liam_thomas's Reviews

Most versatile, comfortable, and gorgeous guitars I've ever played!

Definitely the prize of my collection, the blonde ("blond" in the catalogues) SF1000 is one of the most beautiful guitars I've ever seen, but it also incredibly versatile and comfortable to play.

As with all the Super Flighters, the 24 fret neck is totally accessible due to the extended neck and shape of the body, but the SF1000 has something more special. The neck is more comfortable due to a slightly thinner profile, and the ebony fretboard feels utterly frictionless. Combine that with the improved quality pickups, and you have a real playing machine here!

You really can't do better than these guitars without venturing into the almost boutique, high end guitars like a Gibson Custom or PRS Artist, definitely worth the money and then some.

Beats 90% of similarly priced guitars in today's market in an instant!

This rare Yamaha electric guitar easily beats any other models of similar specification in its price range today. To get a guitar with this standard of playability, craftsmanship and electronics below £700 (new) is near impossible. Even with 30+ years of wear, most of these are still dramatically more playable than the majority of similar guitars today, and the craftsmanship is second-to-none.

The shape of the body, contours, position of the cutaways and the extended neck make the 24 neck completely accessible, and the low action makes for an overall easy playing experience.

Although the sound from the pickups is a little on the dark side from the large amount of mahogany, they are still remarkably impressive for the price. The electronics are very well wired and incredibly reliable.

Overall an amazing guitar, very hard to find in good condition but if you can get one then you're onto something great!

I think I got lucky and got a damn good one!

I've never been a fan of strats really, other than one that I built as a project when I was 14 I've never picked one off the shelf that felt comfortable or had a good action. However this Mexican Standard felt great right away! I did a little fine tuning to the action and set the intonation a little better but from the first chord it felt really quite nice.

People always hate on Mexican Stratocasters, but I think if you find the right one then you can walk away with a damn good guitar for the money! This was certainly the case with mine. The sound quality is great but I'll probably upgrade the pickups anyway, and the neck feels brilliant.

Overall this guitar plays really easily and sounds much better than you'd expect of a "cheaper equivalent" to the favoured American Standard.

Love the "church" setting!

To be totally honest, this is one of the few pedals I've never really experimented with. I knew the sound I wanted from my reverb and had a pretty good idea of how to get there so with an educated guess I'd dialled in the right mode and had it all set within about 5 minutes and haven't changed anything other than the FX Level ever since!

It sounds phenomenal, and that's pretty much all I have to say on the matter..

Couldn't ask for a better bucket style delay!

Strymon are awesome, basically. The sound quality from this pedal is incredible, as is the range of sounds you can get. With the addition of a "favourite" switch you can even save a secondary sound so you can instantly toggle between your two most used effects.

If you ask me, you can never have to many variables in an effect. Strymon give you so much control here you can really personalise your sounds right down to a modulation control for those spacey delays.

The tap tempo switch being built onto the pedal is amazingly convenient, and they've been considerate enough to make it a quiet switch as well as to not be too distracting!

The whole unit is very tidy, very reliable, and built like a tank. I doubt I'll ever be changing my delay pedal!

Best clean boost I've found so far!

If you need a clean boost for solos, this is the one to buy! Unless you feel the need to have some tone sculpting as well to make your leads cut a little more and want to buy the Micro Amp+, this is perfect!

Having the single, big dial makes for easy on-stage adjustments if you find it's not quite the right volume in the moment.

As with all MXR pedals, very sturdy and reliable.

Amazing range of sounds, great tonal versatility!

If there's one thing I look for on a pedal before anything else, it's how much tonal control I have. Having both high and low controls on this chorus pedal instantly grabbed my attention, but the sound was the real clincher.

The variety of sounds you can get from this really is incredible! I personally use a relatively slow and shallow chorus just for a bit of texture particularly when playing finger picking patterns and arpeggios, but it can do some proper rotating speaker sounds too.

Very sturdy as are all MXR pedals, and fantastic sound. What more could you want?

Brilliant guitar for the price, stock pickups could be better

I fell in love with this guitar back in college when I first picked it up and felt the neck. I still love how the heel is contoured so perfectly that you can glide right up to the end of the fretboard without having to navigate around a heel at all.

The set up has always been great, although it takes a while to get used to the extra jumbo frets. It looks amazing, both the top pattern and the colour, and the whole guitar just feels amazingly comfortable to hold and play.

Pickups are great for an intermediate player looking in this price range, Duncan Designed humbuckers modelled on the Seymour Duncan JB and Jazz set I believe. They could've installed something a little nicer, but they suit the guitar and are still a great standard in this price range.

Overall an excellent guitar for under £500 and served me very well for the best part of 2 years before getting more money..

Truly excellent for recording and live use

I used to make do with one of our drummer's spare tom microphones... I didn't realise what I was missing until I got one of these and my life changed! Absolutely love it, perfect for mic'ing up my amps either for stage or studio.

Big. Loud. Marshall.

It looks the part, it sounds the part, but it's a pain in the a$$ to get around. Once it's out of the car and on stage, I couldn't love it more! There's little else to say about it really, it works, and sounds excellent!

Good build quality, even if stock pickups are shocking..

I picked this guitar up for very cheap as used, but in excellent condition. I mean seriously, one tiny hairline scratch behind the headstock. This meant the frets were perfect, everything was where it was supposed to be, so I was able to do a pretty special set up and get a surprisingly low action. After that, I started to put it through it's paces and really test her out.

Within about 30 seconds I found that the pickups were lacking in pretty much everything... They were muddy, lacked definition and generally just sounded rubbish. I hung it up after that and went out and bought some Seymour Duncan humbuckers for it!

The guitar itself is not a bad guitar at all, the neck is a bit chunky for me but that's just down to preference, but the overall build quality is pretty good for a "cheap" guitar. With a bit of attention to the set up and a change of pickups I made it sound and play like a much more expensive instrument. It's still not perfect but it's definitely the cheapest way to get a reasonable quality Les Paul if you swap the pickups out!

Rich sound, great sustain and volume, but very high factory set up!

The combination of the woods and the "open pore" finish gives a fantastic tone to this guitar. The first thing to impress me was the volume! It doesn't have a particularly large body so I wasn't expecting it to be anywhere near as loud as it is, but that's not a bad thing. High and low resonance are pretty well balanced, and the sustain is excellent.

From the factory this guitar was set up with an incredibly high action. Now I don't play 24/7, but my fingers are well accustomed to guitar strings after 8 years of playing, yet this would actually be painful to play for longer than a 20 minute set! Since bought, I've filed down the saddle quite dramatically and have now got it to a reasonable action but I was quite disappointed to have had to do that myself.

The Fishman Presys system sounds excellent, but I'd suggest ignoring the built in tuner for anything other than a rough guide - it's not very accurate. The release clip for the battery compartment is pretty stiff the first couple of times, I actually took the strings off and pushed from the inside to avoid breaking anything off! Otherwise, good little system.

I love the sound of this guitar, and after a bit of work I've got it playing nicely as well. Definitely ask for a proper set up from the shop, but it's a great guitar once that's done!

Fantastic piece of kit, totally reliable and excellent sound quality!

I just hate wires, really. That's where this started anyway... But as soon as I first plugged into the G30 I heard an indisputable difference in sound! People often talk about the tone loss from a cable and I used to be one of the people who'd shrug it off as one of those things that only a pro can hear or that people fuss about for no reason, but this seriously makes a dramatic difference.

Unlike analogue radio frequency wireless systems, there's no compression thanks to the digital technology which means the sound coming out of the G30 receiver is exactly the same as the sound that leaves your guitar. No tone loss, at all. If you already have a bunch of cables, pedals or whatever then this is a great starting point to helping maintain your tone.

With regards to reliability, I've been using mine now for nearly 3 years and I've never had a single problem with it. The battery life is tolerable but obviously not amazing, and the range is plenty good enough for a small stage.

It's always worth giving the battery compartment a check to make sure its properly closed, as I did once have the batteries fall out half way through a song, but that's uh...user error!

Simple as you'd expect, nice and reliable

You shouldn't ever expect much from a volume pedal, ultimately you should never really think about it too much either! The VP JR is great for a reliable piece of equipment to easily take for granted. Being passive there's next to nothing to go wrong, and being a simple mechanical operation it's easy to fix if it ever did break.

Having the internal switch to change the shape of the volume sweep is nice as well. For those who don't know what I mean, you can have it to either increase in a linear fashion, or flick the switch so that at first the volume increases very little and then a lot faster when the top is pushed further down.

I like it, it hasn't broken yet, that's good.

Great for someone with lots of effects, very useful board!

Any pedalboard does the job, but this does it in a really practical way that makes life a lot easier! I got the one with a hard case, and damn I'm glad I did! Wheels baby, wheels!!

The slats make this board so easy to wire up in a way that's neat and tidy (until you look underneath) and it looks really smooth and well...pro. It sits at the perfect angle for easy access to pedals at the back without being at a height that looks obtrusive on stage, and the spacing between slats is perfect for pretty much any size pedal.

The board itself is nice and lightweight, even if the case is a bloody monster, but hey you can't have it all! The only thing missing was handles on the board, so I put those on myself.

Extremely versatile, stunning range of sounds!

As far as 2 channel overdrive pedals go, I'm yet to find anything better than this for the bluesy rock player. Both channels have a great range of dirt to them, and the tone can be fine tuned brilliantly with the fat/fatter switches.

The first thing I loved about this pedal was the "blend" dial on the overdrive channel. This lets you dial a balance between the overdriven sound and your untainted clean tone. The extra definition you can get by bringing in a little of your clean sound is great, it really lets you tailor the sound perfectly. The amount of gain you can have on this channel is fantastic, I find a sweet spot is just past 12 o'clock where you've gone just passed a low level "crunch" sound where you've got just the right amount of sustain but can still dial it down with volume on your guitar. If you wanna go a little cleaner it can handle more of an AC30 sparkle as well, or get really quite ballsy if you turn it right up.

The distortion channel is really impressive for a pedal designed for a primarily country player! It's right into the realms of a plexi kind of Marshall rock tone. Turn the gain right up and your into dirty, angry rock territory, or dial it back for a more bluesy sound. Like the overdrive channel, it's got the potential for a lot of different sounds.

One of my favourite things about this pedal is combining the two channels! You can only really do this with the two gain controls at no higher than about 1 o'clock, but you get one incredible lead tone when you put the two together! The sustain and saturation is perfect, and the clarity you can get from the addition of the overdrive channel is really something to shout about.

Definitely a pedal to replace after a fire, I don't intend to ever be without one!

Massive sweep, brilliant tone, this is a classic for a reason!

Although I'm not a massive user of a wah pedal, I like to have the option there if I fancy using it. I chose the Vox V847 because of the wide sweep range, and was not disappointed! The range is really massive, so you can get a crazy variety of sounds out of it.

The only problem I find is that the pedal itself doesn't actually move that far, so in a very small movement you sweep a wide tonal range. I like having that range, but I find it very hard to control with such small movements! This is probably just my clumsiness, but I find it a little restrictive.

Soundwise, brilliant! Practically, I struggle a bit but hey practice makes perfect!

Love the clean channel, not much of a fun of the dirty..

I use a big pedalboard, which is where my overdrive sounds come from, so this amp is perfect for me as it has plenty of headroom and the clean channel sounds amazing!

I've occasionally used the overdrive channel in an emergency when a pedal, patch lead or something has died part way through a gig, but I've never really used it as a go-to sound. I find it lacking quite heavily and have to fiddle with the EQ controls for ages to get a really good sound from it. As both channels share the EQ controls, this is quite undesirable as I like to have the EQ all set to 12 o'clock for clean but then all over the place for overdrive so it makes switching between channels a total drag.

I find the EQ controls are very responsive, and the reverb is pretty variable for an amp as well. A lot of amps I've tried will overpower the "personality" of a guitar and make everything sound quite distinctively similar, not exactly the same of course, but similar. For example, a Fender Twin will always sounds very much like a Fender Twin with either a Les Paul or a Stratocaster. I love how the JCM900 lets any guitar's individual sound come through. I've recently started playing with a strat for the first time in years and I love how differently this amp responds to the single coils.

A very versatile amp, even if the overdrive channel leaves a bit to be desired.

Truly excellent value for money, very hard to beat for its price range!

I bought this as something "small" to use at home and for rehearsals rather than lugging my JCM900 head and 4x12 cabinet everywhere with me. When I use my JCM900 (100W) I get practically all of my overdrive effects from pedals, and only use a small amount of reverb on the amp, but wanted to keep things as simple as possible at home with having a good overdrive channel on whatever my amp was going to be. Having a bunch of high quality guitars, I wanted something that would compliment their quality so I wanted valve. This JCM600, was a great buy!

Bought for just £200 (poor cosmetic condition, often sell for £500+) I had enough "change" to revalve it, and daaaayum it sounded great afterwards!! The valves do rattle a bit, probably due to being horizontal, but that's not a deal breaker for a practice amp. The cleans are stunning for a relatively cheap amp, and the overdrive isn't far behind.

The clean channel really needs the bass dialled back at low volumes, but otherwise sounds incredible for its price. The overdrive channel takes a bit of time to dial in the right EQ, but once you find the sweet spots it really growls! Or sings if you want it to.. I was really impressed by the difference made to the tone by putting a patch lead in the parallel effects loop and turning the loop volume right up, seems to give it a massive tonal boost although I can't really put it into words...

Overall a great valve amp for those on a budget, you really can't beat it for the same money elsewhere!