Jeff "Skunk" Baxter

"What a thrill when that showed up in the mail! Usually, I use an Ampeg VT-22 or Vox Super Beatle head. The Vox is excellent for steel guitar because it has very little inter-modular distortion at low volumes. It's an old one and has a nice reverb and echo for the steel."

"I go back to the beginning with the Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amplifier. I met with Roland founder Ikutaro Kakehashi in 1975 and he presented the amp to me. Never before had I heard such clean tones at low and very high volumes. The JC-120 does an incredible job of reproducing whatever signal and sounds are plugged into it. I need an amp I can use for clean tones, fat tones, pedal steel guitar, and acoustic guitar. I have even bussed background vocals from a recording console through the JC-120 in the stereo chorus mode, with a mic on each speaker and back to the console—beautiful!

I have used the JC-120 on such songs as Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” and Donna Summers’ “Hot Stuff,” and on recording projects with Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, and the TV series King of the Hill, to name just a few examples. I use it on virtually every live gig I do, from rock shows to classical guitar at the Kennedy Center with a choir and orchestra. Reliable, solid, sweet, and versatile, it is my go-to amp of choice. Very few guitar amplifiers are referred to as “iconic,” and the Roland JC-120 fits that description perfectly."

"What a thrill when that showed up in the mail! Usually, I use an Ampeg VT-22 or Vox Super Beatle head. The Vox is excellent for steel guitar because it has very little inter-modular distortion at low volumes. It's an old one and has a nice reverb and echo for the steel."

In this video from Roland, Skunk Baxter demos the Roland Blues Cube Hot. He says:

One of the problems with getting a good vintage tone has been to make the guitar sustain enough and this amp has a singing quality that quite frankly, I was a little amazed.

I like Reverb. I like Reverb because I think it adds a dimension to the sound live that you can't really get any other way. It's a trade-off between getting some reverb into your signal and being able to have clarity of your tone. And I won't tell you what the secret sauce is, but they listened and what they did with this amplifier is create a reverb that you could use live, and to me that's a whole new jump in technology.

There's something about a 12-inch speaker in a small cabinet. There's a tone that we've all grown to love. The bottom end of of the equalization circuit, instead of pushing the amplifier past the point where the cabinet and the speaker can handle it, it seems to just enhance it.

The Dynamics that I would like to have that come from my hands and my pick attacking the strings seems to translate very well into this amplifier. A very, very, friendly mid-range. It's portable, it screams, and it doesn't rip your head off. But it'll hold its own. I don't think I would need anything else, put it up on a chair, crank it up, sit back and play my music.