hred

What attracted me to this amp was how clean and pure the tone is and how lush the chorus is. It does not try to be tube which is my least favorite thing about most solid state amps. It is just a big DI box with some nice color to the tone. The stereo chorus is almost always on when I play. It does a great job at adding a rich texture without getting in the way of anything. The reverb on the amp is nice and ample but nothing crazy. I am not much for vibrato but the vibrato can also provide some nice textures that mix well in the overall tone. The reason I did not give this amp 5 stars though was because the distortion is unusable. It is not a big deal for me because I have plenty of pedals but it was disappointing to find. The JC 40 has a really nice distortion effect though, that almost reminds me of a transparent overdrive, plus it is not insanely loud like this monster.

The first thing that attracted to me this guitar was the looks obviously. I have the gold sparkle version and I get comments about it at every show. Moving onto tone and functionality though, this guitar looks like it has humbuckers but it actually has single coils (gold foil style I believe). In some ways, it has a tone that verges on strat-like but the similarities are not excessively congruent. A player could definitely tell the difference in the tone. The 3p-DLX sounds heftier and the unique body style adds almost a natural compression. I get asked a lot if the knobs being up top get in the way or cause any problems but they really don't all the much. As long as I adjust them how I like at the beginning of the set, they don't move a lot. Tuning is a little bit of an issue from time to time but that is to be expected since it has a bigsby. I think the long spring in the bigsby mitigates some of that problem though.

This pedal was given to me for free at a show once (the guy just bought the helix so he had renounced pedals). What I like over the dynacomp is the sustain and the attack rather than just having a sensitivity which is just the ratio. I like to switch between luscious sustained chords or a funky hard attack lead melodies, but it can also handle simply smoothing out dynamics relatively well. It is supposed to be using vintage based circuits that adds a warm coloring and I can hear it a little bit but not enough to care about that feature. It is a little noisier than I'd like, which I understand is the nature of compression but I have played compression pedals that handle the signal better. Overall, a great beginner pedal for those getting into compression or just a low cost alternative if you are not wanting to shell out for something with similar controls.