Join the world's largest community of musicians and their gear.

Eh, as I said, you call the tune, you pay the Piper. It's life, I'm used to it. Keep playing the hand I'm dealt until I turn up Aces'n'Eights. So far Lady Luck has been kind in that regard, leastwise.

Well, looks of it I'll be going with the MBrace or building my own, as there just donae seem to be much out there. Building my own, could possibly fill the niche, and if I got my costs down, and it's effective, could maybe bring it to market myself one day.

Not bloody likely, but hey! 3D printing makes many things possible nowadays! :D

I believe more expensive is better, to a point. I would argue that a $3,000 guitar is infinitely better than a $300 guitar within the same category, however, I believe that the difference in quality between say, a $1,500 guitar and a $3,000 guitar would be negligible. But again, to echo most people here... many of these things can be subjective.

oh yeah, the 90s Laney amps thata re just modded 800s like the GH, VH and Iommi models are fairly robust, not as road tough as an 800 but not as finnicky and delicate as a dsl/tsl 2000... I've seen the 3 channel one go down on someone but never had a problem with the single channel with boost models I had. The most metal version would be the tonny iommi signature which he still uses to this day. Of course I don't think it comes in less than 100 watts so a GH50L in a combo might be your best bet. It really depends what era of metal you're after... you get to thrash and the mesas start coming in for a lot of guys as do the preamp/poweramp setups and then all these death emtal guys were using solid state and the blackmetal thing is like those god awful valvestates, right?.... you just gotta figure out what you want. Marshall's last great amp in my book was the silver jubilee and the 900 series was kinda a pale imitation with more bells and whistles, since then they've just been designing junk and maintianing their rep on the reissues.

if I needed to do anything with heavy gain and reasonable clean tone from the same amp without using a distortion pedal I would be looking to buy another soldano hot rod 50+. The clean have a smidge of hair to them, the whole gain range of the dirty channel is hyper useable. Amp cuts, sounds more british than the SLO100 (also excellent), is indestructible and easy to service... You can really balance some great tones one a hot rod series Soldano, Im not a switcher guy but this is the only channel switching amp I've ever regretted selling. It was a joy to play. Very modern if you want but capable of very old school hard rock and early emtal tones too. Its the closest I've ever come to getting hiwatt clean to crunch tones and cranked marshall tones from one amp without building something myself.