Friday, April 16, 2010

On another note


The other night I played a Marshall JCM 600 combo as my "dirty" amp and something called a Fender Deluxe Bluesman (or some such)* at Complete Music. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the JCM 600 is probably the last amp Marshall made without the "angry bees" sound going on. It sounded nice. Very Marshall. Difficult to get a slightly dirty sound on though. The clean channel did indeed sound clean. I really couldn't make it grit up even when turning the master all the way down and the channel all the way up. So I had to use the dirty channel and make it sound as clean as it would go (which was still too dirty for a rhythm sound for me, but it was a smooth and nice "lead" sound).

The Fender, which I'd never seen before, looked roughly like a '59 Bassman. It was clearly a "reissue" - style amp in tweed. Had a presence control and a master volume. It would not dirty up at reasonable volumes no-way no-how. I used it as the "clean" sound and it was pretty OK. I wish I had that amp and one of the Traynor amps (as the dirty amp). That would probably make the best sound for me.
*****
Two, count 'em -- two, computers went bye-bye on me this morning. The laptop I think is dead dead. The other one I'm working on right now but probably doesn't have long to live.

*It was probably a Fender Blues Deluxe.

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