Bare Knuckle Pickups Forum
Forum Ringside => Guitars, Amps and Effects => Topic started by: Aizaku on April 18, 2012, 08:48:27 AM
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Hey there. After getting the Bugera 1960 Infinium today and realising it wasn't for me I'm back on the market for a head. I just need to know if there's anything out there that's good. I want a real smooth liquid lead sound; no scooped metal here. Feel free to recommend anything, even the unfashionable. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers
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Budget? Power needed?
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Budget? Power needed?
Budget's up to $500 (I can stretch to $600) and from experience I like 50 watters. Anything lower and you have to use hateful EL84 tubes and anything above stays too clean and gets annoyingly loud too quickly.
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look out for anything used.
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A Jet City 50w springs to mind. Or a used Marshall DSL50 with a Tubescreamer.
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I'm a fan of the Egnater/Randall modular stuff. You can get almost any tone you desire and there's plenty of high gain modules available from the geneious modders.
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what did you not like about the Bugera? so we'll know what not to recommend :)
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Well if you want a big name, I'm sure you can find a used JCM-800. Maybe a bit more info on application and tones you want would help us help you.
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with a Tubescreamer.
that's what i was sorta thinking. a lot of those high gainers get a lot smoother with a ts in front
i mean, i wouldn't call my laney gh50l smooth at all really, but with a ts (clone) in front it's passable.
it's also a bit like a guitar or amp that's too bright versus too dark- obviously the ideal is "just right", but normally you can work with "too bright" and tame the brightness, but it's a lot harder to increase it if it's not there already, and it's a bit the same with smoothness (in my limited experience, which might be complete cr@p :lol: ). it's a lot easier to smooth something which isn't smooth enough than make something which is smooth edgier.
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I second a jet city 50W. It knocks pants anything else in the same price range and scares amps twice it's price. and it does exactly what you're looking for plus more. and it's dirt simple.
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I was looking at the Jet Citys to use as an all around versatile amp. What is it like for metal, especially with a TS9 (or whatever overdrive Inext buy) in front of it? Also, what's it like regarding clean tones? And is it good for instrumental types of metal like Petrucci, Satriani, Timmons, etc?
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I've played a jet city 50W extensively in a local place and it shares a lot in common with its big brother, the Soldano HR 50+ which i'm lucky enough to own because i found one at a very low price a few years back when the economy was shite and every one was doing fire sales.
In short these amps love pedals but you don't need for most things excluding extreme preamp distortion styles. I wouldn't use a screamer because they're an extremely mid rangey amp to start with. everyone does the clapton, knopfler, moore assosciation, but i think you've got way more in common there with cantrell, slash etc. you can back off the mids for a scooped tone, but these amps are built to cut thru a mix live. Steve via used to use the SLO100 in his live rig so you got virtuoso stuff covered. the first channel is actually pretty clean if you want it to be, but i use it for 70's rock, with a good boost it nails things like skynards solo tones. otherwise i know jazz players use SLO's and HR50's for the clean channels, blues guys like the dirt in the first channel when the gain is up, and everyone from hard rock to heavy metal go for the lead channel. Basically this amp plus a few choice OD's, boosts and fuzzes and some careful eq'ing and careful guitar tone and volume controls can do most anything.
the Jet city 50Watter is 85% of the way to a full fat soldano for a 5th of the price
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How about the 100 watt with the depth mod? Is the depth mod something you can turn off with a knob? And would you say this is worth having for instrumental styles over the original 100w? When I say metal btw, I mean more like Power Metal bands like Avantasia, Edguy, etc.
Also what's this amp like at lower volumes?