Quote from: phatt on December 26, 2021, 07:21:11 AM
FWIW, I rely on pedals now and just use a very basic SS amp, Actually just an old SS Laney keyboard Amp.
For my sounds most fancy pants guitar amps are way to hot rodded. for SS amps I'd rather work with amps that have a simple less tone coloured response and let the pedals do the magic. most hot rod multi channel amps are frustrating as the clean is ok but the other channel/s are often useless and many players end up using pedals for most of the sounds they need anyway.
One wonders why bother spending big money on all the fancy channel switching crap if all you need is a simple amp and a few pedals. One big advantage of pedals is you can just swap them out if they don't work for you,,No solder needed. win win.
As much as I dislike the idea of a pedal board they prove to be far more versatile than expensive Amps.
Yes, agreed, I play many many genres but I never go more than... I don't know, Stray Cats-level overdrive, unless I want a really saturated neck pickup type lead for a soul/r&b part, but even that's miles away from "shredder" territory
The fixation on this particular amp... well, it's two-fold--educational (for the end user) and utilitarian
As I mentioned in my PM I'm a guitar teacher, and I always start my kids out on classical guitar. Invariably one day they either show up and say "I'm in jazz band now" or "I'm getting into this genre of music now" and at that point there's a fork in the road... most still play classical at that point but we start playing electric guitar then, too. This Wards amp on the bass channel is actually pretty fantastic for a piezo loaded acoustic guitar--totally rolls off all those annoying high end frequencies and provides some much needed low end, which is great because they can keep playing the guitar they have & just add a pickup, rather than buying a whole new guitar. For jazz that channel works well too, as do the other channels if you fiddle with the tone knob on the guitar... really 3 solid flavors of jazz tone in that one amp. Neo-soul is popular with kids now and that amp does it. Emo/indie/math rock is popular with kids now and that amp does it. If they want to learn something involving gain... it becomes an excellent learning tool for "this is how amps work, you turn it up and use your guitar's volume to control the amount of gain" etc. So... I guess in short, this amp does everything I need it to do without any fancy channel switching etc, and is really the only amp I've found that does that. The Yamaha THR series is still my go-to for kids who want to get into recording, but for performing purposes it doesn't cut it, it's not loud enough to keep up with a jazz band or even a drummer, let alone a high school drummer.
Of course... parents will often ask for a quieter solution for distortion lol, but I'm not always quick to tell them about pedals. Sometimes I want to force them to play clean for a while before I introduce "makeup for technique". Same with compressor pedals... can make some passages twice as easy to play, but as an educator... I don't always want that.