Peavey Electronics Corporation is one of the largest audio equipment manufacturers in the world. It is an American company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets professional audio equipment, with headquarter in Meridian, Mississippi.

Hartley Peavey is the founder and CEO of Peavey Electronics Corporation as well as a well known businessman in the musical industry with his innovations.

He was a guitarist with obsession to become a rock star but his father did not support his idea and telling him that he won’t make money for life for being a musician.

According to reverb.com website, in 1961 Hartley (born December 30, 1941) built his amplifier on his own because his father wouldn’t buy him one. Beyond his expectation, the amplifier was a big hit. Four years later Peavey company was founded in 1965 with $8.000 from Hartley’s remaining college fund. At the time Peavey produced only two amplifiers : the Musician and Dyna Bass.

The recognizable company logo was designed by Pravey himself in high school. He started his company above his father’s music store and inside that he built amps one at a time. The Musician and Dyna Bass amplifiers were both high-wattage, solid state amps that featured simple functions for musicians.

Peavey build his products with passion along with build quality and affordability in mind. Its innovative amps are built like tanks and affordable enough for every level of amateur or professional players around the world.

In late 60’s, Hartley bought a factory from $17.500 money that he borrowed and decided to make the business serious. This was the important moment of the company when he moved from the attic of his father’s record store to a real world factory to manufacture amplifiers and electronic.

In 1973, Peavey developed series of amps with 6L6 power tubes and two 6C10 pre-amp tubes. These amps had their inspiration from Fender Twin but with their own unique sound.

When the solid state amps becoming popular in the 70’s and 80’s, Peavey created their most famous solid state amp : Peavey Bandit. It was introduced in 1980 and has gone many revisions and this model is still being produced today with Trans Tube Technology from Peavey. The Bandit model has become a standard in the solid state amp world.
In 1992, Peavey released their most famous amplifier, the 5150 guitar amplifier. It was a two years collaboration between the amp designer, James brown and guitarist Edward (Eddie) Van Halen.

The amp is a vacuum tube based guitar amplifier that features two channels, 120 watt all-tube 6L6 power section and a shared EQ, the 5150 was able to produce a variety of rock and metal tones with the lead channel for what this amp is famous for. The 5150 II comes with separate channel EQs and makes it even more versatile.

The 5150 gains popularity with rock and metal music genre and many guitarists give high credit for this amp. Some top players that use this amp are Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains and steve Lukather of Toto.

In 2004, Eddie Van Halen parted ways with Peavey and the amp was rebranded as the 6505 and 6505+ which feature EL34 for more British flavor.

Not just amplifier, Peavey also produced some guitars, although not the most recognizable or distinct guitar models. According to gear-vault.com, in 1975 the company started to manufacture guitars to follow the bigger companies’ latest trend : selling amplifiers together with new guitars. But the outcome of the guitar selling was not as big as the amplifier division.

The most successful guitar model for Peavey is the one from collaboration with Eddie Van Halen called the Peavey Wolfgang guitar in 1992. EVH said this was a result to produce his ideal guitar. It was relatively successful but did not gain much attention and reputation such as the Fender Stratocaster or the Gibson Les Paul. The Peavey Wolfgang was discontinued later in 2004 and the company reintroduced the Wolfgang as HP2 in 2017 Summer Namm show as written on wikipedia site.

Today, Peavey Electronics Corporation is one of the largest makers of musical instruments in the world with more than 2.000 products in 130 countries. The company still produces guitars and amps in United States including the HP2 range electric guitars and Budda amps.

The products from Peavey that stand out through their popularity are as listed below, although they manufacture a wide variety of equipment :

• 5150, 6505, 6534+ series guitar amplifiers
• Bandit series guitar amplifiers
• Classic series guitar amplifiers
• CS series power amplifiers
• JSX series guitar amplifiers
• Radial Pro Series of drum kits
• Triple XXX/3120 series guitar amplifiers
• ValveKing series guitar amplifiers
• Vypyr series guitar amplifiers
• TNT series bass amplifiers
• 400BH Series Bass Amplifiers
• Windsor series guitar amplifiers
• Keyboard amplifiers
• Wolfgang and HP2 series electric guitars