falling in love with the sound of small amplifiers
 

Okay, I own 4 amps.. they're all of a decent size/wattage, but the crowning achievement is the 300wt Behringer amp with a ton of built in effects and it sounds pretty good, but ...

Today, I was playing through a Squire Champ15 which is basically a practice amp.. the distortion is just fucking AMAZING. Like, Big Black-type distortion out of that thing, just BUILT-IN. It was the best kind of distortion: it sounded like a fucking vaccuum cleaner sucking up a blender but you could tell every note apart still (so, it wasn't a "New Day Rising"-era Husker Du distortion, it was a "Zen Arcade"-era Husker Du distortion). Just unreal.

So, I went ahead and bought it for $40. Fucking great! I can see myself playing out of it a lot more than my 300watt Behringer amp for recording and perhaps for playing live (it may not be powerful enough to play live with actually but oh well; definitely using this for recording!).

So, while at the music store, I played out of a Line6 amp which was also 15 watts and $100 and it sounded fucking UNREAL. It had 4 distortion settings: clean, metal, crunch, and INSANE. Yes, there was a distortion setting called "insane". That amp sounded unbelievable, it had weird effects switches and a REALLY weird tremolo effect that sounded unlike any tremolo effect I'd heard. It was more tremolo-ey than anything I'd ever heard: everything I was playing sounded like a skipping CD. It was fucking amazing! Jesus, I almost bought that too! (instead, I bought a kazoo, some Ernie Ball strings, and a ukelaley -- however the fuck you spell it; total price: $37).

So, yeah, it's odd, I've played out of amps of many shapes and sizes, but the ones I am really attracted to are the small, quirky ones, often with built in effects or super fuzzy distortion and not the loud huge clanging banging ones. Eh.

I've got an Ibanez 15 watt and it sucks big time.

my my 15 watt crate practice amp had the most unbelievable tone ever and it was louder than my 30-watter, therefore, the speaker kept blowing up everytime i played with someone else; now it's shorting and that makes me sad.

once, i tried to stop my problem of constant amp blowups by putting a speaker with a bigger magnet. it had the bassiest, ballsier, fatter and most dark sound ever but, because the resistance was so big, it didn't have a lot of volume.

i need a 50 watter for gigging, i'll probably get a cheap bass amp or something.

I used to have a mini amp. The kind that you could attach to your built. I forget the model.

I just remember sneaking up on my brother as he was watching tv, putting it next to his head, and then jamming out. I would get some decent dead-legs for that.

ohh, i also have a smokey amp; you put a paperclip on the speaker and you get the most dissonant, out of control distortion one can achieve. sickest thing ever!!!

ive got a fender champion 30 and i fucking love it,

i can see what you mean but er those line 6s with 'insane' i dont like them so much

I have a V-Tone Behringer and your right, my Johnson Standard 15 watt amp has much better distortion. However, with you and me it's more of a matter between digital and solid state amps.

people everywhere feel yr basement jam.