i dont see this obsession with valve amps.... its starting to annoy me...
its like people just refuse to accept that anything other than their big, fat valve amp can get any good sounds at all.....
It's not solely to do with sound though- it's to do with "feel" as well.
as a guy used to playing non-electrical instruments before i started guitar (piano and drums), valve amps are the only way i can really get the "feel" of a real instrument, the way an acoustic instrument reacts to your playing etc....
The fact that it sounds sweet is a bonus, lol.
SS stuff can feel (as well as sound) a bit synthetic sometimes...
I agree though, for the tones your after, a hot rod deluxe is probably not the best choice for you, lol. It's good for blues and cleans, but not much else, IMO- your Laney is probably better for the tones you want, lol. (i'm not trying to start a fight with _tom_ here, I know he loves his, and he's lucky that he's found an amp that suits him at a reasonable price!)
But that doesn't mean you don't want a valve amp, lol. Don't let your laney put you off valve amps if it doesn't have enough gain etc. Odds are you only need one or two tones to suit your style of playing, and they just happened to not be in the lc30- but that doesn't mean you need a modeller.
Oh and I agree with kilby/rob (rob kilby?), since he basically agreed with me, haha (point ceded on the SRV front too, I'm sure Dumble probably gave it to him for free or at cost, lol). During Easter (or heck, just next weekend) visit EVERY music shop you can- that way you can try out a heck of a lot more stuff, without them getting pissed off at you, lol (you just change shops after say an hour!). In your (rough) area, there's machinehead ( :lol: ), coda, wembley guitar centre, holiday music, flying pig, denmark street (about 10 different shops, so you can just go into each and try the same stuff, lol), sound control in oxford street, soho soundhouse, and probably a whole lot more I haven't thought of/heard of etc. The tube (the underground, not a valve :lol: ) is awesome too, you can buy an all-day ticket that'll get you to all those shops bar machinehead and coda for maybe £6 or £7 (from central London anyway, lol).
There's no point in wasting cash on a modeller if it won't do what you want (it might, I'm not saying it won't, lol)- at least a good valve amp that won't, as I've said already, you can get maybe 60-70% of your cash back on. Since you bought your laney second hand, you'll probably get back virtually what you paid for it, lol.
I'm a great believer in the "buy once" ethic. This is partly (more like mainly!) due to me getting caught out with "stopgap" solutions that basically sucked, and then I ended up having to buy the good (expensive) thing in the end anyway. If you know you want a high gain tube amp, for example, why waste £150, £200 or more on a modeller, if you'll still be gassing after a Krank/Engl/Framus/insert HC flavour of the month amp here after buying the modeller anyway? And then you're £200 further away from your dream amp, to add insult to injury...
And I wouldn't rush to sell the Laney till you have a new amp in your possession- I don't know about you, but I'd rather have that Laney than no amp, lol.
As for GAS- I'm seriously struggling to control mine, lol. I'm just lucky that my procrastination/laziness tendencies outweigh the overwhelming GAS I have at the moment, :lol:
It may look like I'm trying to make you buy a tube amp (I'm trying to control my bias, lol, honest), but I just don't want you to rush from buying a laney lc30 (how long have you had it? 3 months?) to rushing into buying something else that might not do what you want either- I know at 15 there aren't many options to make money, and you need to spend what you have wisely (I suppose in a way I was lucky I didn't start till 18- not from the playing point of view, though!). As I and Kilby have said, I think the best thing you can do is just say "I'm not buying anything for 6 months" (or even longer) to take the pressure off. then you can try stuff out and actually really appreciate what you want to get, it's not just random GAS any more.
Another thing to remember is, don't be bowled over by the high gain tube amps either. I know I love how high gain the engls get, but i use the metalcore-type tone maybe 10% of the time- whereas when I was trying them out in the shop I was using it all the time, because I wasn't used to being able to get those tones- silly grin time in other words. Don't let silly grin syndrome get the better of you either, lol (i was just lucky that the amp I got can do the metalcore tones, plus lots of others too).
wow, I'm such a spammer, lol.
Hope that helped!
