Re: I Just Realized.....
PUCKBOY99 said:
I was wonderring if anyone else has never played a staple piece of gear, for whatever reason.....and what might it be?
Gad... so many
I've cronged through a couple of small combos, but I've never spent any quality time at all with a Marshall head/cab combo of any kind. Never touched a Vox at all - heard models on my Pod and heard others playing, and it's definitely not a sound I can see myself using.
There's plenty of stuff I ain't touched. I think part of it has to do with what I told B-Bent in reply to his I Hate Amps thread - it's fun to tweak your knobs/pedals and search for "the sound," but the most important thing is always that you get out and rock. In my mind, while I can pick up on all kinds of nuances, there's still basically two kinds of sound: clean and dirty, and every song calls for one or the other. The rest is just gravy, particularly in a live situation - nobody in the audience cares about your rig in the slightest, and they can't hear your third order harmonics and appreciate that you managed to coax them out through a long series of tests and tweaks with an alchemical combination of tonewood, pups, pedals and tubes... they just wanna know if you're rockin' out.
This doesn't apply, of course, to the gearhead guitar players, who are there specifically to drool at your cool rig. I am often one of these - for instance, this local chick band, one of the guitar players plays through not one, but two Garnet BTOs. I am hopelessly in love with her, and simultaneously venomously jealous, it's horrible...
Whatever the case, another thing that keeps me from plugging into a given amp that I haven't tried is that I spend too much time reading forums and newsgroups, and so before I ever set foot in the music store, I've had it explained to me why those reissue Bassmans or AC30s sound horrible compared to the originals, and they're useless until they've had the Jim Tweeky mods done, or whatever... I'm afraid of trying it out and being prejudiced, so I generally don't. Plus I can't afford any new tube amps, I just keep looking for the deals in the pawnshops.
The one exception to this was when I plugged into a Dual Recto one day when I had a half hour to kill. I fell in love all over again... sigh. If I had that amp, I'd never need another one, really - it does the full range of sound that I need, at the click of a footswitch.
