I've been jamming with some guys who do mainly old r&b and blues, and so have been using a lot of clean tones over the past couple months. My Traynor YCV40 has great clean tones, but is quite heavy to lug around to practices, so I went in search of a decent, cheap solid state amp.
After rejecting an old, and quite cool, Rickenbacker amp (too expensive), I went and checked out this old Yamaha JX55. Picked it up for $50 bucks.
I've been using it for a few weeks now and it has been getting the job done quite well. Not as chimey or 3 dimensional as the Traynor, but very pleasant and useable. Stays clean with both volume controls nearly cranked. Takes a dirt box quite well, too.
It also has a USA made Accutronics reverb tank that is fully functional and sounds great.
I just found out a couple days ago (looked over at the control panel when the amp was in the passenger seat of my truck) that you can pull out the volume knob to get some distortion from the amp...bad, oh so bad, but hey, that's what a nice dirt pedal is for.
The knobs and switches were all in perfect working order, too, which, in my experience is not usually the case with old amps. A really well made amp.
If I can ever find the time to learn how, and then record a sound sample, I will do that. My main reason for posting this is so if anyone ever finds one of these and is curious about it, there will be at least one opinion on them out there on the web. I tried researching this amp a little and didn't find much other than a couple crappy youtube vids of a couple other JX models.
After rejecting an old, and quite cool, Rickenbacker amp (too expensive), I went and checked out this old Yamaha JX55. Picked it up for $50 bucks.
I've been using it for a few weeks now and it has been getting the job done quite well. Not as chimey or 3 dimensional as the Traynor, but very pleasant and useable. Stays clean with both volume controls nearly cranked. Takes a dirt box quite well, too.
It also has a USA made Accutronics reverb tank that is fully functional and sounds great.
I just found out a couple days ago (looked over at the control panel when the amp was in the passenger seat of my truck) that you can pull out the volume knob to get some distortion from the amp...bad, oh so bad, but hey, that's what a nice dirt pedal is for.
The knobs and switches were all in perfect working order, too, which, in my experience is not usually the case with old amps. A really well made amp.
If I can ever find the time to learn how, and then record a sound sample, I will do that. My main reason for posting this is so if anyone ever finds one of these and is curious about it, there will be at least one opinion on them out there on the web. I tried researching this amp a little and didn't find much other than a couple crappy youtube vids of a couple other JX models.
