Martin Kidd made his first guitar amp in the early 1990s. Since then Martin has gone on to become one of the most influential & important British amp designers of the last 30 years, as chief designer for Victory & Cornford Amplification, consulting for brands like Fortin, Ampeg & PRS and working with some of the greatest guitar players in the world. 

2024 sees the release of two new, hand made valve guitar amps that are the culmination of everything Martin has learnt during his illustrious career. The design brief was simple. Build the best single channel clean amp & the best multi channel overdriven amp you’ve ever made. 4 years in the making. No restrictions. No limits. No compromise. Hand made & hand wired in England. Victory are proud to announce…. the MK Clean and the MK Overdrive.

Our MK Series amps are available to order in a number of custom finishes, including your choice of panel colour, handle, corners & a wide selection of genuine leather coverings. The leather is exclusively supplied by Muirhead Scottish Leather – suppliers of leather to the House of Lords, Rolls Royce, The Orient Express, Aston Martin & now Victory Amplification.

All amps will be finished with a check over from Martin and his signature before they leave the factory in England.

Production of these exceptional amps starts in March, you can register your interest below.

MK Clean – £4799, €5549, $4999
MK Overdrive – £4999, €5799, $5199
112 and 212 Cabinet – Prices dependant on speaker choice

Victory is excited to welcome to the family the MK Clean. The brief for Martin was in theory very simple, the ultimate clean amplifier. After using the V140 as an early starting point, what became the MK Clean was a very different amplifier.

100 watts and 4 x 6L6 power tubes are the foundation of the MK Cleans distinct high headroom sound, perfect for blues and country players, it still breaks up and has been designed with pedals in mind from the first iteration.

Martin explains:

‘The starting point was that to mark Victory’s 10th Anniversary, we should make a hand-wired and stripped down (minus the tremolo) version of our V140. But the final circuit evolved into something very different to the V140, however; as my focus was on getting the amount of clean headroom seemingly required by the blues and country players; without having too much headroom to struggle with any drive/boost pedals.’

There are two voices on the amp, with Voice 1 being more 50’s and Voice 2 allows more upper mid range into the sound. Adding to this 50’s feel the MK Clean has an Accutronics long tank fitted upside down to get the best sounding high end decay. The amp features a reverb send control to tame any unwanted distortion  in the reverb at higher gain settings.

The amp is completed with presence control, a bass switch and a bright switch to tame any style of guitar you pair with the amp.

For many years we have been asked what Victory amp sounds like the Cornford MK50? So this became the starting point for Martin’s ultimate overdrive amp. 

The MK Overdrive is an amp designed to be versatile enough to cater for all gain players, the Clean channel has it’s own gain control and presence and resonance controls, there is a voice switch which adds more upper mids when set to setting 2. This channel has a lot of headroom and is perfect for pedals.

The Overdrive channel is more aggressive for heavier rock and more modern Metal. There is its own presence and resonance control like the clean channel but the presence will both increase and reduce negative feedback at high frequencies; giving more flexibility to fine tune the high end of that channel.

The Overdrive channel has a Gain 1 and 2 switch, so you can achieve a crunch and lead sound, they both have their own gain and volume controls. There is also a Voice 1/2 for this channel, these affect both OD1 gain and OD2 gain. Voice 2 adds brightness and more gain; tightening the sound/response in the process. There is a master volume to control level across the channels.