Martin Kidd and Victory. Valve Overdrive from Valves

England, the early 1990s.

Kidd teaches himself. A local repairman talks to him as though he understands it all. He understands very little, but the few things he does understand from school physics inspire him greatly.

He makes his living teaching guitar.

He has a 1969 Marshall Super Lead, bought for about eighty pounds. They were not worth a lot of money in those days. The amp was built wrong at the factory: one resistor is ten times what it should have been.

A friend of Kidd’s tries a mod from Aspen Pittman’s The Tube Amp Book: a master volume after the phase inverter. Kidd does the same on his Marshall. It works. Nothing burns down. "I’m still here," he says.

If he has two gigs on two evenings in a row, he may well play them on two different circuits. On stage he makes mental notes of what is wrong, and that night at home he rewires the amp.

Much of his later design work began as a way to be kind to the ears and eyebrows of whoever stood directly in line with the speaker cabinet.

By 2016 he has been building, modifying and designing amps for twenty-five years.

Among Kidd’s guitar students is Paul Cornford. One day Cornford turns up with a 1961 tweed Fender Princeton and asks: do you think you could copy that? Kidd will not copy it. If he makes something to sound a certain way, he wants to have done it with his own circuit.

That is how the Cornford Harlequin comes about, and after it the MK50. Kidd draws the circuits. Cornford brings the money and the marketing.

Around 1998 the Harlequin is reviewed in Guitarist magazine. They started in a double garage at the bottom of Cornford’s garden and then moved to industrial premises. About ten years went by like that.

Then things went pear-shaped. The firm, Kidd admits, was not run very well, and Cornford ceased trading.

Cornford’s amps had been built under contract by the Straight Edge factory. The people there saw the designer’s predicament and gave him a job.

Lee Anderton, co-owner of the Andertons store in Guildford, sold a lot of Cornfords and enjoyed it. When the brand disappeared, it left a gap in his catalogue. The factory had one too: its contract for the amps was over.

Anderton calls the factory. It is a meeting of minds: "We have an amp designer, we have a factory and we have somebody that could sell them."

A few people put in small sums of money. Anderton’s share on day one: 25,000 pounds. Kidd calls the whole thing a gamble.

Victory is set up not as a limited company but as a trading partnership. That way the partners' names stay out of the public registers.

The photographs and the website are done by Mick Taylor, a former editor of Guitarist and later one of the hosts of That Pedal Show.

Victory has no distributor in Britain: the amps go from the factory straight to the dealers, and the prices come out lower than at many boutique brands.

On October 2, 2013, Victory comes to market with three hand-built amps: the V10 The Baron, the V50 The Earl and the V100 The Duke. The Baron has two output tubes of different types, a 6L6 and an EL84, each with its own master.

The V100 runs on 6L6s. That was decided while testing prototypes with the brand’s first artist, Guthrie Govan. Govan thought he was an EL34 man, but in a blind test he chose the 6L6s.

The names are aristocratic titles. Who came up with them, Kidd no longer remembers. The name The Duke, as it turned out, belonged to someone else, and it had to go.

The first amps do not sell. Anderton calls the Victory of that year a vanity project.

Guthrie Govan asks for an amp that will fit in the overhead locker of a budget airline. The design brief: a printout from the EasyJet website showing the maximum permitted dimensions of hand luggage. Kidd gets it done in about two or three weeks: Govan has a show in the Far East coming up.

The first prototype is not up to the job. The overdrive is close enough, but the clean sound does not have enough headroom. Thirty watts is not enough. Kidd moves the power amp from cathode bias to fixed bias and gets about 42 watts. The prototype comes back to Govan weighing ever so slightly more.

When he boards a budget flight, Govan says, they look at the amp’s case and assume it is a camera bag.

Lunchbox amps existed before Victory. Kidd himself names the predecessors, the Linear Concord and the Orange Tiny Terror. But most were around 15 or 20 watts, and he wanted a full 50 watts' worth from small transformers in a compact chassis.

In the spring of 2014 the V30 The Countess comes out at 799 pounds. Anderton remembers four hundred orders in a week, and he shot the demo in his own basement. Victory goes from a loss-making vanity project to a business.

After the V30, Victory finally starts to be taken seriously. Guitarist gives it a "Guitarist Choice" award and "Gear Of The Year 2014".

In December 2014 the V40 The Duchess comes out: an amp for blues and roots players who had been asking for the amp that didn’t seem to exist.

In 2015 Rabea Massaad, a man who knows gain, asks for a compact amp for modern metal and down-tuned guitars. He himself had played a Marshall JCM900 Dual Reverb and a 5150. Kidd finds out that the JCM900’s overdrive is solid-state almost all the way to the tone stack, and he does not want that. Basing it on a Soldano is out too: only his own circuit will do. The first Kraken prototype comes out with too much gain, and the low end has to be tightened even further. In the end Kidd describes the first channel as a higher-gain JCM800 and the second as a 5150 with a softer attack.

The same year it comes out that Dave Murray recorded his parts for Iron Maiden’s The Book of Souls on a V100 and a V412 cabinet. It was his tech who recommended giving Victory a call. The V100 did not go on the tour: his switching system needed one more interface, and there was not enough time.

In 2016 the Sheriff comes out: classic British overdrive, inspired by the Plexi sound of the sixties. Kidd remembers the overdrive of the old amps as a bit unrefined, bordering on harsh, but in a mix that harshness served a purpose and helped the guitar cut through. Instead of a low-power mode, the Sheriff 22 got a separate built-in power soak that reduces the output to 0.3 watts, so that a cranked amp could be played at bedroom volume.

With the Sheriff 25 Kidd realized that the "vintage Marshall" in people’s heads is most often a Marshall that someone like José Arredondo once modified. The same José that Dave Friedman took his amp to for a mod at eighteen. Kidd goes for a hot-rodded design. Others in such cases use clipping diodes, or transistors used as diodes. He wants "the valve overdrive from valves." The EL86 output tubes were the supplier’s suggestion. Kidd had never even heard of them, and he lowered the voltage on their screen grids.

In 2017 the RK50 comes out, made together with Richie Kotzen.

In 2019 the VC35 The Copper appears. Kidd kept being asked whether Victory had anything like a Vox AC30. It did not. The Copper became his AC30 at sensible volumes. Two 12AX7s, an EF184 pentode and four EL84s give 35 watts, or 12 in low-power mode. The EF184 works as a cathode follower and drives the tone stack. At full power the bias is mixed, cathode and fixed; at low power it is pure cathode bias.

In 2020 the Countess was renamed The Jack, as in jack-of-all-trades. The same year Victory and Two Notes capture Victory’s cabinets in DynIR.

Friends and customers had long been asking for the "Victory sound" in a pedal. But the market was already completely saturated with every kind of OD pedal imaginable. The pun, Victory admits, is intended.

It was the tubes that decided it. One day the tube supplier asks: "I’ve got loads of these, and they’re all made by Philips or Mullard or whoever. Do you think you could do anything with those?" They are CV4014s, also known as EF91s. Otherwise they would end up in landfill. There is virtually nothing on them, and no guitar amp has ever used tubes like these. It is a case of suck it and see.

The CV4014 is a small-signal pentode with seven pins, physically just a little smaller than the familiar 12AX7. It is a high-reliability military version of the EF91, built to cope with vibration, including in aircraft.

The tubes in the V4 pedals were made in 1981 at the Mullard factory in Mitcham, Surrey, for the British Ministry of Defence. Then they were shipped to the Royal Navy supply depot at Spring Quarry, Wiltshire, deep underground, part of a vast Cold War bunker. The bunker, thankfully, was never needed. For forty years it was just an extremely expensive place to keep tubes that were waiting for someone to design products around them. That is what the manual says, with a smiley.

The first stage runs on a low-noise EC900 triode, made in the former Yugoslavia under license from Philips and Mullard. Victory extends the warranty on these tubes from 90 days to two years: to military spec they are designed to last at least 6,000 hours.

In the summer of 2018 the V4 pedals are shown at NAMM: The Countess, The Sheriff and The Kraken, at 349 pounds each. In November 2020 The Copper joins them. As far as Victory knows, nobody before them had put four tubes and an all-tube signal path into a pedal.

Then a power amp was added to the pedal preamp: in 2020 came the V4 Duchess, a lightweight solid-state Class D amp of 180 watts. The module could give up to 210, but modules like this do not distort when overdriven, they just switch off, and Kidd did not want to build a limiter. Speaker emulation was deliberately left out of the Duchess: everyone has their own IRs. And by 2021 the V4 Kraken came out with a Two Notes cab sim inside.

The main decision behind the V4 is written in the manual: the pedal goes not in front of the amp’s preamp but in place of it. It is not an overdrive but the front end of a tube amp in a steel box. "Have we said that enough yet?" the manual asks.

Kidd puts it more simply. If an amp has a great clean channel, but Dr. Jekyll needs a new Mr. Hyde side, the V4 is that Mr. Hyde.

Everything else follows from that one decision.

It needs real plate voltage. The pedal takes 12 volts and 800 milliamps, which is a lot for a pedal, and while the heaters warm up it draws three times that. The high voltage comes from a switch-mode boost converter built around a MAX1771 chip: it needs few other components and takes up hardly any room on the board. The hardest part is noise. The converter switches at hundreds of kilohertz. The whine itself cannot be heard, but the interference creeps along the ground. So every voltage has its own separate ground.

The plate voltage is lower than in the big heads. Kidd thinks this can be heard: the waveform starts to distort differently, and the midrange gets fuller and nicer.

The output is line level, 0.9 volts at most. There is no cab emulation and no power amp in the pedal, and it cannot drive a load box. What it does have is the Amp Through mode: with the pedal on, the signal goes through its preamp into the amp’s power section; with it off, the amp’s own preamp is back.

The Bright switch is there because the pedal has to drive power amps it has never met. Effects loops vary drastically. The manual warns that the setting furthest from a player’s favorite can make the pedal seem broken. It’s not.

The Copper has its own story. A treble booster is traditionally a single-transistor device. Kidd built his with a tube. The Tone knob shorts the two out-of-phase outputs of the last tube stage together fully, partly or not at all: the result is a treble cut. And the Copper’s Bass Mode has three positions, not two as on the head: full bass on the boosted channel turns to mush, so in one position the bass is cut on that channel only.

A common thread runs through it all. The JCM900’s overdrive is solid-state; Kidd makes his with tubes. The Sheriff 25 was asking for diodes; he puts in tubes. A booster is normally built around a transistor; he builds it around a tube. And where silicon is needed after all, in the Class D power amp of the V4 amps, there is a Valve Response Circuit so that the power amp feels like a tube one.

And the master volume. Kidd still puts it after the phase inverter, as in that first Marshall mod, on the V40, the Copper and the Sheriff: a good part of power amp distortion is born in the phase inverter, not just in the output tubes. Friedman does not care for such a master: it takes the negative feedback out of the amp. Two masters, two answers.

In 2016 Kidd said that an amp’s sound is almost entirely down to the circuit, not to the choice between EL34s and 6L6s, and that NOS tubes are not necessarily better. Two years later a whole line was built around NOS tubes. Not because they are magic. They are small and rugged, and there are enough of them to make pedals for years and keep spares.

In 2023 the YouTuber KDH calls Anderton’s stake in Victory "Andertons Big Secret". Anderton explains: he was afraid that other retailers, especially UK ones, would not want to stock a brand tied to Andertons. And he admits that he could have been more open about it. The UK advertising regulator asks him to declare his financial interests in every video, and he starts doing so.

Kidd’s answer is short: Anderton does not own Victory, he made an investment. Some people expected it to be the beginning of the end. Nothing changed.

In 2024 Victory turns ten, and the MK series comes out: MK for Martin Kidd. The MK Overdrive was born of all the requests for a reissue of the Cornford MK50 Mk II. Every MK amp is checked over and signed by Kidd himself before it leaves the factory.

He never became the head of the company, and he does not regret it: he does his best work designing circuits and tweaking them. He works mostly from home and stays on at the factory as a technical consultant. Victory amps are built in England.

In late 2025 the blind guitarist Anthony Ferraro asks to try a Duchess MKII. Victory builds him an amp with a braille panel. "Dude, it’s an amp!" The unboxing video has been watched by tens of millions of people. Now Victory fits a braille panel to any of its amps at no extra cost.

In 2026 the PowerValve 200 comes out, a power amp for digital rigs. Inside, the same CV4014 is at work.

Kidd is sure that tube amps are not going away. They get cranked until they essentially malfunction, because that is what players are after. And a model or a profile of that same amp, he says, will not feel the same. Though he honestly admits that those devices are far more versatile.

There is a symmetry in this story too.

Kidd started out by reading about a mod in a book and putting a master after the phase inverter into a Marshall that cost eighty pounds. More than thirty years later his initials are on amp panels, and the MK Overdrive brings back his Cornford MK50.

He does not like to copy. If an amp comes out and people like it, he wants to feel that he did that.

He never did study electronics. He just wanted valve overdrive from valves.

On our site, Victory is represented by the free AmberPawAmp plugin and the NAM captures of the V4 The Copper, The Kraken and The Sheriff pedals.