My first amp!!!

Was talking gear w/ friends and I finally found pics of my first "guitar amp" online...
 

 

 
 
Man, it SUCKED! lol

I remember that if I pushed the volume on that one, you'd feel air winding from behind the knobs and the power button.
 
It was the perfect complement to my crappy guitar.
 
 

Hence all the snickers I get here.

Mine was also 10 watts, can't remember the make. 3 inputs. Guitar, bass and vocals all through it. 'Appy daze.

My first

Very Old, it was allready second hand when I was fourteen.
On the back of the amp or the reverb was a text saying: Made by beautiful californian girls
 

My first amp, in 1974, was a 40 watt FAL combo. All the worst elements of 1970s cheap solid state. Ultra-clean unless absolutely cranked when it was just unpleasant. No reverb but it did have tremolo and a 50Hz hum that could be used as a drone.

My second amp was a 1968/9 Marshall 50 watt Lead head which I got very cheaply indeed in 1979 because it was sounding a bit off and its original owner wanted rid of it because he wanted to buy a new-fangled HH "Valve Sound" transistor amps "because transistors are more reliable than valves". Five new valves and the Plexi was working fine....

My second amp was barely better than the first - it was a Ross keyboard amp. Not much to redeem it as a guitar amp, beside the onboard chorus.
 
I hit the jackpot with the 3rd one - comparatively speaking - when I managed to get a Marshall Dual Lead Combo. No tube, but, from memory, it was actually pretty good for a Solid State amp. I still see them online going for $250.
 
Had to sell mine for $50 after walking through the whole city, carrying it on my shoulder and trying to get a better deal. It was that or starving.
 
I'd really like to find and try one again, even if just to see how well or poorly I remember...

Rain
Because that one sucked so much, I'd rent one from a guy when I could. The rest of the time, I'd borrow the one we had in school. A Traynor, just like this one.
 

Just seeing this picture got my freaky little brain into playing mode. My main amp right now is a Traynor TS-120 from the same era (it looks exactly like that except bigger with more knobs, ins/outs, 5 band EQ, etc). It's actually a REALLY freaking nice amp for an old transistor jobby.
 
Over the past few months I have stopped playing aside from just picking up the guitar unplugged to noodle around or nail down picking/fingering sequences for the theory stuff I'm writing. Before that I had finally gotten around to hooking up my Line6 head and then the Traynor to my mixer (both have XLR line outs). The Traynor line out sounds WAY better than the L6 as far as a usable clean signal. Unfortunately the line out signal is so hot that I have to keep all the levels on the amp set to 0 but I can still screw with the EQs on it.
 
Last time I hooked it up I was screwing around with my Boss OD (yellow) pedal and my MXR Drive pedal and monitoring via my mixer with headphones and I was getting some pretty juicy rock/blues tones (way better than using my sims with a direct in on my interface). Today I was messing around clean just to practice up on the exercise regimen I've been writing down and jamming out some weirdo clean prog/jazz type weirdness.
 
I took a break and started thinking about some of my metal/hardcore stuff so I pulled out my Keeley modded Metal Zone which I had been having kind of a hard time dialing in with the Line 6 using the line outs. With the Traynor it was WAY nicer/meatier/live sounding. Still kind of hard to dial in but MT-2's always are with their hyper sensitive controls. I was getting a ton of brittleness/crackliness in the high range that was making me think it may not work on a recording but I was able to just turn down the tone on the pedal and compensate on the Traynor's EQ sections. It was pretty much perfect after that.
 
Man I love that amp. It's funny because I've owned a ton of Traynor gear over the years because they were always cheap as heck and you could usually just toss a stomp box in the chain and they work well live. Now sadly they have become conidered "boutique" gear and have tripled in price. A buddy gave me this one in lieu of some money he owed me and man it's a real score. I had to get it repaired because the main board was busted somehow so it could only be used as a cabinet but the guy had replaced the factory speakers with some fancy arsed ones so once the amp section was working it was a brilliant piece of machinery. It's looking like it's gonna be REALLY useful for my home recording stuff too with that line out.
 
Anyway... your picture inspired that little rant and a day of riffing out. I'm sure my arms will burn like arsewads tonight from such a long session out of the blue but it was worth it.
 
Oh and my very first amp was a little 10-15w yamaha thing with really bad distrotion. My first semi decent sounding amp (aside from the Fender Vibrato Champ my uncle loaned me along with his Hohner tele) was a Peavey Express 112. That thing was like metal godliness compared to the Yamaha POS. Still pretty crummy distortion by todays standards though but it worked well enough for all the Metallica/Megadeth/Overkill/Anything METAL crap I was learning at the time.
 
 

My first guitar amp was branded Vadis it was a 60 watt valve head with 2 x 10" speaker cab. The company dates from the 60's to early 70's in Sydney Australia.
I bought a no-name 12 string hollow body electric guitar with it as a package

I bought it from a 2nd hand store ( pawn shop) for about $250 (5 weeks pay at the time 1973) but then along came the first child and back to the pawn shop it went. The amp not the child.

Sadly I don't have any pics of the gear.

some really cool stories here!!
 
heheh, 1st amps are kind of embarrassing, eh?
at least realistic had a few bells and whistles.....
 
mine was a bit more....... common.
 
 
 

a sears silvertone, with a tube amp in the case.
really sounded good...
 
but later, i bought another sears product, just because it was in it's own box.
 

 
i guess i liked sears products.
LOL
 
 
i learned how to play all my zeppelin albums on this amp.
 

no, i meant i stood on top of the amplifier while i played.
 

but absolutely NOTHING...
 
beats moving air.
 
it's like bacon bits versus filet mignon.
LOL

My first was a Peavey Backstage I got at the local music shop. I still have it in the garage somewhere (I'm a sentimental pack rat) and I bet it still works. It's got to be at least 20 years old now.
 

How awesome is that! I didn't anticipate that this would generate so many cool stories. It's great to see what you guys cut your teeth on.
 
My best buddy back then had a Sears copy of a strat - olympic white, maple neck. Man, I envied him. He bought his first amp from one of our older friends. The cheapest thing - originally it was in a plastic casing, but the guy had built a plywood box and put the electronic and speaker into that.
 
Since neither of us had pedals, we used to run our signal through an old 8-track tape deck, which, when the cartridge wasn't properly inserted, generated generous amounts of fuzzing. How it really worked and how he'd figured that one out I cannot tell. As a matter of fact, it doest seem to make any sense, but that was our fuzz box.

I was doing some more research on old gear I used to rent and remembered that modular pedalboard by Korg...
 

 
The one I used to rent had distortion, delay, whatever modulation I can't remember and a 4th unit which I just can't remember. I first rented it because I wanted distortion and that pedalboard was the only thing they had with distortion.
 
The cool thing I discovered was that you could actually play the pedalboard almost like a synth, on it own. Just get it to generate some noise and you could create those otherworldly, insane "special effects" by tweaking the parameters on the effects...
 
I wouldn't be that curious to try my first rig again, but this Korg thingie, I'd sure like to give it another spin...