My guitar amps

[Deleted]

I have stared to make videos of my amps and a few of my guitars. So here is the first one. I did post this on another thread but since I have this one done, and I would like to have all 3 of my amps together...

I do have another video of the Peavey Delta Blues amp done. I have to upload it and that will take some time.

EB

[Deleted]

Here is the Peavey Delta Blues amp with my yellow guitar. EB

[GuitarAttack Forum]

Sounds good...I think my favorite is the middle pickup.

John

[Deleted]

Jan 27, 2023 13:28:29 GMT -6 GuitarAttack Forum said:

Sounds good...I think my favorite is the middle pickup.

John

Me too! I Also like the middle and the bridge together.

EB

[GuitarAttack Forum]

All - what is it that makes you like an amp? Is there something that makes you promise to never sell it?

Have you ever played one you knew you didn’t like as soon as you started playing?

Just curious…trying to tap into some experience.

Thanks,
John

[dnic]

Jan 27, 2023 12:58:52 GMT -6 @eagleblues said:

Here is the Peavey Delta Blues amp with my yellow guitar. EB

That's a great sounding amp!

[dnic]

Jan 29, 2023 7:36:28 GMT -6 GuitarAttack Forum said:

All - what is it that makes you like an amp? Is there something that makes you promise to never sell it?

Have you ever played one you knew you didn’t like as soon as you started playing?

Just curious…trying to tap into some experience.

Thanks,
John

My main reason for hanging onto anything is that I won't be able to replace later if I wanted or needed to.

I don't use amps very often anymore and when I do I take my 5 watt Epi stack. Two reasons really, it saves my back and the venues I play it never gets that loud.

But I love my Peavy Classic 50 w/ 4 10s. My brother in law gave me a 71 Fender (I think it's called vibrolux). It has a 15" speaker. I did an A/B between the Peavey and the Fender and the Fender won hands down in the tone department. They're a bigness while still being very smooth. Not to say I don't love the Peavey, but side by side I could hear a distinct diff.

I plugged into a Marshall stack at GC once many moons ago. Couldn't tell you which model or what guitar for that matter. And you have to understand that I'm very self conscious in music stores so I may not have given it my all. But It had a very harsh sound IMHO. My son played a dbl stack for years in his bands and sounded great but he can really play.

[Deleted]

For me, the amp I made, I don't think I would ever sell it. It will go to one of my grandkids that play. At least I hope that is what will happen to it. I know that once it was gone, I'll never have another one like again! For one, I made it!

 

 The other two I have, the Delta Blues amp and the Fender twin tone master, I will end up keeping for a long, long time. I may at some point let them go as my heath gets on. But for now, I am at the end of my amp buying days. I'll be 69 next month. I don't pay out anymore. But these three amps I like a whole lot, and they make me happy for what I do.

 I know my amp days are done. I have worked hard to get these and all my guitars. I do have a couple of production guitars I may soon be letting go of. But I have a hard time in letting them go as well. I'll be making videos of them soon.

 But I like the way my 3 amps sound. Each one has something the other one doesn't. Kind of like guitars. They all have something that the other does not have.

 My quest all my life of playing has been trying to find an amp and a guitar that fits everything in one. After all these years, I wind up with these 3. I am really like the Fender tone master amp. It's not heavy and sounds great! I wish that had one of these back when I was young!

 But it's still hard not to like the tube amps. After plugging into the 2 tube amps, there is a feel to them that the digital amp is still lacking. Now, don't get me wrong, the Fender tone master is a great amp! Maybe a lot of it is my head. Kind of like a Fender name brand over a non name brand guitar. LOL Come on, we all know we all hear sound with our eyes! Right? LOL!

 I just watched a video on SRV amps. He had so many. More that I thought he had. Most of them were modded in some way. He borrowed a lot of amps form people he knew at the time. But yet he still pulled off the SRV sound. Proving to me once again, the sound was in him, not the guitar or his amp/s. They even showed him playing a Squier guitar through a Peavey amp. in his early days.

 Well, I looked a some other big named guitar players. They all had their amps and guitars they played. Even the pedals they used. I was surprised to find out the many of then used little or no pedals for their sound/tone!

 Most player have the volumes set around 7 on the tube amps. That seems to be the magic number for most. I have not played my amps at 7 in a long time. For me, I am around 3 or 4. In the last two videos, they were only at 2 or 3. Maybe some day I'll crank them up and do another set of videos.

 But anyway. Like I said, I am done with tone chasing and buying amps. A lot of that is my age, and I don't play out anymore. Heck, I don't even have anyone that I can jam with.

 That is my big reason I won't sell my amps. After I pass away, some else can sell them or give them to my grandkids. Same as most of my guitars. Once I am gone, I will no longer care. If I could, I would take it all with me. LOL!

EB

[antares]

Well John I concur with not letting go of things. An amp that I will never ever miss is a Peavey Blazer practice combo. I once had a Peavey Backstage 30 which I traded along with a script logo MXR Phase 100 (ouch!) for the first of my two Yamaha G100-112 amps. The Peavey amp wasn't that great, but at a time when I was playing along with a Boss Chorus to the first Police album, it was a great clean amp with passable overdrive, and it was really well constructed- really solid. When the Blazer came along I thought it would be along the same lines as the Backstage 30. It was awful and I soon moved it on. I wish I'd kept the MXR Phase 100 too. I wish I'd not traded away my Vox AC30 either. Nor my valve driven tape loop Wem CopyCat. Nor my 15 Watts Wem Dominator Bass amp. Nor my 1970s Fender Musicmaster bass, nor my 1960s Fender Musicmaster guitar which I didn't even know what it was at the time. I swapped that for a Puch moped and £5. Flip.

I don't get rid of "stuff" any more, but that starts to become problematic ...

でつ e&oe ...

[dnic]

A lot of ouches in that list. But for me the worst would letting go of an AC30. OUCH!

[Deleted]

I had 3 AC30s. I got them all in trade, One of them needed to have the filter caps replaced. I fix it, then traded it off for a guitar. LOL!

 They are good amps. But never could get the sound out of them that I liked. But I know a lot of people do like them. I was always going to mod one. I thought that I would find another one to try and do some mods to. But that never happened. I wish now I would have taken the one that I replaced the filter caps on that I would have made the mods to that one since I had it all apart. LOL

EB

[antares]

Another one I'd be glad to see the back of is my Yamaha AA-5. Well actually I have three of them. They are visually similar to a smaller version of a Roland MicroCube. Yamaha intended them to be used with their Silent Guitar range so I shouldn't complain really, but I will. They are just clinically clean lifeless boxes. I can cough louder than an AA-5 too. I bought the other two because you can daisy chain them and I was curious which turned out to be a blind alley because more didn't equate to volume. It's hard to conceive that a Silent Guitar puts out a larger signal than an electric guitar so goodness knows what they are useful for. They flap severely on any bass notes.

That said, because they deploy a digital amplifier, the AA cells last for dozens of hours, and they make good stereo speakers with (eg) an MP3 player because oddly, they are loud enough for them and they have a loudspeaker on two adjacent faces. I guess it's all related to line level input? It's no point trying to boost them with overdrives or preamps. They are abject rubbish and I'd be glad to see the back of them.

でつ e&oe ...

[Deleted]

Steve, you sure do get me to thinking. Back in the 80s I was involved with tent revivals. The guy that owned the tent had these two Gorilla amps. Who here knows of them? They were one 12" speaker, simple and basic. I had pedals that I used back then. It was my first time in hooking up in stereo. I put one amp at each end of the stage. I thought I was in Heaven (no pun intended)

 Over the years since then, I have looked for these little amps. But I never again came across them. They were solid state amps. After that and after I moved to AZ I bought two Carvin amps. They had 2 12" speakers in them. I played in stereo for years with them. They had the trans tub tech in them. I really liked them a lot. One of my granddaughters has one of them. I sold the other one.

 I may have to see what I can do to hook up two of my amps that I now have in stereo. Playing in stereo was like the music hugged me. LOL!

EB

[antares]

I have an Akai Headrush Mk. 2 looper / delay / echo pedal- the one that K T Tunstall made famous (I did hear she was testing a Mk. 3 for them but nothing seemed to come onto the market.) Mine's built like a tank, but one of its great features is four outputs. You can channel each of the delayed signals to each output and thence onto a discrete amplifier- one in each corner of the room, and then you just ask people to look in on you from time to time!

I remember that their manual was factually incorrect regarding switches to tap for loop recording and playback and I eMailed them about it. They updated the online manual as a result of that, but when I checked again many months later, I noted that it was incorrect once more. I guess they may have had to recover from a website crash and the restore point chosen was an old one? I couldn't be bothered to eMail them again. It's a great pedal even if the loop length is a bit limiting, but then KT Tunstall showed just how much can be done within that restriction.

I confess that I struggle with synchronising foot taps with the audio with these loopers- I have the same problem with my Digitech Trio pedal. Old age I suppose.

でつ e&oe ...

[Deleted]

Jan 30, 2023 10:33:06 GMT -6 antares said:

I have an Akai Headrush Mk. 2 looper / delay / echo pedal- the one that K T Tunstall made famous (I did hear she was testing a Mk. 3 for them but nothing seemed to come onto the market.) Mine's built like a tank, but one of its great features is four outputs. You can channel each of the delayed signals to each output and thence onto a discrete amplifier- one in each corner of the room, and then you just ask people to look in on you from time to time!

I remember that their manual was factually incorrect regarding switches to tap for loop recording and playback and I eMailed them about it. They updated the online manual as a result of that, but when I checked again many months later, I noted that it was incorrect once more. I guess they may have had to recover from a website crash and the restore point chosen was an old one? I couldn't be bothered to eMail them again. It's a great pedal even if the loop length is a bit limiting, but then KT Tunstall showed just how much can be done within that restriction.

I confess that I struggle with synchronising foot taps with the audio with these loopers- I have the same problem with my Digitech Trio pedal. Old age I suppose.

でつ e&oe ...

I had a Digetech processor I used for a long time. It had like 99 settings in it. I only used maybe 4. What I liked about it, It had waw, and volume peddle on it. I miss having that.

 When I sold that on eBay years ago, I got more for it than when I bought it new for. I used that money to fund one of me guitar builds.

 I have 4 pedals now. One is a delay, the other is a Fender bassman, the looper, and a distortion pedal. I don't hardly use them, except for the looper. I think the bassman has stereo hook up. Hum...

 I, too, have a problem with getting the looper to stop in the right place. I sometime have to try a few times before I get it. I bet not everyone is lucky on the first try. Some seem to have a handle on it. But I think they still spent some time in learning how.

EB