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#220979 by AJ6stringsting
Thu Aug 22, 2013 6:22 am
I knew if I posted this, you guys would whip up some of your voodoo amp recipes !!!!
I'm fixing to trade my Crown power amp off, for one of them Carvin tube power amps. I have my fingers crossed, so I get more tube crunch from my 2112 rack processor. The 2112 has the crunchy, spongy organic tube compression with the two 12AX7's in there.

#220985 by SCReams
Thu Aug 22, 2013 12:21 pm
GuitarMikeB wrote:It's funny how many people these days think learning and developing their guitar abilities on an acoustic guitar is a waste of time! I see guys who have been playing just a few years, yet have some decent electric guitars and can't play them worth a sh!t!. They can't even tune them. It's not my place to tell them "get a $300 acoustic and develop your finger strength and strumming", but what I hear is people not improving month after month because of the laziness that playing an electric has allowed them to rely on.


My mother, who has never touched a guitar, told me that she wouldn't get me an electric until I could play my acoustic. While she was worried more about the noise, she actually planted a lot of seeds that really developed me. At the time, I thought I was struggling in adversity, and playing an acoustic "sucked", but when I did get an electric I was better than a lot. Nobody ever had to hear the one string rendition of Smoke on the Water, or Iron Man with all the wrong chords.

#220995 by Starfish Scott
Thu Aug 22, 2013 2:20 pm
lol you forgot "cat scratch fever" ..

#221489 by stratmanel84
Sun Sep 01, 2013 7:07 pm
For me, it's tube amps all the way for electric guitar. These days, I'm loving the 30-watt, 2-KT66, single channel w/Tone & Vol, cathode-biased amps I've been building. Built one for myself, and one of my guitar-playing friends after hearing/trying my amp, had me build one for him as well. (Mine is the tweed amp on top.)

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Strat

#221492 by gbheil
Sun Sep 01, 2013 8:36 pm
Cannot help but be amused at the clutter on your work bench.

The sign of a master craftsman . . . 8)

#221580 by jw123
Tue Sep 03, 2013 12:57 pm
I bet thats a good sounding amp!

Ive thought of trying to build a few myself, but hell Im just a player!

#221617 by SCReams
Tue Sep 03, 2013 7:03 pm
I wish I had the know how to build an amp. That would be so fun, and you'd appreciate it more knowing you made it.

#222183 by Cajundaddy
Sat Sep 14, 2013 3:14 am
SCReams wrote:I wish I had the know how to build an amp. That would be so fun, and you'd appreciate it more knowing you made it.


Building an amp these days is not so tough. If you can follow directions carefully and have good soldering technique you can do it. There are a lot of plans available for DIY amp projects on the net and a Western Electric circuit is pretty well understood at this point. Go for it!

#222203 by GuitarMikeB
Sat Sep 14, 2013 2:45 pm
Tube amps - yep
Solid state amps - for some sounds - yep
Plugging electric guitar through a digital multi-fx pedal into a pa system - NO!
Two guys last night at the open mic. One had some kind of strat clone, plugged int an fx unit, a Roland-midi unit, an iPad for backing tunes, all plugged into the pa. Other guy had a Carvin plugged into some kind of fx unit with the compressor adjusted too stiff. Both sounded pretty bad.

#222204 by gbheil
Sat Sep 14, 2013 3:11 pm
Our guitarist plugged his Tele into my Carvin Nomad Thursday night.
You should have seen the look on his face. 8)

#222207 by Paleopete
Sat Sep 14, 2013 4:09 pm
George - Sounds like the first time I plugged into a tube amp...I had been running solid state for years, knew nothing about tubes at all, except "those are OLD..." I had used Kustom and Peavey amps for around 15 years, never was satisfied with any of them. All solid state.

So I went to sit in with a band, as an audition. Their guitar player, who had decided to stay, handed me a Gibson ES335 plugged into a Peavey Butcher, and apologized that his "good guitar" had broken a string...(a Yamaha SG2000, I later found out why he called it his good guitar...great is more like it...)

Anyway the damn thing sounded so good I could barely play the first song just listening to how stinkin' GOOD I suddenly sounded...got my head together after a minute or two and managed to play some good guitar, 3 songs and got down, they told me come back any time.

I asked him about it later, how did he get that amp to sound so good when I Had been fighting mine for years...he asked me what I played. Peavey Pacer. OK that's why...this is a tube amp. Pacer is solid state. No comparison. He also told me he could get a good sound out of any tube amp no matter what nameplate it had on it. Peavey, Marshall, Fender, Randall...it didn't matter.

I've been a tube head ever since, the difference in sound made a believer out of me in 30 seconds. Or less...I now know he was right, just about any tube amp will get me a good sound. It may be a little more gain than I really like, such as Marshalls or Mesas, but I can still get a good sound, and if I have a few minutes to tweak the tone and gain settings, I can get it awful close to just what I want.

But it all goes back to that first minute or so with a tube amp after playing solid state for years...it can be compared to stepping out of a Volkswagen and into a Cadillac...

#222318 by AJ6stringsting
Tue Sep 17, 2013 3:07 am
I ran across some SS amps that are damn close to tubes : the Carvin Sx-300, a Peavey Trans Tubes and a Behringer amp ( which model, the name eludes me now).
On my Digitech 2112, I was blown away that I was able to recreate my 1980's Carvin X-100B, Marshall JCM 800, 1972 Fender Twin Reverb, Fender Princeton, VHT Pitbull, Mesa Mark IV and Soldano SLO. I feed my RP-1 and RP-12 into the 2112 that is tonally set up as the amps mentioned.
The State of Solid State is slowly getting better.
But I'm biased, those 12AX7's sure spoiled the hell out of me over the years.
As JW stated, that thick tone is King and Majestic. Computer chips and circuit boards can't emulate the power of those burning carbons in the tube !
:wink:

#222344 by Paleopete
Tue Sep 17, 2013 2:50 pm
Good point, solid state has improved since the 70's, if I didn't have the option of keeping my Fender Champ running for a practice amp, a Peavey Trans Tube would be worth looking at, for a practice amp...

Onstage though, NOT...

#222351 by gbheil
Tue Sep 17, 2013 4:58 pm
One of our guitarist use my Carvin Sx-300.
It actually makes for a decent blend of sound with my Marshall.

Biggest negative from my POV with tube amps is controlling the volume in the stage environment.

Nothing I have tried to reduce the volume on stage and in studio has been without negative affect on the tone.

My Marshall is a class A of 5 watts, it sounds best with the volume pot set around 7.5 - 8.5

Invariably the sound men first look at my little rig with disdain.
Then when we sound check they have to come look again.
"Man . . . that little thing is loud"

#222364 by mistermikev
Wed Sep 18, 2013 12:29 am
I'm not sure what it is in me, or what it says about me that I see threads like this and think "ok, your mission, should you choose to accept, is to play devil's advocate and find a scenario where solid state is actually better than tube"...

if you play jazz.. polytone
victor wootens' brother (not sure his first name) plays a jazz chorus and while he's not a tone guru I have to admit he sounds great live.

and the jazz chorus, not much beats that for a crystal clean tone... fender princeton chorus or peavey stereo chorus also sound great for that one thing...
but then those who know me know I have several tube amps so who am I kidding?

sans... I think so much of tubes sounding good at low volume is just that EVERYTHING sounds better loud right? I've got a killer ant (1.5w tube) and it sounds pretty good cranked and is very quiet... but I bet it would sound better loud!

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