a review of the overdriven tones that are achievable using the Peavey Horizon II. As in Part II of the review, I am using a Fender tweed style amp with 4x10's with a touch of reverb. The same amp setting is used for all recordings of this guitar.

How a guitar responds to overdrive and distortion is a key factor for many players. If a guitar feeds back or is noisy when the drive is kicked in, it will become an annoying guitar to have to lug around to performances. I have found that my Peavey Horizon II is exceptionally quiet for a guitar of it's day. Take a listen to some of the tone samples that have been created. . .

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This week while visiting a local guitar store I saw a 1983 Peavey Horizon sitting in the used section just beckoning me to take her home. This guitar was manufactured from 1983-1986 and has a very unique pickup configuration that really does give a wide variety of tones from a single instrument.

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