Amp recommendations!

define affordable? I consider anything under a grand in USD to be an affordable amplifier and anything for 500 or less to be a budget, workingman's amp or in the used/bintage market to be a lucky find or a sleeper model

like my '62 ac30? not an affordable amp, it was sort of affordable when I bought it 15 years ago, but now? can't touch one unless you are wealthy.... on the other hand my 70s Arbiter-made AC30 was super affordable, needed some servicing out of the gate and is beat to shit cosmetically, but it was almost in budget-gear territory around that magic $500 mark.... cheaper than either of my reissues and really a cool version with tis own voice.

I tell everyone to go out looking for vintage 60s/70s traynors if they wanna save money and sound fantastic... most of the models will straddle fender and marshall tones.... the bass models are more tweedish while the reverb/effects models tend to be more blackface fender leaning. Look to pay under $500 for one in good shape. People charge more, they are nuts. There are tons of thema round, they're indestructible and they just aren't that collectible. If you don't want to be loud look at some of the sleeper Gibson models, not super affordable like they used to be, but you can certainly find some nice 5 to 20 watt 2 tone or tweed Gibson amps from about '55to '61 that will go toe to toe with any tweed fender. Make sure you see gut shots though, people used to mod these and ruin them... stay away from anything that's not in the 2 tone leather/gnawgahide covering or tweed covering because after the tweeds/crestlines circa 1962? Gibson systematically went about ruining their amp line

I also recommend everyone try a tiny terror. Its a solid, portable, realitvely reliable modern classic that's like a hot-rodded ac15. Discontinued now but very affordable on ebay and such, they made TONS of them. Try to get a made in the UK one with an early serial #. People love the hybrid microterrors but Iw as not wowed. They don't suck though and the scarcity of controls makes them easy tog et a great base tone from in seconds..... plus they sound basically the same at bedroom and stage levels for sounds both clean and dirty though they excel at the modern orange dirt tone...

Stay away from amps with too many features, these are invariable tossed on crap circuits to cover the lack of tone with unnescasary versatility....

my personal preferences lean towards voxes and small to midsized tweed type amps, but I have a couple of big 50 watt el34 amps again now and have been into old marshalls and fender's blackfaces at times having had pricnetons, deluxe reverbs and a lot of the heads.... you really can't go wrong with a silverface deluxe or if a sivlerface is out of range maybe a reissue with a replacement speaker --- just a great alla rounder for the small club guitarist who isn't looking to join megadeth or children of bodom

I don't know if any of what I just told you will help though! I mean, apart from your budget whata re the considerations? What types of music will you primarily be using it for and what types of venues or recording spaces will it be seeing?

I wouldn't call 30 to 50 watts a practice amp, its big for a lot of modern clubs. I find myself taking the modern ac30 or the matchless outta the hosue with me so I have the half power modes and master volumes just in case because that 30 watts or so is pretty loud even playing clean. Too loud for a lot of people's delicate ears even though I think it feels pretty reasonable.... I mean, tis an electric guitar.

define 'budget' and tell me about your effects usage.... got lots of pedals or do you need an amp that will do the heavy lifting on drive, compression and general voicing? I like my guitar and amp selection to do the work and I sue my effects presets sparingly as like, flavoring.... I would sooner turn an amp up to 10ish and work my volume knob than kick on an overt distortion pedal but I am part of a dying breed.

to me, for the primarily bedroom guy who plays with people once in a blue? can't gow rong with an ac4tv for under $200 used.... I personally prefer the TV models to the ones with the 2 band top boost tonestack (other than the HW, but that's outta your price range I think --- I actually sold my ac4hw to fellow moderator narcist alst year ;-) but by all means try both the TV and the topboost! I think the TV is cheaper though.

I nearly bought myself a Laney Cub until Jim here sold me his old Vox AC4.

Here it is: The Laney Cub 12R. Is $400 considered affordable to you? You haven't really given us much to go off of. There's also the Vox AC4TV, or even the AC4C1 model which go for fairly cheap. If you want to cough up around $200 more, you can probably get the handwired version.

If, however, you want to shoot yourself in the knee, get a Line 6 Spider.

Will the line 6 spider actually shoot you in the knee, or just use modelling to emulate it?

yeah, Line6 gear? it pretends to shoot you in the knee and depending on how picky you are you may or may not give a yelp of pain.... or maybe you'll give a pretend scream to convince your friend your tone's legit

I mean, everything has a musical use, I just think maybe you should make your primary amp and guitar the best quality thing you can get that's suited to your sense of music and the guitar. And I kidna feel that way with instruments and studio equipment in general. Your primary, workhorse pieces should be the ebst thing you can afford that expresses who you are. The trouble with mdoelling amps, soft synths and any of these all in 1 solutions to my ear is that they tend to express some marketing guy's viison of music unless you really, really fuck with them or misuse them. Whereas, like an old plexi? well it can do the cream and zep sounds sure (if you have the chops and can emulate the touch of a Clapton), if that's what you wanna express, but you can play an unusual guitar through it and set it up for a clean tone maybe and all of the sudden its expressing you and your playing and no one is saying 'oh, yeah, the old marshall stack sound again." And there's no digging tog et that sort of expressiveness, tis fast. You can just turn the volume down, grab a telecaster? boom, you are doing something a little off the ebaten path that's not going to be a preset on the spider combo amp. Oh yeah, and the old tube amp will sound really good in general because it was handmade with some love... but on the other hand you can misuse crap technology and do some neat things. I've been using a beaten down old fender frontman a lot lately as a preamp for guitar and synths because it just sounds so raunchy with the awful distortion circuit engaged, volume cranked and then a padded signal off the speaker output into the recorded via a DI... or it interesting to reamp a synth, right? but use the frontman driving good speakers like some of my celestion blues or old green and silver backs or even a fullr ange PA cab just tog et way on the other side of the spectrum. Bought the frontman for like 10 bucks outta a GC's used area on a whim. I modded it a little and decided its an effects processor now. As an amp? eh, I have real amps. Vitnage stuff, boutique stuff, fancy tube and solid state hifi power amps... PA gear. But as an effect, embracing the bad sound and weak design? well? it was worth 10 clams

There's also the Vox AC4TV, or even the AC4C1 model which go for fairly cheap. If you want to cough up around $200 more, you can probably get the handwired version.

yeah, the C1, that's the topboost oen that's closer to the HW circuit but with a 10" cab, inferior components and no 'hot mode'

the handwired is really a nice sounding amp... I just like playing really loud and Iw asn't using it after the initial honeymoon phase so I gave her to Narcy.

What bad English?

Sorry about that, I'm new on the forum, my budget is around $400-500

in your shoes I would check out a ac4tv head and look at 2 cabs, maybe a 1x10 for the bedroom and a 2x12 for gigs, but that's me... I think if you go that way you can be ready for anything, you will have adequate clean and a great amp based drive tone which a lot of dudes lack in these days of 5 dirt box pedalboards with lots of options and sketchy, ill defined crunch/solo tones... I lean on my amps and no one ever accuses me of having a weak dirt tone for any genre, even metal and I cut the mix like a hot knife through butter at any volume level without swallowing any other parts of the arrangement and on tape? or harddrive these days? I have much better guitar sounds than a lot of whats on the radio... good SE, class A tube amp will get you in that ballpark with enough power for small clubs and the ac4tv has that great rock n roll voicing and speaker options will be the thing that helps you blow it up, shrink it down and get some different colors before you need to stomp any gadgets... and its going to give your buckers and strat singles equal lovin' unlike some designs that excel at clean with fenders and dirt with gibbies and that's that --- you have to play the amp though, tis half your instrument and its a dying artform... kids today play their pedals but a lot of that gets lost by the time it gets to the 2nd row of the audience but the amp? playing into the amp and working your guitar controls? that hits the back of the theater or club

if you need to do metal though, that 1 little tube, lack of phase inverter distortion and the small, low iron output transformer will be a little weedy and midrangey no matter how you shape whats coming into the amp, but for every other type of music from jazz to alt rock to Clapton/beck stuff? good way to go

vox amps are literally some of my favorite amplifiers ever. they nail things from Elvis to Van Halen to Nirvana to Pixies. you can use the bass control for that, and a vox on high gain with reverb fully up is so so so amazing. it gets to the point where I won't put my usual DS-1 or RAT on it.

a high gain vox? with reverb? what, you mean some kind of modern models?

I am about to go off, so if you don't want to hear some tone snobbery stop reading:

as far as I am concerned vox only makes 6 models with various tweaks over the years: AC4, AC10, AC15, AC30, AC50, AC100.... and I don't like those custom classic ac50 and 100s, I don't get what vox was doing with those, they sound like everything else in channel switching... oh, and there's the notorious ac120, that's a weird beast that's actually pretty cool with the 4 band EQ, but its not terribly voxy... the rest of the stuff is really meh and I don't like to think about them. A stock ac30 from one of the better runs is so perfectly what it should be that vox could justs top trying to innovate. I kinda wish they would. I mean, there were a few vintage voxes with spring reverb, but no one used the reverb because it was a bad circuit designed specifically to avoid the Hammond patent because Tom Jennings didn't want to pay the licensing fee, cheap bastard. Adding anything to an ac30 apart from a some voicing switches for bright, hot, half power or a post phase inverter master is like total blasphemy to me. The ACs are the most 'right' factory amps stock. Like, fender comes up with some cool new stuff sometimes and should keep at it, but the brits? Marshall, Hiwatt, Orange/Matamp and Vox? They all could just keep making the models they are known for and nothing else. Marshal's last good ampw as the silver jubilee. Everything up to that point was gold. After the Jubilee? They made one passable amp, the 900SLX. Which is very much a single channel jubilee versus the other 800s. Marshall is just defined by the pelxi fronts, the 2203/04s and the jubilee and they can just quit with those, theya re all perfect at being what they are. Orange? they made 2 cool amps recently, the terrors and the sadly discontinued rocker 30. Nothing else worth much of a damn. I am curious to try the custom shop but I suspect its the one amp that's like the old oranges which were really amazing and unique amps. Every version of the 80, 120 and 200 were ass kicking in different ways and they just can't improve on them. Hiwatt? They have 3 legit amps, the 50, 100 and 200. All great designs, just scaled power sections of the same killer sound. Hiwatt tried some other things after Dave died, but none of it measures up though the 80s 30 watter is an interesting side story. They still coudla just quit with the original 3 models which I believe was DR's intention ebfore his untimely death. Vox coulda stopped designing around '65. As interesting as the UL amps are they aren't that great and they just didn't do anything since then that holds up. All of Dick Denny's great design work was over after he did the 50 and 100... being the 1st guitarist who designed an amp he hit the nail on the ehad so squarely with his amps that he coulda just rested on his laurels. Sound city shoulda just kept making the L100 and nothing else (the concord is like the crappiest amp ever and the mk4 50+ and those amps with multicolored knobs? so weird stock, not a primary stage amp or even useable for a lot of music), Watkins coulda made the dominator mk1 and nothing else and been legendary. Selmer? all they did was wreck their existing models in the 70s, in the 60s you had the two zodiacs and the treble and bass heads like mine and those designs were just awesome during their heyday.... let the new guys at the table design new tube amps, oldsters? keep cranking out the fabulous amps from your heyday with modern components! Its hard to beat an 800 or an ac30 so why try? just give me more of those!

DS-1 or RAT on it.

I love the rat, but I seldom bother with my rat-type dirt box set to a typical rat sound.... I just let the amps talk and they talk loud! you would laugh if you saw the presets on my nova drive, I have like one with a decent amount of gain. Into a dead clean amp my main 2 presets (one for singles, one for buckers thata re very similar, just slightly different midrange response and gain/output) are barely adding any dirt, but they goose an amp that's breaking up in a really musical way because the rat and tubescreamer sides are in parallel working different frequency ranges with some clean blend and a slight output boost overall. I can't even imagine using a rat type of pedal the normal way, it just eats up all your dynamics and touch. I don't think I've turned an OD or Dist up past 3 on the gain knob in 10 or 15 years other than for testing purposes in the store. I just don't wanna hear that. Well, not into an amp anyway. What I'll do recording DI through like a moog filter? well that's another story but then its less of a guitar sound and more of a synth thing and I tend to gravitate to the sansamp in those scenarios

Hm. I like loud blasty type distortion, to a point. if it loses tone I'm no longer interested.

I find my favourite has come to simply going louder. Set a Vox to the right amount of volume and gain, and you achieve the perfect metallic, low gain tone. Tossing in a low-gain Rat makes it much more touch-sensitive. The volume on the VHT Melo-Verb can further add some drive and I just love the aound from it. Hell, I think I might sit with the Deucetone for a long time.

Lol, I think the consensus is that Alan should get a Vox AC4. Get it modded, too! I hear the AC4TV mods make it sound so much better.

Hm. I like loud blasty type distortion, to a point. if it loses tone I'm no longer interested.

there's a lot less distortion in my amp-based sounds than than you might think you're eharing on my recordings. The distorted qualities poke out of a mix. In general less is more with all distortion the minute you're going through a mic and a mixing console or other gear that might exaggerate those harmonics. When iw as still an engineer professionally Iw as always trying t talk the punk bands into using less gain for a muscley and more powerfully raw guitar sound. Those who listened to me were always happy in the end.

This is a very very good point.

There's a time and place to blow people's faces off and it isn't the recording studio.

no no, this is true of live too.... this isn't about the aesthetics of when a lot of distortion serves the song, its a question of how a room reacts to distortion, how it interacts with the band dynamic and also how every piece of gear capturing it will add distortion of its own as well as changing the harmonic balance in ways that might increase the audibility of the 'distorty' components of the guitars hamronics making it far more mushy than you think standing in front of the cab.

On live guitar? I did FOH off and on for years, guys use too much broadband distortion, they disappear in the mix and sound smaller even if they're blasting loud. Worse still they will get that big rectifier bass sound on their guitr and eat the bass sound so its an indistinct mush behind my great drum sound and no matter how much I tweak the PA the stage volume in anything less than 1000 seats will keep it muddy. Its like a tinny can of bees anyhere but in front of the amp or the very back of the room on axis with the front of the amp where a 4x12 wants to throw the sound, but then in the back it peaky, fatiguing mids and non-musical thumping. Its sound REINFORCEMENT, particularly in mid-sized and small spaces. I am filling in and helping, but I can't help a bad sound. It could be frustrating when you would talk to a young band who was dong their first decent sized show opening maybe and you wuld sound check get as good as you could and hit the talkback and go "are you open to a suggestion or 2 in roder to maximizethe impact you'll have on the audience? I promise that unlie most sound guys I won't suggest you turn your VOLUME down." and then they go, "no, we're ready to rock, good job on monitos, it sounds great up here. Most of the time the only faces gainiacs (and I love that term) are melting are their own. For indescribably distorted guitar sounds I would rather guys use in-ears and I get something DI like a fractal. You see more and more of that in the heavy world because they don't want to turn the distortion down but they need like a STUDIO mix to stand a chance of it melting the faces of even the 1st row. Alright alright, I am way off on a tangent. Maybe you got something from this though, I've been at this a long time, especially counting my non-professional time lately.

if you are really interested I can tell you so much more, but live is literally THE WORST with distortion from a dedicated amp/speaker rig with a mic on it. you're getting acoustic interference, bleed from the drums and bass, the microphone adds THD (and its usually a shit mic like a 57 where the crap output transformer adds gain and balances it but it distorts like a mofo when hit ahrd and on guitar? well, for recording uses I like to take the transformers out of 57s, try it)... then your console might have some THD , you might have a gate to help with bleed but that adds some clipping because there's gain staging in that VCA, compression at the desk? even justa cross the mix buss? even the cleanest comrpessors distort subtley at times and they are definitely grabbing harmonics and cranking them up making distortions sound more distorted.... PA speakers???? should I go on? Don't even get me started on EQ, even so called linear phase EQ has distortion induced by the phase shift of overlapping fitlers....

this is just applied science applied of course to the observations of a guy with good ears and a lot of experience with all different music situations

EDIT:

notice that though I mouth off on this forum ad nauseum, when I work with other people's music and I have an opinion I ask if its welcome first... maybe my opinion holds no water in some instances because murky can of buzz is what the band's vision is and their definition of good sound, because tis just subjective, these are generalities.... but there's a point where stylistically compromised sound quality is just bad sound that an audience doesn't connect with on a high level if at all... sometimes its just listener error on my part though and I always allow for that and if no one wants my thoughts on the sound I just keep it to myself and work with what I get

although this is why I don't miss commercial recording and doing live sound -- I'm super opinionated but super respectful too and it just gets me all bothered some days... tis better just to not do it for other people even if they beg! its not like there's money in it, its a labor of love

I mean, if you think you're melting faces and you look at the audience reaction and the reaction you see is face melt who am I to tell you those faces haven't melted and that they're a bit unsatified? If you're satisfied then I am wrong. If you wind up let down or unsatisfied or whatever though? don't blame me, don't get dejected. You made decisions x, y and z and people wanted a, b andc. If you wanted people to like you? you could pay attention to that audience and you could listen to people's suggestions.... if you follow your muse its all about you and you can't expect any specific reaction. If you make a challenging record with harsh sonics then be prepared for a negative response from the majority or to be ignored completely (at least initially) unless there's a real specific convergence of cultural factors making people unusually receptive. I think a lot of musicians aren't pragmatic and they don't manage their expectations. They want to be mavericks but they want to be loved too and its great if you can be both but its hard. You have to decide if in music Machiavelli applies...

I am way off in left field here but maybe someone will take something from this and it will inform their work and they'll do something special in the studio or their shows will get better or different or whatever and they'll better manage their expectations and their working relationships which will help them have a signature sound... its people behind the gear and on the other side of the speakers and that's kidna the secret of tone and just music.

yeah, true. i feel that. i was recording a guitar track yesterday and the producer said, "do me a favor. i know you're new to guitar but turn your fuckin gain down." i did and the recording is awesome.