I've recently learnt a very valuable lesson and like all good lessons, I thought this is something I should share just in case it helps someone for making the same mistake.
This is a long story but it's all about the journey and not the destination.
Now I'm alright on the guitar. That's a statement you won't hear me say often because I believe in modesty but I'm alright (whoops I said it again). Now I'm no Jimi Hendrix but more of a Keith to Brain/Mick/Ron or Izzy to Slash and so I should be, after playing the darn thing over twenty years. The thing is, I have learnt a lot of the tricks of the trade over the years and turned myself into a decent band player, but there was one thing I forgot and checking out lots of videos on YouTube I've noticed I'm not alone. Some people never learn how to play the ‘Electric' part of an electric guitar .. eg the amp! To me its more important than the pickups, the strings and even those tap solos.
My story is not an uncommon one. I got my first guitar when I was still at school and it was horrible .. really horrible. You had to catch a taxi from the strings to the fret board and that was just at the first fret. But if you think that was bad you should have seen the amp … it was a box and a speaker and very few transistors turning the guitars single into ‘tone'. I still have the guitar but I'm sure the amp is in a landfill somewhere in south east London.
Anyway after finding out I had the appetite and dedication, if not the god given talent, to get better, I slowly upgraded my gear. The upgrades came mainly in line with the increase in my earnings from my fledgling career in the real world with the odd deal and slight of hand along the way (we all find a way to get the next guitar) before making it to my first ‘professional' rig. Well I thought it was professional anyway. Basically consisting of two vintage Fender guitars, a bunch of Boss pedals and a 2 x 12 Peavey Classic 50. Now you can probably already see the problem emerging, 80% of the value of my rig was in the guitars!
Now this is not a bad thing .. not at all, and I am rather passionate about this having read everything ‘Tone Heads' have to say about ‘gear'. Leads, pedals sucking tone, non-hand wired amps etc etc. Your tone is you tone .. period. If you have a great tone it really doesn't matter how you got there and frankly Jimi probably could have got my first amp and guitar to sound like heaven on earth if he'd tried. However, saying all that its great to have all that hand wired boutique stuff isn't it? It just makes it more fun and lot easier.
Anyway rant over. My ‘pro rig' was great and did just want I wanted, but more importantly (and this is the real point) it was the journey that I had taken to that rig that really matter. I knew every inch on the controls, how touch sensitive the whole thing was. If I need to play soft, I knew how to do it. If I need to rock out I knew which buttons to press. I was ‘one' with the whole set-up.
Then like most of us. Life happened and that day job, which was only there to support my musical career, suddenly became my career. No longer could I practice everyday for 4 hours, jam three times a week and gig at the weekends. I had to work late, study and work at the weekends. This eventually turned into me almost giving up playing at all for nearly a year!!
Saviour was at hand though. I ended up with a job that not only paid well but sent me over to America for weeks at a time with nothing to do in the evenings and weekends. Now with that extra cash and Tin Pan Ally nearby it could have gone one of two ways. Thankfully my addiction became GAS (guitar acquisition syndrome for those who don't know). However, I was on my own and without a band so there was no need for an amp. This continued for some time.. years in fact. I got right back in the saddle in terms of practising and my touch and technique was really good. At least I thought.
So me and the guys from the old band buried hatchet and re formed (hey if all those other nineties bands can do it why can't we) and I had to buy an amp!
Oh my what to do. Well the difference this time was three fold. 1) I thought I knew what I was all about, 2) I had more cash than before and 3) the internet!
Back in 1992 there was no discussion forum to tell me that I should buy a hand wired amp from this maker over here and this boutique pedal from that guy there. Nor could I order the latest hand made models from the West Coast in the US. In fact my rig basically could really only be what the local guitar store stocked. Okay I concede I live in London so it wasn't that bad (I was able to pick up two vintage Fenders after all) but I was very, shall we say, ‘focused'.
I decided with the help of my on-line ‘friends' that I needed a hand wired 18 watt Plexi Clone 2x10 combo. Again don't get me wrong this is an amazing amp but the problem is I had no idea how to play it.
What I hadn't got was I'd forgotten how to play with an amp. I just took it for granted that because I'd re learned the guitar that I would just be able to play through an amp.
One: I hadn't re taken the journey to arrive at the perfect amp for me.
Two: I'd never played a hand wired valve amp before. I had no idea how sensitive it would be.
Three: The touch and technique I had developed was to make a solid body guitar sound great acoustically, which basically means you have to play really hard. Put that through a hand wired amp and you get abrasive and aggressive, which can be cool but not what I was after.
So I thought to myself, okay so I have a great guitar, I've got the chops and now I have got an amp that cost 5 times what my so-called ‘pro rig' amp did, I'm going to sound amazing.
Truth is I sounded awful. How can this be! I can play. Yep. The guitar is brilliant. Yep. Right so it's the amp then. Well that's easily fixed I'll buy another one.
So I did … but what to buy. Well my sound was too distorted and aggressive so I clearly need the Fender clean sound. So I bought a very expensive hand wired custom shop Fender amp and I was still having the same problem. Arrghh! So I decided to think about selling the ones I had and buying something else (the credit crunch had happened at this point so no more purchases!), which is fine but I'd be losing 20%+ value on each amp with them both being hardly used.
So I realised I was making expensive mistakes so I decided to put my two amps on ice and rent amps from the local studio and hope to come across the one I liked. By this time my band was playing every week and I was getting better and strangely I was starting to make the rented amps sound really really good. I had been using a Marshall JCM 800 regularly so I started to believe that is the amp I needed so all I had to do was sell one of my amps and a guitar and I could get a JCM 800.
Thankfully I had a moment of sanity and decided to just try that Plexi out one more time before selling it at a loss and wow ! Unbelievable, truly the best amp I had every played. How could that amp that sounded aggressive lifeless and dull over a year ago all of a sudden sound like heaven?!?
So I asked myself, hmm the amp hasn't changed, the guitar hasn't changed so … you could hear the penny drop over our very loud drummer. The realisation that I had forgotten how to squeeze the best out of an amp was a hard one to take but a really well worth lesson.
I always read about how an experienced player could get everything they need from a non-master volume amp with one tone control just by changing their attack and using the volume and tone controls on the guitar and I thought I was that guy. I wasn't … I could play a guitar but not an electric guitar.
So I guess this has been a rather long-winded way to say ‘don't forget to practice with the amp". It really is up there as one of the single most important items in your chain effecting your tone but its like an instrument in its self. Yeah Jimi could take my old crapy amp and make it sound like the tone of the gods but he was a one-off. If you are going to get a great vintage clone / hand wired style valve amp remember it is not going to react like your Peavey Bandit so you might need to practice purely on getting that amp to sound great and its going to take time.
Anyway as for me. I now have an incredible two-amp set up including the best of British and American, which NOW I can make sound really good. It's been a journey but I'm no longer searching for a new amp!
About the Author
My name is Colin and I have been playing guitars for many years. I am currently part of a band called Paste, we have been playing and gigging for 26 years now. Wow that is a long time, still loving it as much as when we started!! Check out my website: http://www.fatneckguitars.co.uk
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