Mike Soldano is the man behind amp tones that influenced a generation of guitarists, his hot-rodded ideas having been used on countless albums by artists from Warren Haynes and George Lynch to Steve Lukather, Mark Knopfler, and Edward Van Halen.

Soldano’s latest, the Astro-20, is a three-channel amp that combines classic tones with 21st-century features like onboard IRs and MIDI connectivity; for the computer savvy, Soldano’s Editor software offers an intuitive interface that allows users to assign different Galaxies (voicings) to the player’s choice of overdrive channels. Users can also mix and match IRs for all three channels. Loading and organizing an IR library is fairly simple with a little time and patience, and it allows saving up to 128 MIDI pre-sets.

The 20-watt amp brings old-school tube circuitry, with four 12AX7 preamp tubes and two 6V6 power tubes. Its three-channel setup offers clean and two overdrives. Designed for flexibility, the Astro-20 combo sports a Celestion G12M Greenback, but can be used without the speaker – perfect for gigs, rehearsals, or recording using the DSP-powered IR cabinet simulation.

Wielding a Superstrat, the amp’s four voicings, accessed by the “Galaxy” switch, produced loads of options. Green is the clean channel – described as high-headroom, similar to an American combo amp. The sounds range from Wes Montgomery clean to Led Zeppelin crusty-clean. Blue provides phat bluesy cleans and crisp overtones that pop. Purple pushes the gain with a tighter response, and the Red brings the high-gain crunch that brought adoration to Soldano. Blue, Purple, and Red can be assigned to either overdrive channel independently and saved as a pre-set. The overdrives are easy to customize, and you can program multiple pre-sets for specific songs with varying output levels. You can also create channels to act as a boost with additional gain stages, which creates a new set of voicings.

What about output? Well, there’s loud, and then there’s Soldano loud. The Astro-20 is loud enough to handle almost any gig, and its higher-gain tones are unique – voluminous, mud-free, ballsy – reminding us what the late-’80s SLO-100 was all about. And even with its Master Volume, three-band EQ, Presence, Depth, and Bright switches, and all the bells and whistles, it feels like a plug-in-and-go rock machine.

This article originally appeared in VG’s March 2024 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.