Under rated Tone Beast Amplifier

I like that scans of manual I found have all the Bias values and how to set compressor and values to check on certain components as well...

Also seen scans of a folder with setting cards in them giving settings for lots of diff styles. No it won't be be all and end all bit a good start point and uses the filter and variable point modrange so you can see hear what they do for different sounds.

Love the detail it goes into on controls and how to use them as well. Really handy stuff to actually know what's going on and why to use certain controls in certain ways.

Yeah i had use of a wee 12 when I played as a teen and i loved the sound It produced... Shame i didn't play for 20 odd years in mean time.

its a shame Moog didn't do more guitar stuff... just the 3rd series maestro effects, lab amps and moogerfoogers :-(

Agreed those big Maestro pedals are cool...

You seen the new product??? It's basically a lab series preamp in a pedal :)

yeah, looks itneresting... there's a trend with that right now, complex 70s solid state preamps as pedals... there's a Sunn Beta Lead pedal that a lot of people keep sniping about for isntance.

https://reverb.com/item/4442454-alchemy-audio-assembled-aion-electronics-lab-series-l5-preamp-2-channel-guitar-effects-pedal

https://reverb.com/item/4361550-isp-technologies-beta-preamp-bass-effects-pedal

that's ISP's bass one, but there's anotehr company doing Beta Leads, forget who... this si the new thing I guess. So amny controls on all this stuff. I'm a studio engineer by trade and when i'm performing msuic i don't wanna think about anything like that, just turn up and go... but I guess for sme people mroe is more!

I'm going to reveal my specific bargain amp here. Its a specific traynor form a specific couple eyars that's quite rare but is CHEAP. No more than $300. The traynor YVM-1 Voicemaster PA head. Needs to be a mk1 circuit. The mk2 is a better bass amp and eveyrthing after that is solid state, so the date codes need to be '69 or earlier tog et the rock guitar beast (although you can probably mod the mk2 circuit to rock like fuck). Its a bargain for a hand-wired 50 watt head with a unique sound that's still PURE classic rock. The giant old Hammond transformers are probably worth 200 bucks each on the sued parts market and I only paid about 200USD for mine so do the math. Youc ould also throw this amp off the top of a building and then go gig with it, its that sturdy. From clean to dirty it leans to vintage orange based on tis very matamp-ish topology (it gives up the OD goods pretty early for a non-master amp but its one of those great old amps that keeps getting louder for a while even when fully distorted). This amp is a great rocker and its way cheaper then most other traynors because people don't know about it yet (or they heard the later versions that don't sound as good for guitar)... downside? Only 2 years of production with this circuit and many of these have been bought up and gutted for parts (apart from the transformers it also is loaded with the valuable mustard caps you found in old marshalls and voxes) or modified into different circuits by guys like Fuchs who likes to turn this amp into a Dumble.

Will be sure to cast eyes over any old traynors i see locally. You never know what may turn up...

all the tube traynors are good amps, the odler ones are the best... stay away from the el84 designs sicne they're not unlike your WEM in general and the fixed bias EL84 ones might be too much like the clean channel of your Crate... but 6V6 ones and EL34 ones deliver some rgeat fender and amrshall tones and the PA, as I said, is like an Orange/Matamp or more of bass amp kinda design but with 4 discrete channels... the good bass mates are like tweed harvards or 6v6 powered low watt plexis... the good bass masters are tweed bassman heads, very JTM45ish and they evolve along similar lines to marshall's plexis but with less shrill top and more low, like the bass amps (although ironically the mk2 voicemaster PA makes a much better bass amp for clean and loud bass reproduction)

tryanors are harder to get in the UK, they were Canadian like garnet and like garnet they mostly saw distribution in north america

its a shame, but I keep trying to think f underrated tonebeasts on a budget and all the stuff I used to swear by has blown up in reputation and value! Sunn, Ampeg, Selmer, Sound City, silverface champs and princetons (they actually did a silver reissue PR, dude! used to be able tog et them for peanuts back when I used princetons). most Traynor models... even Supro, Harmony, Dano and the store brands they made have all blown up thanks to their assoiation with famous player sold and new. Hell, even the humble Laney AOR heads are getting pricey and well known in the hard rock world! Thanks to the itnernet there justa ren't many amps elft udner a rock for intrepid guitarists to discover... and with all vitnage stuff going up, its ahrd tow ant to experiment with some no-name when anything old commanding $500+ usually. Back when these amps were a quarter of that buy in it was cool to get oddball old amps and hope they worked right and souned cool... worst case scenario was $100 loss and you could just budget ahrder for a couple weeks to make good the shortfall. Now? I pity young kids coming in. We live ina golden age of gear. There's more new stuff then ever before thata ctually soudns good and is built with care... all the old stuff is revered and wel maintained... but the buy in is huge on a lot of the goodies new and old alike.

I'd love a norlin es-369 and les paul professional but even though most people didn't rate them and also say norlin were worst (especially late) they are getting prety expensive now :( so that ain't gonna happen... May Need to be an Ibanez recording copy (which strangely looks like a professional and not a recording duh)

Wonder if there are some 90's 2000's kit that got overlooked and costs peanuts that will eventually be rated.... Digitech pedals are cheap but some are very good... The amp that started this crate vintage Club...

Trouble is days of internet people can look everything up, hear them played, see original and s/h prices so days of undiscovered gems is probs over so guess youg lot now are stuck with Chinese stuff.

I dunno, the 90s was the ebginning of the big quality roll-off in mass-produced amps and it was the beignning of the boutique boom where now we have this huge construction/component quality chasm (even if prices don't always reflect that, ahem, orange and the company masquerading as hiwatt)

Agree about quality but bound to be odd other bargain that's way below what they cost and under rated that people will start to rate somewhere down line. But will the stuff last is obv a thought ????

I'd love a norlin es-369 and les paul professional but even though most people didn't rate them and also say norlin were worst (especially late) they are getting prety expensive now :( so that ain't gonna happen... May Need to be an Ibanez recording copy (which strangely looks like a professional and not a recording duh)

70s and early 80s MIJ gutars are the bomb... Ibanez is probably the brand with the biggest range in quality of their gibson copies ging from total junk to better-than-gibson, but the used market reflects this and even the garbage can have pretty high asking prices. Check out Greco and Burny. There are still some deals to be ahd frm those brands. But do your research.

Norlins are a mixed bag... a problem with a lot of 70s gibson models that didn't see severe quality downgrades is that some guitars carried the alte 60s thin nut well into the 70s under norlin andthat's a deal rbeaker for a lot of people... I don't care that much personally but if you have wide fingers then it might make the guitar less of a player for you.. I'm not going to pretend I think Norlin era gibbies are worth what the current asking prices tend to be... so many have those crazy, low/wide frets or horrible accordion bridges. Ironically I think Norlin had some great sounding buckers. The T-Tops of that era sound fantastic and I believe the Shaw buckers and Dirty Fingers came out under Norlin.

on the 369, great headstock design, not super iconic but hugely functional (its been reused on the midtown, which is a highly underrated modern guitar)... HOWEVER, you willw ant to dump the fine tuning tailpiece. I'm telling you, they aren't that helpful, they cause more tuning issues then they solve due to an extra point of slippage AND they're a tone suck compared to a quality bar. All the moving parts suck up string vibrational energy and transmit less into the body. This of course goes for the Ibanez artists (I think those are the ones Carlton and Scofield would use?) only with Ibanez of that era who knows what the post spacing will be to replace the tailpiece... gibsons generally just drop in a Gibson part.

Would be Alu Stop bar or vibrola without arm as a tail piece. don't ask and i know everyone says the tone ain't as good as it is with Stop bar but a lot of my fave 335 tones came from a 335 or similar specced exactly like that. Including my fave bb king tone as its a bit less smooth than normal and bit more o/d (example listen to why i sing the blues in ziare 74) not a typical bb tone and i love it.

Snake headstock i love though.... Awesome