Oh, poor guitar players lugging their amps and speaker cabinets around. Geeze! Try a 140lb. or 120lb. Fender Rhodes Piano and amp speaker system - get a two-wheel kart. Oh, poor guitar players with an amp in one hand and the guitar in another.

Well this all good news to me because I'm going to save a ton of money by not buying boutique amps.  

I've already got a POD version 1.0 up in the closet somewhere and there's a Fender Princeton solidstate that was used as a scratching post by the cat that I've got covered up in the Iso booth. 

I've got everything I need now. 

I think it all depends on your position in the scheme of things. If you are the producer...you get to have say so in the sound the guitarist ultimately comes away with..that's the producers job. If you're the engineer...you have no say so about it. You job is to capture what the producer tells you to capture. If your the guitarist and you have good chops but a crappy sound....well too bad bad you have good chops..cause you sound like crap.

Well see that's the only other reason to maybe get a new amp if you were shopping for one. The new amps today have a beefier pre-amp section. There's really no need to crank them as loud. Most times, the old amps being loud couldn't get enough drive or sustain so the power tubes needed to cook to get that sound. Ok, there's only one way to get that sound...a super loud amp. 

Danny,

Yep, that is the tone I love, the red glowing hot, soaked power tube over driven sound.  I currently have a Peavey Classic 50/410 that has a clean channel and lead channel.  It is a 12ax7/ EL84 based amp with (4) 10" speakers.  I can get a pretty decent lead channel, preamp tone out of it, but I love the clean channel overdriven tone when it saturates.  It just has to be so darn loud to do that. I can kind of simulate that sound at low volume by turning the volume all the way up, putting an overdrive pedal on the clean channel and then controling the volume with the pedal.  I get a pretty creamy tone by doing that, but I have always worried that it may be hard on the amp.  

I find that I really don't need even 50w any more.  I don't play larger venues any more.  If I was to play out now, it would be a small club or at church.  I think 15w to 25w would be plenty for me.  I have been trying out a lot of amps in that range lately.  I have been eyeballing that new lower watt V3 amp that Carvin  has come out with, but would really prefer to try it before I buy it.    

MakeShift
Inevitably, no matter what amp I plug into, I will eventually dial in a tone similar to what I dial up on my own amp.  I twist all of the gain and eq knobs around and eventually, I am playing my tone.  Its as you say, I have a tone fingerprint.

Same for me - I think we all have a vision of what "our" tone is, and we end up tweaking whatever amp we're using to acheive that.  I used to play out with a Triaxis which I dailed in for my ideal tone.  My brother-in-law bought a little VOX amp with a modeler - When I was over for christmas I quickly dailed in "my tone" and it sounded great.  (that little amp had a tube front end and sounded fantastic)  When I use my PODX3 I've got my tone again.  It doesn't seem to matter all that much - I just need something that allows me to dail in the right kind of front end compression - high gain - that responds to my playing style.
 
I do have to admit that playing with real tubes "feels" better.  I'm not sure it sounds any better on playback, but there's something organic about it that I like.

Oh how I hate amplifiers after years of lugging them around.  Most of them are so limiting when it comes to various types of sounds.  On top of that you need a decent mic and room to record it well.  I'll take me a POD recorded direct any day of the week. 

Of course for what I do, I need a variety of sounds so POD's are great, if you are only after 1 sound then maybe an amp is the way to go.

wow.. my first amp was a sears silvertone. I loved that amp.. It came with a homemade cab with 2 15 inch and 2 12 inch jensons... It for the time, was kicking in sound. As for tone, it is what we play. We use our ears, to achieve that sound. So, just about any amp, will achieve that.

Mod Bod


Well this all good news to me because I'm going to save a ton of money by not buying boutique amps.  

I've already got a POD version 1.0 up in the closet somewhere and there's a Fender Princeton solidstate that was used as a scratching post by the cat that I've got covered up in the Iso booth. 

I've got everything I need now. 

I get what you are saying, but I tend to agree with most of the others on this thread.
 
If this were the late 70's or early 80's, would you have tried to sway Andy Summers when he walked in with a Solid-State Roland JC-120 to record those classic Police songs? None of the amps you listed would sound anything like that? Your solidstate Princeton would have a much better chance.
 
As for the POD 1.0, don't you think they have gotten better over the years? That earlier unit seriously lacked clean headroom and rendered it almost useless to me - but the newer ones don't suffer from that problem. The modeling has gotten a lot better as well since 1998-1999. As just one example - the modeling of a Hiwatt DR-103 on my X3 Live is so good I have to turn on my real 77' DR-103 every few months just to keep the caps formed. LIVE is a different story, but in recording I find myself reaching for the models more and more ....
 
Just my 2 cents.

the whole point of gear,really, is to get you inspired.


i can not get inspired playing thru a modeler.
or a reamp situation.
or anything else, other than a real guitar/amp connection, usually at volume

i can play thru anything, make it sound decent, and pull off everything i do..


but i wont get inspired.

that, to me, is the whole point of 'gear' and the search for 'tone', etc, etc, ad naseum.