Red Bear MK120 Amp Head 120 Watt Tube Guitar Amplifier

Red Bear amps were sold by Gibson in the 90’s and were designed in collaboration with Russian amp manufacturer Novik, Ltd. These amps are pretty hard to come by and have a bit of a cult following. Often described as a JCM 800 on steroids, the circuitry is modeled after a JCM800 2203 but has more low-end and a slightly wider mid range response.

The amp is versatile, warm sounding and doesn’t overly-color your tone. The Low Gain channel is ultra clean and maintains clarity at higher volumes. Adding gain will give you slightly dirty to a nice crunch. The high gain channel adds more crunch and using the gain boost will give you heavy, raw, in-your-face distortion. This thing can easily cover blues, southern rock, classic rock and metal and is great for drop tunings. I plugged my ES-335 into it and was even able to get some usable warm jazz tones out of the clean channel. The low end on this thing is huge. The lows can be dialed out but they’re definitely there when you need it. Of all the amps I’ve owned this was my favorite, any guitar, a few pedals and I could get just about any tone I needed. No amp can do it all but this one is definitely a workhorse.

It has standard 6 knob Marshall type front panel with Presence, Bass, Middle, Treble Master Volume & Pre-Amp Gain knobs. A High and a Low gain input and a sensitivity switch which acts as a gain boost on either channel. The switch can be controlled manually but can also be controlled via footswitch using the ¼” input on the back panel. Any standard on/off footswitch with a ¼” jack should work. I don’t have a footswitch but they can be purchased online for about $10-$20. Speaker jacks on the back panel accept 4 ohm, 8 ohm and 16 ohm cabinets.

The internal electronics are hand-wired point to point wiring making it an easy amp to service or mod. The amp was re-tubed with Groove Tube 6l6’s and have plenty of life left on them. The preamp uses Russian 6N2P/6H2N tubes. They’re similar to 12AX7’s but supposed to be less noisy. The tubes are easy to come by online, I have some extras on hand that I’m including with the amp. The tube socket will also accept 12AX7 tubes using a relatively simple wiring mod that can also be found online.

These amps LOVE to be played loud but it sounds great even at low volumes. It handles pedals like a champ and it cuts through the mix extremely well. Not sure what else to say about this beast.

I’m torn on selling it but I haven’t played out in about 10 years and have no plans to start gigging again. I plug it in and piddle around with it every so often, but for the most part it’s just taking up space. I decided that it’s time to pass it on to someone else who can get more use out of it and let this dragon spit fire again.

Includes:

Amp head & power cord + extra preamp tubes

The amp is packaged with plenty of cushioning and ready to ship. For shipping purposes the tubes have been removed from the sockets, numbered, wrapped in bubble wrap and stowed inside the amp head.