Guitar talk: acoustic, bass, classical, twelve string? You name it! Pt III

[matthewr]

In other news I have been enjoying the GBBO's Tony linked above. It's certainly a lot more my sort of thing than Bake Off, although I guess watching the guitar build while eating cake would be the best option.

Obviously as a newly minted Telecaster snob, I approve of all those people setting fire to Les Pauls (Sorry, Gav )

 

[Tony L]

Since I have never met anyone who can bear to play completely dry what do people do?

This has always baffled me. I’d personally not entertain an amp without a really good spring reverb. It is just essential to me. Even more so if you want a bit of ‘crunch’ from the preamp stage as no way do you want to put a reverb pedal in front of that unless you are going for very specific shoegaze tones or whatever.

My wants list was:

a) Classic Fender sound
b) Spring reverb
c) Not deafeningly loud
d) Simple traditional hand-wired construction so I could probably fix it myself if it ever blows up.

I ended up getting a trem thrown in too, so win/win!

 

[gavreid]

Possibly the PR5 might just be discontinued as their is no mention of it on the Morgan website -- it's now just the PR12 and the Josh Smith special edition. Although more likely they seem to have discounts on the models where they have "1 in stock" and the rest are "We can order you one" so maybe they are clearing inventory and/or stopping selling them eventually. Although if they were dropping them I would expect more of an "Epic Deal!" push.

The Vox AC4 is a lovely low powered amp (I used to have one) plenty loud too. I put AY7s in to lower the gain and have more clean range. There's a handwired version for half the price of the Morgan, but you seem to have made up your mind Fender and Vox sounds are more similar than you might think with a bit of EQ adjustment.

https://voxamps.com/product/ac4-hand-wired/

Since I have never met anyone who can bear to play completely dry what do people do?

I've been playing with just the OE trem into the clean channel for months now, no reverb, no delay, no extra gain or boost...

 

[matthewr]

I am definitely open to persuasion and other points of view, including a "don't waste your money an accept that you are just a bedroom noodler"! Which is of course the point of asking my friends here

I think if I am buying an amp then I want a clear upgrade from my Blackstar which is pretty good for the money (it's about a £400 amp). Otherwise, it might make more sense to spend my £500 voucher on some premium effects -- the OE Trem, say, or that bonkers Chase Bliss one with the motorised sliders -- or even another guitar. And of course I already have the OE Revival which does a pretty decent job of a whole range of classic amp tones and works like an amp front panel in terms of going FROM clean to driven with the gain knob. Mostly my playing since getting that the OE has been just Tumnus (as a dirty boost) > OE > Fender Reverb and/or Fender Tremolo.

(Although as an aside I am intrigued by the idea of really lovely sounding amp and using the OE Revival feature to blend dry / wet sounds)

The Vox hand wired range can get pricey as well depending on which speaker you want, although the AC15 with the a Greenback speaker like the Morgan is £799 which is a significant difference. It also puts the cost of hand wired in perspective as well: "normal" AC15 w/ Warehouse G12C = £695, hand wired / turrent mount version = £1299. With my £500 voucher an amp in that range would be a very affordable upgrade on my Blackstar.

https://www.andertons.co.uk/brands/vox-amps/handwired-amps

The other point I would make is that this is really a gift from my employer to mark 10 years of my life in what will almost certainly be my last job before I stop working. Getting a nice amp I'll have until I pass it on to my nephew seems more fitting to mark that than just buying a another pedal.

PS I am pretty sure I am going to sell a lot of my pedals once i get round to it as most of them are already unused.

 

[Tony L]

I'm a little suspicious of the Morgan being sold off at a heavy discount, I doubt very much that Andertons had many in the first place. I know they're built at the same place as Friedman, Soldano and others but their bad publicity on customer support seems to have got on top of sales...

I’ve just spent a fair bit of time reading up on this and it does appear Morgan himself has a bad attitude to customer service and may not be someone you’d want to deal with. I suspect the amp itself is very good, the range certainly sounds great on Andertons YouTube with Mick and Pete, and if it is properly hand-wired to a basic Princeton style circuit *any* guitar amp repairer could fix it, but that still leaves the question as to whether you want stuff designed by people you don’t like.

I have to admit I am picky about this. There are certainly a couple of hi-fi companies I’d not even have products in the house as I just think they are/were run by twunts, and given there is so much truly excellent non-twunt-designed product out there why bother? To be honest I have Gibson in that category too now after seeing them smashing up perfectly usable product (and asking stores to do the same) that could so easily have gone to charity/education etc. I just don’t want to do further business with them as I’m very much on the ‘green’ side of things politically. Likewise I’d not want a Fulltone pedal after the guy outed himself as a racist recently.

Regardless on paper it looks to be a very good amp at a very good price, but I’m entirely not sure I’d push the button after what I googled up.

 

[Tony L]

Andertons have got a second-hand hand-wired Bad Cat Cub here. Note this isn’t the ‘Player Series’, its a proper had-wired one. I’d look at that very carefully!

 

[matthewr]

Interesting. All though that is an older version II of the cub (current is VI) and is missing their fancy power scaling tech and presumably other minor improvements of the last few years. From a quick google they are meant to sound a bit like a Matchless.

 

[Tony L]

Personally I view simpler as better. It almost always equates to easier to understand/fix anyway.

 

[gavreid]

To be honest I have Gibson in that category too now after seeing them smashing up perfectly usable product (and asking stores to do the same) that could so easily have gone to charity/education etc. I just don’t want to do further business with them as I’m very much on the ‘green’ side of things politically. Likewise I’d not want a Fulltone pedal after the guy outed himself as a racist recently.

I agree, they wrote them off for tax purposes and had to smash them up - shows how broke they must have been. At least they appear to be in much safer hands now

 

[Tony L]

I agree, they wrote them off for tax purposes and had to smash them up - shows how broke they must have been. At least they appear to be in much safer hands now

It’s not just that, they just seem to have an extraordinarily wasteful corporate attitude in general. Here’s a Gold Top 2nd fished out of a Guitar Centre dumpster after the store were apparently instructed to destroy it:

Obviously stuff found on internet, all caveats apply etc, but I’m not seeing much evidence of green or sustainable behaviour from them. I also have no idea if Fender or whoever are any better, nor the Japanese companies, but if they aren’t they certainly don’t get caught as often!

 

[gavreid]

It’s not just that, they just seem to have an extraordinarily wasteful corporate attitude in general. Here’s a Gold Top 2nd fished out of a Guitar Centre dumpster after the store were apparently instructed to destroy it!

Yes - and for the same reason, they were writing off the retuns - that's an old video too tbf. I agree though, compare those factories to Framus in Germany, it's on another planet altogether...

http://www.framus.com/en/Framus---C...-Factory-Tour---Visit-us.html#current_site_id

 

[matthewr]

I think that was the old Gibson regime? Did they not sack everyone and start again when everyone hated their entire range and then they came out with the "back to basics" Les Paul's like the one you bought Gav?

 

[matthewr]

Personally I view simpler as better. It almost always equates to easier to understand/fix anyway.

The power management thing the later Cub's have is a big part of the reason people really like them though. It's their variation of the run the preamp and power tubes at full tilt and scale it back through a clever reactive load arrangements that retains the tone and feel of a real amp. In practice I think it will all be a bunch of discrete, analog components though and not a secret PCB full of surface mount. In fact I suspect a good portion of the things is literally just metal!

 

[gavreid]

Did they not sack everyone and start again when everyone hated their entire range and then they came out with the "back to basics" Les Paul's like the one you bought Gav?

Not that I know of, seems like the same staff. Mine had a duff bridge and a tuner - so it propably was the same QC staff at least They did close Memphis but that was already a done deal.

 

[gavreid]

This is a bit different (in places), well worth a watch

 

[matthewr]

Me again, still musing on amp choices....

I find myself asking, do I really need an amp with on board reverb? I mean if I think of classic Fender sounds I really want a spring reverb and ideally a tremolo but outside that it seems many people do indeed play without any reverb? This is somewhat moot as I am narrowing down to the Tone King vs Morgan, but a) it seems odd to dismiss, say, the Milkman I have always like the sound of because it has no reverb and b) I find myself listening to lots of Vox amps and learning that there is more to them than just sounding like a British 60s pop group and the apparent virtue of non-negative feedback amplifiers.

Also this AC15 seems staggeringly good value for money. Handwired, Celestion speaker, half power mode, and a master volume and non-master volume bypass mode.

In fact don't say anything but I wonder if it's actually mispriced?

 

[gavreid]

Seems like the price of the AC4 hw or just the cab, it's $1600 at Sweetwater I'd bite your arm off at that price...

 

[matthewr]

Yes with my £500 voucher it would be a massive upgrade for £400. Although it does seem too good to be true.

 

[Tony L]

Only you can decide about reverb, though if you do want it you would need to run the amp totally clean if using a reverb pedal unless the amp has an FX loop (most don’t). Gritty/crunched reverb only works in very specific shoegaze scenarios. In any classic Fender amp scenario you are crunching the preamp section ahead of the reverb send, i.e. the reverb remains clean. This is why it was a ‘must have’ for me. I needed it in the amp. I also think there is something very special about a proper valve-driven spring reverb that pedal emulation just doesn’t quite get. It’s almost that echo pedal vs. proper Space Echo kind of thing. I never run the amp dry though, the reverb is always on to some degree.

PS I’d still not rule out a proper hand-wired Fender Princeton, I’d really want to research what had been criticised QC wise as the build looks good to me. Either that or just bite the bullet and get a black-face spec Rift!

 

[matthewr]

I have a funny relationship with reverb in that I find none at all really weird, but mostly I just want a little bit of classic spring reverb. I never get into to it in the way that shoegazers do and certainly not the way the ambient people do. Or rather I sometimes enjoy dialling up some awesome sounds with verb and all sorts of delay which is really cool, but when I come to actually play I always go "Ok, time to play so lets switch all that bollocks off". If I were to do reverb in a pedal I would be much more of a Caitlinbread Topanga than Strymon BigSky type. Or indeed the Fender Tremverb I already have.

I could always move my amp into the bathroom I suppose

I do share the concerns about reverb into the front of the amp if it's anything other than clean. I also like the idea of just having a guitar and an amp and not having reverb in the amp would mean at least one pedal.

PS my favourite use for delay is actually when practising as getting your scale notes in time with delay repeats is way more fun than drilling your timing against a metronome.