What Are Your Favorite Amps To Play?

Bogner said:
Sounds Like A Terrible Bondage. ;)

Work On The IN Part And Get Around To The OUT Part Later. :)

#Komet
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Hah! Honestly, no bondage involved. I don't want the headache of adding another amp.

Adding an amp is an "if you give a mouse a cookie" situation. The switcher handles 8 amps, but only four cabs, and it's already hooked up to four cabs. Plus I don't want more speakers. The room is already full of speaker boxes and shelves and stuff against walls.

So I'd have to put the amp somewhere it functions well and looks good.

That means I'd need another piece of furniture, which is its own can of worms, because that means I have to both have one made - I need something studio worthy, cool looking and on wheels for getting behind the rack to service the gear - and then I'd have to move furniture around to accommodate it.

And it would have to have room for more than one head to justify the cost of having a cabinet guy make it to my spec - which means I'd have an empty space to fill and would need another amp to put in it.

The whole idea of adding an amp without getting rid of another is simply a gigantic pain in the ass. Not that I'll never do it, but right now I don't want that much stuff. I'm still feeling like I'm gonna kick the bucket before too long, and it'd be kind of a waste.
 
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László said:
Hah! Honestly, no bondage involved. I don't want the headache of adding another amp.

Adding an amp is an "if you give a mouse a cookie" situation. The switcher handles 8 amps, but only four cabs, and it's already hooked up to four cabs. Plus I don't want more speakers. The room is already full of speaker boxes and shelves and stuff against walls.

So I'd have to put the amp somewhere it functions well and looks good.

That means I'd need another piece of furniture, which is its own can of worms, because that means I have to both have one made - I need something studio worthy, cool looking and on wheels for getting behind the rack to service the gear - and then I'd have to move furniture around to accommodate it.

And it would have to have room for more than one head to justify the cost of having a cabinet guy make it to my spec - which means I'd have an empty space to fill and would need another amp to put in it.

The whole idea of adding an amp without getting rid of another is simply a gigantic pain in the ass. Not that I'll never do it, but right now I don't want that much stuff. I'm still feeling like I'm gonna kick the bucket before too long, and it'd be kind of a waste.
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I Get What You Are Saying. You Forgot To Add The Part Of Having To Get A New Car To Go Get The Custom Piece Made Though. ;)

I Am Just Razzing The Laz Because I Know You Would Love That Komet (And A Few Others). :)
 
Bogner said:
I Get What You Are Saying. You Forgot To Add The Part Of Having To Get A New Car To Go Get The Custom Piece Made Though. ;)
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Exactly!
Bogner said:
I Am Just Razzing The Laz Because I Know You Would Love That Komet (And A Few Others). :)
Click to expand...
The Komets tick the same boxes for me that the PRS CAD amps do: Single-channel, very touch-sensitive, versatile, with a distinctive tone. I've played through one or two, and man, they're great.

The problem is that I really like both of my Mesas. For now I'm good. But I don't know how I'll feel in five minutes, let alone five months!

I really need a Magic 8-Ball...

"Hey Magic 8-ball, do I need a new amp?"

"It depends on your next question."

"OK, how long am I gonna live, anyway?"

"Uhh...I wouldn't necessarily make any firm plans for the day after tomorrow..."
 
The amp I use depends if I am playing home alone or out with other musicians. I rarely use a tube amp at home. A tube amp played at bedroom levels sounds like it is being starved. I am currently using a Orange Crush RT-35 at home, but I used a Tech 21 Trademark 60 for years. I have a Mesa Boogie Mark Five:25 and extension cabinet that I want to sell and Fuchs Blackjack 21 head that picked up used for a good price that I play when I can wind it up a little. To tell you the truth, I wasn't crazy about the Blackjack 21 at first, but the more I played it, the more I understood why Robben Ford plays the way he plays. The Dumble Overdrive Special architecture amps have one thing in common that is different from every other tube amp architecture. It occurs on the tail of single notes on the overdrive channel. It is almost like a touch-controlled psuedo-feedback. It is very musical, but it does require one to conform to the amp instead of the other way around. If one listens to Robben Ford, one sees that he tends to emphasize the tails of his single notes. He is playing to the ODS' strength. No Dumble pedal on the market comes close to cloning this feature correctly. It is an exploited flaw in the Dumble ODS architecture much in the way that blues guitarists exploited the flaws in the Tweed designs.
 
Em7 said:
A tube amp played at bedroom levels sounds like it is being starved.
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My mileage has varied!

I've used firstly Mk Boogies, then latterly (post-2004) ODS-type amps, at all levels from loud right down to barely-there-at-all.

My home practice rig for the last few years has been a Two Rock Akoya with a Cornish SS-3 in front of it, and most crucially a Lehle SD/FTT Ambi-Space in the loop; the speaker is a Celestion Black Shadow. Tones are somewhere between early Christopher Cross and Larry Carlton.

My playing out rig is also a variety of Two Rocks and/or Boogies.

Em7 said:
It is an exploited flaw in the Dumble ODS architecture much in the way that blues guitarists exploited the flaws in the Tweed designs.
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Is it really a flaw, or did Dumble actually intend this to happen, once he realised the possibilities that lay within the Fenders he started blueprinting, and heard how certain players "held the note" using his earliest massaged circuits? I wouldn't be in too much of a hurry to describe this - or any other aspect of his work - as some kind of accidental by-product.

Certainly, playing an ODS-style amp requires you to meet its performance envelope at least part-way, if you're going to get any real value out of it vs say an early Boogie: they both have their strengths, as observed by Steve Kimock in response to a question on TGP a while back:

"So the Mk IIC+ could be set to sound similar to an ODS, but the ODS would still come out on top?

That's almost a trick question as it involves overlapping distortion performance, and depending on the application, all that distortion performance overlaps to some degree.

So Boogie, Dumble, Fender with a pedal, Acoustic 150 with a blown speaker all overlap at some point. In the TGP context of "Dumble sound" as a kind of smooth jazz hot tub karaoke MP3 competition, the Dumble isn't really doing its best work, and neither amp is anywhere near its potential, so to the extent that those two amps do overlap in less than professional application, neither is optimized.

If the application was onstage, live band, lead guitar, take no prisoners, cut through the mix, hit the back of the hall etc, the Boogie would probably leave the Dumble in the dust.In the same environment at lower gain, the Boogie would not be able to get the same perfect sit in the mix refinement that the Dumble has, and would be more fatiguing to listen to.

Anyway to make a stupid story short, those are two really different amps that could both be used for "Lead Guitar" chores, with the nod going to the Boogie for shoot from the hip, and the Dumble for accuracy. You don't really have to 'aim' the Boogie to get it to work, it's a hand grenade basically. Light fuse, get away, at least.

The MKII C+ Simul-class is probably one of the very best lead guitar style amps ever made in any quantity. If I had to get up and tear it down for a couple of tunes with any rock band, I would take the Boogie over the Dumble. If I had to live with the amp every night for the rest of my life in a more responsible musical context I would take the Dumble, and the occasional onstage humiliation at the hands of Boogie equipped guests.

Both great, different amps, but don't underestimate the MKII C+, particularly the Simul-class with the export transformer, they're world class lead guitar amps that will hang with anything."
 
Got another 35 minutes in tonight. I turned it to the 25 watt mode for the first time in months. I had it dialed fairly aggressively (gain at 11:00, treble on 2:00, presence 2:00. depth 9:00) Turning it to 25 mode only makes it just a bit quieter, but it softens it a bit. What it did was make it a lot more home friendly... like a mild compressor just smoothed out the sound a bit... took a little bit of the punch out.

And, not a lot. Just enough to be SUPER nice for playing at home because I get away with playing fairly loud (master just above 9:00, which is consistently over 90dB). I think I'm going to leave in in 25 watt mode for a while and even try a couple of the 1x's to tame it further. This was through the Zbest which just rips and has LOTS of punch. I'm betting the 25 watt mode through my 1x12s will be even more friendly. In any event, I've played with 25 watt mode before but was always dialing for different things (doubling down on the smooth thing, by using alnico speaker, etc). This was actually a bit of a surprise though. It really sounded great and just a bit less aggressive.
 
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OK, back from the mountains. I'm enjoying challenging myself right now, so it's going to have to be something a bit demanding.


"For un-relaxing times, make it Two Rock CRS V1 time."
 
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