Re: transparent amps / speakers
Lewguitar said:
The amp is the other half of the electric guitar and a good amp colors the tone to give us the electric guitar tones we all know and love. An amp that did not color the sound would give you a very bland, hi-fi kind of tone. You wouldn't like it. It'd be like plugging your guitar into a PA system and trying to get a good tone by twiddling the knobs on the mixing board. I doubt you could find a tone you'd like... Lew
You probably just misunderstood. It's guitar -> ME-50 -> amp. The ME-50 Line Out jack has an amp sim. It's not modeled after any real amp, is only on Line Out, and is not selectable. It's mainly for mixers and headphones. However, something about the way it sounds is totally awesome, in my opinion. That's why I'm wondering. It's honestly a VERY close call if I was to pick Line Out into a board or the left and right amp jacks into the Twin Reverb. The only thing is that this amp gives me more versatility: I can add/remove spring reverb and tremolo ("vibrato") separately.
----- Tone rant below -----
I dunno. I've been on this quest for tone, and I find more clues and keep getting close. So far, SD pickups are much better in my guitars. More tone to start off with. At one time I was thinking about contracting someone to make me a custom totally-analog multi-stomp-box out of a Boss blues driver, chorus ensemble, tremolo, and delay. Granted, totally analog means I'd have to buy the separate pedals and then disassemble, reassemble, etc. My three "must have" pedals so far are blues driver, chorus, and delay. But to buy them separately was more expensive, and since I have to be VERY versatile where I tend to play, it was either buy 10 pedals or one multieffects.
Then I got my Twin Reverb. Until then, I was running Line Out on the ME-50 into a pair of Altec Lansing XT1 speakers Line In. At church it was Line Out -> direct box -> some Roland keyboard amp and the church sound board. It honestly sounded very nice. But the Twin Reverb, at least in my small dorm room in Korea, sounded krappy, and sounded like it had leaky capacitors. When I did a live "battle of the bands" there, outdoors, however, they had brand new 65 fender twin reverb reissues. These were VERY loud and VERY nice.
Then I got back to the states and was playing in a large church. Their amps sucked (Line 6 don't like my ME-50) so I played Line Out into the church PA, essentially guitar -> ME50 -> Direct Box -> XLR into sound board. I was told it sounded awesome, but I was the only guitar player there.
Then the next practice I hefted my Twin Reverb to church. So it was guitar -> ME50 -> Twin Reverb. I was told it sounded awesome once again, but this time by guitar players. I paid $300 for this amp originally. One guitar player was insistent that I sell it to him for $600! That's when I started wondering about what other amps I could get and how it would sound.
Guitar players tend to want their own unique sound. I was thinking that maybe if I ran a unique amp and Line Out into it, I would sound totally unique. I emailed several custom amp shops and they recommended either mod two Fender Blues Juniors for stereo out of Line Out for "true" chorus, or else they would contract, but it would cost me $600, my "budget".
So now I'm not sure. I have yet to have enough time to go and hunt for any amps.
