semi-OT: practice amp for looping

[Scott Hansen <evanpeewee@gmail.com>]

hi ben-

here's my recommendation-

i do mostly guitar loops, occasionally use my drum machine, use to feed it random stuff recorded from small digital voice recorder (searching for a new one of these for simple recording....)

as a guitarist, i've owned one small tube amp in my life (kustom tube 12A-ok, didn't love, still have)...to my ear, guitar amps are just so MID-RANGEY.

now i realize that most guitarists love this sound, and of course all the classic guitarists, i love their sound (and chased it too long....endless, although i always went gtr, since

i didn't want to spend a fortune on amps). a few yrs ago when my 50 watt SS amp died & the repair i paid double the price of the original amp for, didn't last more than 9 mo's. i decided to go small cheap, had little 10 watt marshall (ok), then got the kustom above (ok), but i found that for me, the tiny speakers, just SUCK! now i don't play loud at all at home in my studio, and i honestly don't know the size of the speaker of my old 50 watt amps (probably 10", might have been 12"), after 2 yrs of small amps and hating them, i decided to start a hunt. Jeff Duke uses a portable PA system amp in a bunch of his vids & I F***ING loved his sounds, but it's a newish amp still, and couldn't find any for under 200 beans (i'm a budget guy). so about a yr & 1/2 ago i found a Fender Keyboard 60 amp at a local pawn shop (my fave pawn shop that i bought a million guitars from closed back in '05, sadly), did some research, saw a few people on harmony-central used them for gtr, i tested the amp at the place w/ some crappy guitar there & it sounded ok. got it home, feed it my system & setup,  AND I LOVE IT. it's very clean, which i like (this probably comes out of the nels cline model-clean amp, dirt from pedals), but i think the range of sounds is much greater than a guitar amp , to my ear. i like the distortion to come from my pedals, and i like digital distortion (this probably puts me out of the running for "guitar purist/tone snob" category). but i like the sound of it. actually i hate playing direct now, which i would always do when i was obsessively recording things a few yrs ago, i used to favor my direct sound over my "live in studio  sound"but not anymore.

so i think keyboard amps are great, or at least i like my Fender Keyboard 60 amp. it's the only fender thing i've ever owned in my 28 yrs of playing....

my setup: homemade gtr-digitech rp150-fuzz machine (fuzz factory clone)-way huge swollen pickle-digitech dl8-EH 16ddl ri-boss slicer-behringer tweakalizer-lexicon mx200-out to my fender keyboard 60 amp.

oh, i have no idea how old it is, i got it for $105, i don't  use the reverb on it, and i never mess w/ the tone knobs on it-i think i have everything tone wise on 10. i keep the volume a bit low, so i don't blow out the house,it has some bottom end when i crank it. i can make the house rattle a bit, have to do that when everyone is gone....ha...

happy hunting....

-IT IS F***ING HEAVY, i would hate to move the thing around for gigging, your back would be shot moving it.....mine stays put...

the new(ish) songs posted to my myspace thing are loop experiments recorded live w/ the fender amp to my fostex digital recorder , from a while ago.....

s---

www.myspace.com/scotthansen

 

 

 

 

On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 3:53 PM, Ruelle Benoit <benoitruelle@yahoo.fr> wrote:

Hello,
I'm sure I'll get some good advice from the looping community so even if it's a bit OT, i'll ask.

I'm searching a small amp to practice at home. Something under 150$ and I think that with 15W, it will be enough.
I investigated something like the fender mustang, the line6 spider or roland cube but I'll use this mainly for looping and  it would be nice to have a solution where I can overdub differents sounds with different FX.

As I won't find any amp with an FX loop in this price range and i already have some amp modelling tool ( zoom G2 and Johnson J-Station), would it be OK to buy a keyboard amp instead. The range will be wider and I can also us it to loop bass/synth and voice. Any inputs regarding this solution? Any proposal? I already tested putting my J-sation into my home HiFi but I don't get the response I expect from a guitar amp. It seems to lack some compression and I don't get the "oomph" that I can get even with a very low budget amp (think the squier you get with beginner pack).

Thank you for any info;

Ben.