Hello all,
I'm considering treating myself to a new practice amp. The one I have currently is... pretty terrible. My main amp is a 100W Line6 Spider 2 digital amp, but it's a bit of an effort to bring it downstairs, which is where I do most of my playing.
Does anyone have any recommendations for an amp which would be good for CBGs? Particularly as I'm now getting into winding mag pickups. Looking to spend no more than £150.
Cheers in advance for the input!
Replies
Just picked up a Fender Greta. It being cleared out at Guitar Center for $79.
A couple of things make this amp super sweet. It's all tube, no solid state power section. It also has an aux input to play along with your ipod, drum machine whatever. Not only that but you can hook up an external cab or simply plug the pre-out to your favorite power amp or recording interface and has a analog VU meter.
I've not tried it with an external poweramp, but on it's tiny speaker it has a sweet, sweet saturation when overdriven (using volume as God intended). Plus it looks very, very cool. Like a old radio.
i recently bought an Orange micro 20w head, it has a tube preamp into solid state, going into a 1x12, combo speaker or or 4x10 cab it sounds pretty big and powerful! (-:
£99.00 or so.
Well, I went for the Bugera. I am absolutely loving it! Such a warm, characterful tone. Very varied and plenty of volume. The power attenuator is the icing on the cake, 0.1 watt has lovely full valve sound at a low volume, and the crunch and breakup at 1 or 5 watts is gorgeous. Highly recommended!
I really love my Bug. I live in an apartment so the attenuator is a huge feature for me but to my ears it seems to suck some of the 'tone' out. It just seems lifeless and flat at 0.1 watt. I had an attenuator on a Sovtek Mig60 and I noticed the same thing when cutting the wattage.
The Bugera also takes pedals real well. I have a ton of dirt pedals, everything from OD, Blues Driver to more metal stuff and the little amp eats them up and puts a little tubey character to them.
One thing I do not like about the Bugera is the reverb. It's nice for a 150$ +/- amp but I would have rather had more tone control than digi sterile verb.
It's all subjective and a matter of taste. That amp looks friggen dope too. I love the piping on it.
There has been a huge trend in lower-wattage tube amps for the past few years. When I first started playing guitar for rock music the "thing" was having the highest wattage amp as you could. The problem is that in order to get that tube break up and distortion you really need to push your amp. I bought a Marshall JCM 800 about 15 years ago and I couldn't get a good sound out of it. I just wasn't pushing it hard enough for the break up. You had to have it at pants-flapping/hard hitting drummer volume to get over the top saturation and gain I was seeking.
I had a Peavey Classic 30 that my friends gave me a hard time for having. Peaveys were for kids or pawn shops or both, usually in that order. But I loved the tone I could get out of it at stage volume and bedroom volume.
With lower wattages you get the gain and break up at lower volumes. Keep in mind, a 10 watt tube is not twice as loud as a 5 watt tube. You need 10X the wattage to get twice the volume. The little Bugera fully dimed out, all things being equal, would be half the volume of that 50 watt metal machine rock God monster Marshall.
So you should be getting more distortion at 0.1 watt for a given setting. That is, if distortion is what you want. One reason for the massive 150/200watt tube amps is to have enough headroom to stay clean at stage/concert volumes. My Peavey 30 watter can definitely play a concert but it would be nearly maxed out and therefor pretty distorted.
Glad you like it. A video should be forthcoming then no?
Don't feck about, just buy a Roland MicroCube. I've got one, Hollowbelly has got one..anyone who is anyone has got has one. I've also got a Pignose 20..I used to think it was OK..but it's a P.O.S. compared with the Roland. It's 3 watts... it's all you need for a practice amp.
Nah, just kidding. Kind of.
The engineer at the studio where my band records is a dealer for Roland. My drummer endlessly wants to re-record parts so I get to mess around with some of his stock. I have tried the Micro-Cube and the Cube Street and to be honest neither really seems terribly exceptional to me. Frankly they sound like modeling amps which is an amazing coincidence because that's exactly what they are.
I brought in my Hog 20 one day just to A/B them and I vastly prefer the one decent tone out of the HOG to the 50 sub-par tones ( to my ear) out of the Micro Cube. That said, my experience with a cube is pretty limited and I have had much more experience with the HOG.
I am pretty sure I will buy one at some point. They're not bad amps at all. I think I prefer the Cube Street over the Micro Cube.
In addition... Tube Wattage is much different than Solid State Wattage and is not even a real exact measurement of volume, just a decent indicator of a tube amp.
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