jimmarchi1's forum posts 8022

place a 'decent' cardioid dynamic microphone in front of the speaker... closer is better for live. Plug it into a mixer channel and have the guy play,s et the gain so you have about 3dB of headroom. You may wanna use the EQ section's high pass if there is one to avoid rumble from the drums and bass cab. Move the microphone around until it sounds good. Generally you want it straight on for live, not angled, but you may want it straight on the dome or further out towards the edge of the cone, YMMV.... this process should take about 2 minutes. The small gig standard mics are the ubiquitous Shure SM57 and the space-saving Sennheiser E609. The 609 is side address so you can actually avoid using a mic stand and just wrap the mic cable around the amp's handle so you can hang the mic in front of the speaker, resting against the grille cloth. The 609 sounds best thisway, touching the grille, anything else is WAY too thin for my taste. SOme folks will do this with a 57 but being 90 degrees out of phase it'll be a bit odd sounding on tis own. I don't recommend that method with any front-address microphones. Personally I prefer the audix i5 and beta 57 for this wort of role, but its live sound, anything goes. I eman given my druthers I like a beyerdynamic stage ribbon mic, heil side address or even a really tight LDC like an AT4040. But there are ltos of super cheap sm57 type mics out there these days. i think the best knock off is by Samson and its about half as much money. It has all the crappiness of the 57 that bar-room yobs know and love. I wouldn't get too much fancier then a beta57 to mic up a practice amp though... not unless it was a 50s or 60s tube practice amp LOL. Diminishing returns. Just make it louder.

Trawl craigslist for PA gear. A lot of tiems people just want a local buyer to pickup their PA equipment because its heavy... I've always sold big encloures live PA speakers and 4x12 cabs that way because I don't want to deal with moving them. I was always willing to offer good discounts if I didn't even have to help the buyer load the damned thigns in their car!

If I were you and I wanted my own PA I would just invest in a cheap-ass little 4 to 8 channel mixer (that you can replace later), an older non-crown power amp from the 70s or 80s like an ASR systems or solid state carvin unit.... and then whatever matched speakers you can, preferably wedges that also come with stands that way they can be PA speakers or floor monitors depending on what you're doing. One budget floor wedge is much like another as far as I'm concerned, get whatever's cheapest. Make sure each speaker will handle the wattage of one side of your power amplifier x2

broootal

if you're really serious about getting started on the guitar maybe you wanna cut to the chase and go for my favorite guitar/amp setup:

https://imgur.com/a/BiDH4jA

only like 3 to 4k on the copper panel ac30 and then somewhere between 500 and a grand ona serviceable tele or esquire with some decent pots and pickups unless you wanna go Fender AVRI or get a King Bee relic or soemthing... that's <$5k and then you're done until you want a strat or a gibson! you'll be damned happy and, lemmee tell ya, if you can teach yourself to play while leaning to wrangle this man-sized guitar and amp setup you'll be able to kick ass playing anything! I wish I had gotten here back in the 90s, took me the whole decade to figure out this was my main deal. Just throw your chips in hard right now, why fuck around? If you stck with guitar you're doing great and if you don't? the resale on copper panel ac30s just goes up, up up and a good tele always holds value unless you damage it. Also, you're going to learn a lot about electronics servicing your vintage Vox ;-)

it's an experience type of lesson

I don't know that the gentleman who made this newbie mistake would appreciate me divulging the details... and he knows where I live.

one more peice of advice for beginners... don't wear assless chaps on stage at your first show. Just don't.

I'm not going to weigh in on the high-end cable issue again. I will say that there's a difference between cables with different capacitance and resistance specs but you already pinpointed the source of your trouble and fixed it. If you want everythinng in line the way you had it you'll have to find true bypass versions of the dyacomp, blues driver etc... the FD2 is already true bypass and is pretty much a tuebscreamer with different diodes (in this case mosfets wired as diodes) so maybe you have a few too many tubescreamers. You're really missingthe idea of wet/dry, its really like a wet/wet setup you made. ANyway, I would be getting a true bypass compressor and be dropping the TS9 and then my next investment would be a better celestion. If the greenback does it for you, just check out a better medium magnet version. The recent G12Ms just don't sound as good as they used to. I also managed to blow one out recently and I wasn't even hitting it with that much wattage. Personally I am not that huge a fan of the 25 watt ones. I've realized I really prefer the 30 watts and the 20 watts, but your only options in a new 20 are the EVH signature or soemthing fancy like a Scumback PVC

remember, 'improve' here isn't a set ins tone, quantifiable thing... those buffers were coloring your sound in a way you didn't like, but you're used to hearing your guitar and ac15 with those fender cables, so 'improving them' will just be changing your response from the tone you're using as a baseline, which is guitar -- tweed cable -- vox amp

I think the other half is fighting, so whatever you're better at

chorus is just a form of flanging with a longer delay time... a lot of flangers at their most extreme delay settings and no feedback (or regen if you will) can produce a lush chorus, some don't have enough delay time available to really get into chorus turf though. Its really a fine line though and one man's flange is another's chorus. A delay pedal with modulation can get flange and chorus sounds as well because all these effects, vibrato, chorus, flange are delay based effects with the time modulated to produce a dopler vibrato effect. Phasers aren't even that different, although there's some extra stuff going on there.

rule of thumb is that fkange will be about 10 to 20ms whereas chorus is over 30ms... flangers typically are one delay line with the ability to add more repeats, that's regen or feedback, while chorus will sometimes have more than 1 delay line but no feedback.

I was actually recording a friend's band yesterday and we wanted a flangey chorusy effect on one guitar line. We didn't have any modulation effects at his studio apart from the chorus in his space echo and that wasn't doing it for him, so we just created the flange with a delay pedal set to minimum delay with some modualtion and a hint of repeats. Sounded like a mild flange/chorus type thing, really good. We kinda split the difference going for the longer chorus delay time with a subtle warble, but we gave it a taste of flanger feedback. I thik we wound up using a strymon another dude had left laying around. So like, any fully featured modulating delay with the ability to get down to single digit delay times can cover all your delay, chorus, flange and rudimentary doubling needs. Any flanger that can get out to 30ms delay times can be a chorus. A chorus generally can't do every flange sound though because dedicated choruses lack regen. Even if you can get the delay time really low the chorus lacks the ability to add repeats.

and now you know, and knowing is half the...

nothing quite like a clean vox with nothing into it... and you have an entry level, corner-cut version.... imagine how much you would like a high end one or a real JMI version from the 60s? they're really stunning amps. Even the worst versions over the years still kick some ass.

if you have 2 grand in USD to spend, this ac30 hea din Italy is a helluva deal and is top shelf stuff, 90% original... I'm seriously eyeballing it as a backup to my '62 but its hard to justify another ac30 right now

https://reverb.com/item/11186531-vintage-1964-vox-jmi-ac30-6-super-twin-tube-amp-head-copper-top-ac-30

by the way, do you have an alnico, M magnet greenback or a wharfdale in your vox?

what the title says, anyone gotten an impression of these line 6 gadgets face to face? I'm not replacing my amps, but the HX effects is looking mighty appealing to me and the price is so much lower than the equivalent fractal...

oh man, the LS2 is buffered too...

I'm just going to ramble some thoughts out incoherently and take from it what you will.

a good line driver is a fine thing with long cable runs, you get some power and a lowered impedance and it prevents tone suck if its in a sensible aprt of the chain, but piling up all these different line drivers might not be helping you out. The minute you use a buffer you're altering your tone because there's no impedance loading from the first tube stage on the pickup. Its a nominal 1 megohm load but the tube will vary depending on how ahrd you hit it whereas a solid state device at 1 megohm presents a steady load so it doesn't 'breathe' with the pickup so to speak... Its almost a feel thing... also, presenting a buffer to some dirtboxes can change the way they behave a bit too. Impedance is a big deal but guitarists don't pay much attention to it outside of speakers LOL... I suspect what's bothering you is just too much processing and its losing something... the voxes, especially newer ones, are pretty sensitive to what you give them. I have a lot of trouble finding the right dirt boxes for my amps. Given my druthers I just turn them way up and have at it anyway, but I'm fairly careful with the setup. Voxes have really wide bandwidths and dirtboxes don't. If you're turning thigns ona dn off a sizeable volume boost is often needed to rpeventyour sound from getting smaller. I have ridiculously low gains ettings when I use dirt into my ac30s, just a taste of the pedal's hair, even from something like a rat, but I have a big dollop of output to throttle the amp into submission. This also prevents the pedal sound being 'smaller' then my clean tone. I willa dd that my idea of clean tone has gotten dirtier and dirtier lately... I went from fender twin type clean over to more of a classic pete Townshend 'rock n roll' clean and then I just give it more. The thing about the voxes is that they are, as my dad once put it, 'the cleanest dirty amps.' The dirt isn't overtly dirt until you're blasting that sucker. Take the edge's clean tone from the 80s... ac30, if you listen its compressed, but not with a pedal, and its surprisingly dirty, but its that subtle vox distortion just setting in as he digs in... then he's goosing it. But the clean still comes off as clean. You're also playing in a bedroom environment. Whenever I'm with a drummer my perception of what works with my amps changes a lot. Gigging or at elast jamming more in a rock band situation with your pedalboard and 15 may help you get what's working and what isn't. Try not to get lsot in setting your gear up to sound good on its own. You have nice pieces and they probably can do wonderful stuff and the weird artifacts may not bother you so much once the band is ripping.... look at something like the old DOD OD250, its kidna shitty playing on its own but I love it when I play rock n roll in a power trio. Its often way cooler then more sophisticated, fancy drives because of the way it sits in the mix when you get it set right for that scenario.

By the way, the block logo dynacomps DO have a buffer. I had to look at mine. This accumulation of buffers in pedalboards was the reason for that big push for true bypass in the 90s amongst the early boutique builders. All these companies had great circuits but unless you only used one or two effects they would rob your tone... all those buffers add up to really alter your clean tone. You really just need one or maybe 2 buffers in a rig if you have a lot of effects or you have long cable runs or something. All true bypass, as I said in a previous post, can be bad with a lot of cable between everything, but a board full of buffered pedals will rpesent other problems.... there are also buffer and buffers. MXR and Boss are not giving you a really hifi buffer. Ideally you want a well designed fet setup at high voltage, at elast 18 or a cork sniffer opamp like some of burr brown's offerings. For a splitter I strongly suggest a Radial engineering unit. My switchbone is buffered but can simulate the impedance load of going straight to the amp with a 10ft cable if you want, you can really dial it in against a cable to sound neutral with your amp, then whatever is before or after it will do what it does but the switchbone manages to be active and sound passive... its pricey but worth it. I think they just released a new version this eyar with another output and more features.

Back to your problem with everything engaged, maybe you need to do more with less. A processed sound is, well, processed. It sounds that way. If you want amp tone focus on amp tone. Figure out what you can't live without and ditch everything else. Personally out of your stuff I would dump the compressor unless Iw as doing country or playing a lot of 12 string. just not needed for rock music ona vox. I would probably play the amp further into overdrive, open master and the channel volume at like 4 and just stick with the Ep and the delay and call it a day. Maybe a dirt pedal just in case.

I gotta go watch cartoons with my kid.... ugh.

yeah, no problem... I'm a big proponent of japanese lawsuit guitars!

I own 4 voxes, 60s, 70s, 90s and a new HW2 as well as a knock off matchless I got when my '62 was out of commission for a while a few years back (and the matchless C30 is very much a boutique mutt of the 50s and 60s ac30 that like started going to the gym and stopped smoking LOL)... so I really dig the ac30. I love the 15 and 10 too, the old ones... oh and the 50 and 100, old ones.... but for me the ac30 is just the perfect amp. I used to tour with 50s and 60s amrshall and fender, but I needed to be hella loud some nights and those ehad cab setups are rock solid, whereas old voxes can be a little finnicky if you don't keep up with 'em and I wasn't always as into doing my own tech work. But I always was missing my ac30 sound. Its so present. Clean or eman the vox sound is just like "YO! here I am! I'm cutting the mix, I'm bright but never harsh... I'm the loudest sub 50 watt amp in the world too, but no so loud the sound guy will be mad at you! I'm not for home use, I'm a gigging and recording machine, LOVE ME!"

I will say this, I think the only versions of the ac30 I'm not super hot about are the 80s Rose Morris amps and the recent Custom Classics and Customs, although I prefer the Classic out of the 3 if I ahd to do a show with rented backline. The current HWs and the 00's heritage amps are pretty kick ass though, not really the same as my old ones, but they're in the ballpark and the special tricks from those recent fawn versions are totally killer... best bang for buck these days in a fairly old school vox is the 90s reissue built by marshall udner contract to korg. Its the last production ac30 with a proper vib/trem channel and a true ac30 guy will tell you its solid trem and seriously amzing, sweet tube vibrato. Smokes the lame circuit on the new chinese ones. Not evne the ame thing. See I wound up with my '62 because when they came out the 90s marshall-made reissue was HELLA expensive by my standards at the time but I lvoed that thing eveyr time I played it at sam ash so I managed to find a beat up original bass voiced model with the rear top boost that was 99% the original parts for the same money... turned out to be a good investment! But I've since gotten one of those reissues and its pretty damn sweet. I still like my old one better, but if you want vibrato I recommend that version, they trade for similar money as the HW2 sells for new I think. I'll take the HW2's build quality, but the odler one is a pretty accurate 3 channel reissue with all the vitnage trimmings and noting added to the classic formula.

But yeah, if you wanna invest in some more vox for a wet/dry type rig, the 30 is everything the newer top boosted 15s are, just more of it, and not really in a more=louder way either. Its just more goodness at any level. If you want 2 flavors to like stack amp tones (which I'm a big fan of) then get a deluxe. You will not be elt down by the silverface deluxe or princeton reissue, they're like 90% there and much cheaper than originals these days... try a tweed deluxe too. that's actually my deluxe of choice. There are decent reissues now. I had a wide panel 5C3 for a while as well as the similar Gibson Titan and Lancer... not sure if thsoe amps are stilla ffordable, but hey... you cna build a deluxe kit in about 12 hours with good isntructions ;-) The tweed deluxe set around 3 or 4 or maybe with both channels at 2 is soemting special too and has more in common withyour ac15 then with blackface amps... the brownface deluxe is also sweet. Look out for used ampeg J20 Jets. handwired amp but its not a Jet reissue at all, tis secretly a 1 channel brownface deluxe. I think you'll find for tone stacking a more brown or tweed fender sound at 12 to 15 watts will stakc ebtter with a vox then a balckface. A larger blackface is nice for A/B useage, clean and dirty wth vox at 7 to 10.... anyway, rambling.

So do you feel like you're losing the ac15's tone just plugging in the pedalbaord or only when you have some effects on? If you disengage everything and you think your tone is suffering elt me ask you some questions. Are you using that EP booster as god intended, as an always on like an EP3 woulda been? So its buffering your signal? If so, are you using the buffer in the empress? You might have a whole lotta buffers overlapping and it might be giving you some tone suck even assuming they're high quality.... and have you tried taking the dynacomp out? I have one and I feel like its got a buffered bypass too. Some buffering can be good with long cable runs, but lots of buffers of varying quality will really buffer your tone. If you leave the EP on all the time that's buffer enough for the whole rig although if you want echo trails you will be forced to use the buffer in the empress too... that will effect you even in a wet/dry setup using the empress' stereo outs as your splitter. If I do wet/dry or wet/dry/wet I will typically split with an ABY or soemthing and then just put that delay on the wet side or one of the sides so the other outputs aren't hitting it all, you know? Its always on but I can turn off the signal to that amp and it only produces feedback from the last note it got and I can keep playing dry.... anyway

NOT GIGGING? HA! who cares.... me? I just like looking at my AC30s

fernandez are excellent strats across the board... theys till make great s-types actually! price is good, see if you can get the nut width from the seller. The odler jap guitars soemtimes have wonky nut widths and this bothers some people... it may also cause issues if you wanna replace the bridge if the string spacing is smaller then 50s or 60s fender spacing. Its not common on the fender copies like the it is on the gibson copies but its not unheard of. For reference, the Burny guitars are the gibson clones by fernandez ;-)

also ask the seller about the pickup screw placement. I've never encoutnered it but I've read that soemtimes the pickups in the early lawsuit fender style guitars is some weird metric spacing. It all went standard USA spacing eventually but there's a chance if the guitar is really old that the pickups mount funny and can't be easily replaced if they're not to your liking. If I recall though msot fernandez prducts use Gotoh pickups of the era which are all pretty nice sounding. Very vintage construction although they soemtimes have wonky magnet types. Cheapies will have ceramic while some gotohs will use oddball alnico grades that were enver used by fender like A8... you run into this with the maxon humbuckers too. Ia ctually like the A8 pickups, but not everyone will. Fender used A3 and A5 exclusively for strats, just like teles. As you know, early teles had an A3 bridge and the first eyar of strats were all A3 and later on went over to the familiar A5. Its less critical with the buckers since there are documented PAFs with every grade of alnico from 2 to 5 and the 8s are kinda cool in a bucker and stillv ery PAF-ish... anyway....

that fernandez is probably a better guitar than the greco. I think Grecos gibbies really outdo their fenders. Tokai is of course the n=benchmark for all alwsuit guitars but this is reflected in the sued pricing for 70s and 80s models.

when this thread originaly went up there was tlak about buffers and I've had a night and day buffer experience lately. I've been tuning up my '62 and '75 ac30s to make them giggable if I want. I enver played the 70s one much after I got it and the '62 I've used sparingly to record since I knew it wasn't totally healthy even though ti sounded okay still. After tons of servicing and a million hours of my poking around inside both amps are healthy. My whole live rig was geared around newer amps (I did have an older selmer and traynor in my MEGA head switching rig, but I do an AC30HW and/or a matchless with the little efects setup most of the time because 3 heads, a rack and a combo was a crazy idea, cool though the tones were)... when I just set up one amp fairly clean I wasn't using a buffer in my chain. I had a long spectraflex feeding a dirt box, line6 modeller and TC delay followed by a decently long monster cable. Everything true bypass. I never noticed any tone suck with the mdoern amps, but through the older amps with mostly vitnage wima and mullard signal caps all the sudden I'm going "where's all my tone?" I'm thinking I screwed up my servicing and I'm poking aorund inside and taking the abck panels off, whatever. Finally I just plug a short cable straight in. BOOM, the '62 sounds sparkling and amazing like I would expect. WHen i engage a buffer on the delay and wire everythign back up its all good. Sounds more or less normal. I usually find most solid state buffers to color the top a little, add some ahrdness as well as restore the treble while destroying the mystical impedence conenction between my pickup and the amp's first gains tage, so I don't like them. But here I had the mystical connection but my wire runs were eating enough top end that a really good quality old amp revealed it! It enver bothered me with high end new amps, maybe they're THAT much brighter or the old caps and transformers are more sensitive, I don't know. But even the 70s ac30 benefited from the buffer and the 60s one was like night and day. Not that it sounded BAD without the buffer, but it was like taking a blanket off the amp. I will enver use my live effects rig with that old amp again without a buffer. Everyone needs some buffering options. Even me!

This is also interesting because even something like a matchless seems to be less sensitive to what goes in then a simialrly high end early 60s amp. On the flip side, the modern ac type aps I have are way mroe finnicky about dirt boxes whereas the 60s and 70s examples just inhale overdrive, distortion and fuzz. These amps are all incredibly similar on paper but use different capacitor and resistor types and every example has a simialrly specced but differently constructed transformer set. At first I was thinking that the healthy 1962 was only a smidge better than the newer examples, but after a lot of time with her tuned up I'm realizing that they really don't, or can't, make them like they used to. The 60s one is so much better than new ones, just like old fenders versus the reissues... its a million little cumulative things that don't jump out in a 5 or 10 minute A/B taste test. Interestingly the new amps seems to be really sensitive to loss of low end when you engage a pedal where all the sudden you kick in a big dirty OD boost and its loud and thick but the bottom is hollow, but the old amps do fine with the same pedals at the same settings and the low end jumps out less whereas any loss of top end when you're clean is like a big hole in the treble frequencies from what you expect up there. Be it a compressor pedal or long cable runs, the old amps are treble sensitive and the new ones, though pretty similar in theory, have a sensitive bottom end. And yeah, I'm using like ALL THE SAME speakers. New blue alnicos and new WGS reaper 55s.

looks really sweet.... the 500 denominates the thousands of yen it riginally cost retail, the alrger the number on a Greco the more it cost and generally the better made it is. Higher number will typically feature real nitro finishes and vintage correct pickups, like 800 and up? lwoer numbers will have less accurate pickups and polyester finish... this greco is VERY fairly priced before shipping, but with the shipping from japan is a little high in my opinion. I'm not positive where int eh line this falls, on an LP copy it would be middle of the line, but strats might have been alla round cheaper sicne I never see anything about SE700 for sale... Matbe $100 too high. Because you live on an isolated island, when you deal with the Japanese sellers make sure they can get the guitar to you easily through their international shipping service... I've had guitars from Japan dropped off by random dudes in their cars before rather than uniformed delivery guys or postal employees, so definitely talk to the seller extensively before giving hima pennny. I would also ask the guy if he can come down 50 to 100 USD.

I just order my japanese axes sight unseen, often right from japanese dealers. Link me to the Greco, I'll tell you what I think.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure. I guess a section would make more sense to me, if only because there's already an 'I want it' section on the page, b

I am going to laod that 'used to own it' section! I'll bog the server right down, bitches!

I'm going to come to a conclusion that the player series is bang for buck across the board. They sound good (if not the way I would want, they're still much better than what fender was doing with msot of their guitars, especially chepies, when iw as young, defintiely a higher sonic benchmark to my ear), they're well made (fit and finish were nice by today's standards although the early mexi standards kill them there, later mexi standards don't).... versy serviceable fenders. They're relatively inexpensive for an actual fender these days... Iw ould wait and look for used ones in a year though. They'll get cheaper. If you must have fender on the headstock (and I get that desire) then they're a good bet. They will need less electronics tweaking then an old standard and they seem rpetty consistent whereas a used standard is a crap shoot in that department based on the year. I cna reptty much guarantee you will dislike the electronics, especially the picups, in any standard strat... they were always shrill, dog's ass pickups and those guitars really fueled Duncan and Dimarzio's empires! Additionally, most MIM standards are poplar and not alder, so they have a kinda weird midrange resonance and the transparent finishes universally look shitty on poplar but fender mexico cranked out the bursts and such through my teens and 20s! Poplar is just a bad material for a stock strat. Even a pickup upgrade doesn't make the guitar sound the way I want it to... Its not TERRRIBLE, but if you're being picky? Go with the alder body for a strat, its THE sound. It might bug you down the road going poplar.

In answer to Comojo's question? if asking price is the same as the new Player Series I would probably avoid the MIM standard strat even though I prefer a vintage 6 bolt bridge. Frankly I would just as soon replace the whole thing with a Babicz vibrato down the road or hard tail it. If it was ME? Both guitars feature a slim girl's neck so I wouldn't buy either. I kidna like MIM strats of the 90s, but boy are the necks a joke and, like I said, poplar, pickups, meh. I would enver pay 650 for one, that's for sure.... but these are crazy times. And you might like that fender 'modern, slim C' neck. Not I! Gimmee a U, soft V, Boat, roundback!!! Less fatiguing.

For the same money I would also look at 70s and 80s Tokai, Fernandez and Greco strat copies. They are fine fender style guitars that still trade for very reasonable prices versus those company's Gibson style lawsuit guitars... very comparable in quality to the JV series fenders and earliest Japanese squiers, they just lack the fender logo... the key with those guitars though is to really pay attention to the specs, the lower end mdoels are pretty decent like early squiers whereas the higher end models are very vintage correct like the JV series (fender's first official RI series, those Japanese guys taught fender how to make the guitars right again and spawned the AVRI series)…

food for thought.

when I was in ym 20s I used to feel like strats and to a lesser extent teles should be maple boards with the good old skunks tripe on the back.... but I really flipped script in my 30s and I've been focusing on rosewood and pao ferro like you are. I still like the maple baord gutiars I have, they're all VERY 50s, but on a go to level my rosewood baord tele and strat are the guitars I reach for when i don't have a specific sound in mind apart from 'fender'. They feel like they play easier. Some of that is the board, some of it is the brdge assemblies, string tree placements etc. Lots of little refinements in the 60s helped the rosewood boarded guitars to play better. On the other hand there's something to a 50s spec fender that you gotta wrassle with and force into making music! And the bright, finished maple fretboard can really stand a much hotter wind pickup and more midrangey magnets and stilld eliver mighty chime because of that reflective fingerbaord…. hot pickups in a rosewood tele or strat get dull to my ear. Best to have both. When I want a dark guitar I have gibsons that do that.

I like 90s mexican standards quite a bit.... but those still have the vintage bridge, which I prefer ebcause I tend to set my trem up wrong and have massive spring tension so I don't take it out of tune when I mute... otherwise similar quality I thought. Not as nice as an older mexican high end, but easily as nice as the older standard if you're not picky about the bridge type. I would say the pickups sounded quite a bit better than stock mexican standard pickups of the 90s and even american standard pickups of the 90s! I was enver a fan of what they were using back then.

for frame of reference, I haven't played a lot of newer strats. I pick something like this up once in a blue. My #1 modified strat is probably almost as old as you are being a 90s jimmy Vaughn... I recently got a silver, hardtail strat, the Robert cray I think. Its pretty well old too. at elast 15 years old. I forget the date. I've had various classic series and the odd American standard but they were all late 90s production and maybe an early 2000s...

tried some... strat is a pretty run of the mill strat... bridge feels like any old floating 2 point trem fender's been cranking out... nothign special about this guitar line. The jag was kinda fun, but I really missed the jag bridge pickup. I always dig the spaghetti western and spy movie sound of the jag's bridge pup and that humbucker can't get close.

I really feel like the flaws with fender's first vibrato system have nothing to do with the number of screws and everything to do with how it contacts the body when pivoting or resting and that can't be alleviated without a redesign. I swear that the real reason fender went to 2 points over the vintage 6 on a lot of guitars is that 2 screws cost less per guitar than 2.

so I'm going to eat my hat about voxes and effects loops... pparently the new AC30S1 has a marshall style master and an effects loop... then again it seems highly bastardized sporting one channel that looks like a top boost but not containing enough preamp tubes to power the top boost channel and a long tailed pair phase inverter. I would guess its a solid state effects loop too, meh. I mean, 2x12AX7s s not many. Maybe they used a MOSFET as a cathode follower and a couple of JFETs to balance the effects loop... or perhaps its just a high Z preamp in and out like my matchless.

Whatever the case, apparently you canmake some sort of ac30 with a modern effects loop. Although I'm not sure how tis going to sound. The demo I saw on Premier Guitar last night was kidna lackluster in the voxiness department... not a bad sounding amp or anything but it didn't sound particularly voxy unless they were playing very clean.

SG! tell me about it, I think Iw as 20 or 21 when I got my '62 ac30 and started buying old marshalls… I had moved back with the folks thenand was making solid money for a change... rather then save my beans I invested in gear

okay, there's no reason to put an effects loop on a vox, even one with a master, because an effects loop falls between the preamp and phase inverter and vox and copycats typically put the master volume between the phase inverter and pwoer tubes, so the master isn't before where an fx loop needs to be in roder to function correctly... a more marshall style master doesn't sound so hot on a vox. It can be done, but it relly takes the voxiness out fo the drive.

That said, I've been mr ac30 for like 20 years. I own vitnage ones, new ones, boutique stuff... I have never had an issue with echo and mod into the front end even though i get a lot of my drive from the amp. Some of my ac30s ARE a bit finnicky with dirtboxes and when you throw other effects into the kix they get finickier... I've founf the C and CC amps to have one of the msot sirt-box finniky iterations of the circuit, but that's my ears. You really want to be careful with delay into the front of an amp in general. Its fine, I personally prefer it to effects loops... but you need to really know be used to doing it that way because you're encountering little bits of comrepssion and distortion that maybe you don't ehar in your dry signal but they have a lot of pull on the delay response. Vintage amp guys and oldsters? we get it and have no problem. Everyone else seems baffled. Really, setting it up right your delay will sound better then ever...

I will say that I am always dissatisfied with delay using only one am but its a compromise I'll make when iw ant to travel light. I agree with brian may on this one. If your speakers share the dry and wet signal of pretty much any delay based effect then you're going to get weird phase distortions as the delay and dry overlap at times forcing the cone to try to move itself in opposite directions. It bothers my ears if I'm playing alone, but frankly in a band situation it gets swallowed by the stage volume.

For wet/dry wet/dry/wet setups using multiple amps instead of the EVH lineout to power amp arrangement I really recommend you use the same amps or better still, an extremely similar amp with a lower wattage so you can drive it nice and hard for a similar tone with less output for delays etc. For instance, a good wet amp for a deluxe reverb is a Princeton... for you an ac30 would make a good dry amp and then your 15 could handle wet duties. When I do that sort of thing these days I will use the ac30hw in halfpower for delay with another ac30 for dry or if I want modulation I'll use a COUPLE older ac30s, one will still be dry and the other I'll use the vib/trem channel and engage the vibrato when I want a stereo chorus/phasing type of thing. Its loud though. Not fun to carry all those ac30s either. Even 2 is a lot for me these days.

are you favoring the TB channel or the mighty but underrated normal channel? Or does the current PCB ac15 not have a normal channel? Vintage ones were normal channel and vib/trem only! but that was the ef86 normal and the Wurlitzer style vibrato (all tube nothing like it, think tubey univibe throb). The handwired series all share a preamp design that gives you the ac30TB, normal and a bright switch on there approximating the non-top-boost brilliant channel (although not quite as the C2 and similar HW remains a much higher value coupling cap C3 from the channel's gain stage than a real non TB, for example my '62 bass model has 1000pf AKA 0.001uf, largest value of any vintage ac30 non-top-boost brilliant channel versus the 0.047uf coupling cap in the classic normal channel that I believe is used in this slot of the C, CC and HW amps, although it may be some other wonky value that Korg chose, I forget... which means with the bright cap engaged the channel isn't as bright as a vintage non-top-boost and its not even brighter than a vintage normal channel when the channel volume is maxed because the bright cap only reduces bass as the pot is turned DOWN! So the normal channel with a bright switch is a real mutt).

it's probably your best bet... if you really want a fender logo, go on ebay and buy a fender neck you like from Stratosphere and just get the body from warmoth or USAcustoms or whoever... If you want decorative wood, I know a guy in Ohio who does really beautiful ele and strat bodies out of crazy looking woods. Firstr ate guy.

y'know Blake, I recall that I played one when shifflet and fender first made it available to the general public but it was such an unremarkable guitar i can't remember anything about it other than that it had humbuckers and was very midrangey plugged in and that the coil tap didn't sound much like I want a tele to. I formed no impression of it good or bad really, can't even remember the neck. You could probably build one from parts for about the same price and spec every detail to your exact preference.

buy a gibson! why not? I mean, if this bankruptcy breaks them nowis your last chance LOL the prices will only go up if they stop making them!

but for real, a decent squier like a classic series is a good place to begin... or in the case of heavier sounds look at low end ESP and Schecter

pretty much everything cheap is made in the same handful of chinese factories anyway, so the logo on the headstock is immaterial, just get soemthing geared towards your favorite type of music. Until you break the $500 mark in a guitar you're looking at apples and apples comparisons, one beginner axe is much like another! If you have real money to spend then the Yamaha rev-stars are a real value for dollar. Good allarounders, well made, even the bottom of the line ones. But more than $200 if you have the seriously limited resources which your original post implies. Its a shame, when iw as a kid I bought a really solid Japanese squire strat from a neighbor for under $100 and my uncle just gave me a 60s fender tube amp he had laying around, but that was back before vintage value was an idea for any items but 50s Pauls, strats, teles, and 335s! Oh the things you could get for peanuts in the late 80s and early 90s! Sucks to be starting now! its a golden age of gear but the prices are very inflated for the good shit. This is a rabbit hole, even if you start cheap, if you fall in love with the guitar it'll cost you. I would say that if you really want to do this, spend as mucha s you can affrd NOW. The prices aren't comin down

guitar hasn't been a good way to impress women since the 70s, dude... that's not a good reason to learn music, but if you think you really want to make music because you'll enjoy doing so for its own sake? go buy a guitar and a chord book if you want to learn a few songs to start, then be patient while your fingers disobey you for 3 months to a year, then once they're obeying? buy some song books of bands you like... or you can actually LEARN MUSIC by fiddling with the guitar and taking piano lessons... but that's a whole other layer of the onion

EHX soulfood you mean? Do you ever just run the 45 wide open with nothing in line, as god intended?

maybe you don't have to, but if you can? well you should!

hey! good to see you... just start with the best of django reinhardt and stephan grapelli... then look at modern immitators

yes, big django fan... one of the greats

http://equipboard.com/surfthejapstrat look at the tabs on the side and click 'gear porn'... psot pictures and I'll probably know what kinda hiwatt you have. Make sure you take thhe back off and get pics of the PT and OT too thatw ay if its a mdoel that went through every significant hiwatt era like the DR504 I will be ablt to figure out when tis form by the transformer type.

put them on your profile in the 'gear porn' section

do you have pictures???

really? you have trouble with the tap on the X4? I've never had a problem. Takes 2 maybe 3 good taps, not even 4 of them... never failed me yet. For me the size is no big thing, I don't have a lot of pedals hooked up, so that's my all in 1 delay solution for live, I have 3 presets that are my soudns and that's that. My needs are pretty simple though. But I've delat with a lot of tap buttons thata re way worse. Iw as impressed with the X4's when I got it, although for the longest time Iw as controlling all my effects from a MIDI floorboard that also was my master tap and the pedals were in the rack that contains the head switcher. But I'm simplifying even further, putting together an itty bitty pedaltrain and losing all the bells and whistles. I don't think I can go abck to just 1 amplifier, but other than that my needs are incredibly modest. I'm even ditching modualtion... the ac30 vibrato and trem are so cool that i don't need anything else. i don't know why I ever thought I did.

they sound pretty similar... mainly the stereo. They may use a different BBD chip but its a similar circuit and sound. I would guess that just stereo choruses from different eras may use different chips anyway based ona vailability... the old ones sound mushier then the new ones for example... and they have more self noise.

an old tri chorus form the 80s? nothing! hre's mike fuller's copy, read the info https://www.fulltone.com/products/80s-rack-chorus A bucket brigade is an analog chip used to create a delay in signal. the OLD trichorus has 2 BBD lines for 2 different layers of chorus versus everything that came before that which just had 1 BBD line so you had 1 layer of chorus and dry. The neuenbauer is a digital simualtion, no BBDs used but it'll provide 2 chorus lines and dry signal like the coveted old rack effects. The digital chorus will have less self-noise while BBD chips tend to be a bit noisy. Digital chorus tends to be a bit more sterile, though ever since line 6 started modelling vintage stomp boxes the digital chorus effects have been getting less and less icy. Still, the BBD devices are quirky anc charming in a way digital isn't. The main reason to check out a digital unit is if you want to get a multi-effect and have MIDI control, otherwise you can't go wrong with one of the classic choruses or more fully featured flangers like the BF2 and FL9 to start out. The Cure, for instance? You're thinking they use a lot of chorus and some flange, but most of it is a boss BF2, even the chorus sounds. Only the early stuff is 'chorus' coming off a JC120. I had this rare mutron flanger at one time on loan and apart from having a built in expression pedal for extreme flange effects, the thing had the most lush chorus you would ever want to hear and there was nothing cold and icy about it... all 70s warmth when set up right. I'm not sure if that utilized BBD chips or s0me older more involved technology, but Im just saying that a flanger with really adjustable delay time is like 2 pedals in one and they are relative sleepers.

But yeah, are you getting the difference here? Its not much. Flange, chorus and phase are all heavily related and spawned out of the early 'tape flanging' and Varispeed ADT effects pioneered by the Beatles and their engineer Geoff Emmerick. under 30ms with a little time/pitch bend here and there for swooshing and maybe some repeats on the delay line? flanging... 30 or 40ms to get past the Hass effect? ADT? ADT with a little time/pitch bend? chorusing... fixed delay time with sweeping filters on the delayed signal? phasing. The character f the effects tends to be how they are implemented. Tape machiens have a vibe, BBDs have a vibe, OTAs have a vibe.... plain digital like from the 90s has a cold and crunchy sound (chorusing with an SPX90 is a glorious thing)…. they're doing the exact same thing but in a different way