This stunning Fenderesque mock off is a beast behind it´s silver face. The sound is mix of Fender and Marshall. You can play it turned all the way up, and it still keeps its nature. Sweet compression, classic tube tremolo and reverb to die for. These are super rare. Check the videos where the amp is played with R7.
History behind the Royal/Elk amps:
Elk amplifiers were manufactured by the Japanese Miyuki Ind. Co. who started out in 1953 making amplifiers. The looks and features certainly were inspired by the Fender amplifiers of the day, but the circuits were quite different and original though. The original brand name was Echo. In the early 60’s Miyuki started making pro quality guitars under the brand name of Elk and later changed the brand name of the amplifiers to Elk as well. In the transistion period the “new” Elk logo had a small Echo beneath it.
Miyuki also used the Luxor and Royal brand names for some of their amps in Europe.
In 1969 there was a big fire in the factory, burning many amps and guitars. Quite a shock for the people who worked there.
The later Elk amps had solid state preamps and tube power amps to become completely solid state amps in the end.
I’ve been researching the history of Elk for some time now. It looks like that Miyuki stopped manufacturing the Elk amps at some point in time (probably early 1970’s) and that Gakki took the brand name over. That is probably the same Gakki as in Hoshino Gakki the manufacturer of Ibanez amps and guitars. If you look at the 1974 Ibanez Accessories Catalog pages 19 to 22, you can see the Ibanez Stage Master and Viking (and other) line of amps. These are identical to the Elk amps of the time. The Stage Master amps look great, but are completely solid state.
The Elk brand was also used for some guitar effects. Gakki made an almost identical clone of the EHX BigFuzz, calling it a Super Fuzz Sustainar. The Elk brand was eventually “phased out” in the late 1970’s.
