Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Choice

That’s fucking cool.

Evil rockabilly vibes. Ace.

That looks great! For amps, I'd give the Marshall Origin 20 a look, have not tried one myself but demos sound great and the feedback is universally good 👍 As a Vox person myself I'd recommend an AC10 or 15 but might actually be a little less versatile than the Marshall

On the topic of Marshall origins, I’ve had an origin 5c for about two weeks now and to be honest I find it a bit too loud for what I expected to be able to do.

In my naivety I expected to be able to crank it in low power mode and get the typical cranked Marshall sound at reasonable volumes. How wrong was I, it’s still far too loud for home use unless I’m home alone. I decided to buy a boss sd1 in the hope of replicating the tone at lower volumes, but it’s way off. The amp only really starts to sound properly good from about 50% up on volume.

Perhaps in hindsight I should have started with a small solid state amp til I figured out what I needed after some thought, but here we are.

Currently considering picking up an orange terror stamp and good headphones for practicing when baby arrives any day now.

There's an absolutely fantastic argument for Boss Waza Air for home situations where you don't expressly need to be heard by other people... I suspect I might look into a pair myself after the next home move...

The problem I’ve found with using headphones plugged into an amp, or into the phones socket on an attenuator, is that the raw output from the power amp often sounds pretty unpleasant, without it running through a loudspeaker. The Waza Air as mentioned fixes that by simulating everything, including speakers. My solution was to use a cheap Mooer IR/cab simulator plugged in to the line out from my attenuator. Works beautifully, really natural sound.

Boss Waza air is definitely too pricey for my current stage of guitar playing

Just took a look at that approach, and by the time I’ve bought an attenuator and cab sim I’d be another 150-200 deep.

I stopped using my Waza Air and sold it because I found myself using the headphone output from my Strymon Iridium instead (made more sense using with my pedals with it and for recording stuff). The Waza Air is really impressive though.

You could check out the Fender Mustang Micro maybe, quite a lot cheaper than the Boss and seems popular.

I hear you on that. I sold my Marshall Class 5 because, even with the speaker plugged into the headphone jack, it was just way too loud when cranked far enough to get decent tone. As I said earlier, something like a Yamaha THR10 is probably a good bet, but I'd consider trying a whole load of cheap overdrive pedals first and just flipping them on eBay if nothing works for you. I think there's also an attenuator pedal that you can put in your effects loop if you have one.

Alternatively the Blackstar HT1 looks ace. I think @Sparky has one that he rates.

The HT1 is a good option I think they do a version with reverb too.
With my Tube15 I can't remember the last time I've not had it in 1w mode. One day I'll pull my finger out and rent a room so I can crank it with some mates.

I've got a TH5 and you can sit there and play with a nice tone while someone else watches TV - really quiet. I have an HT1 that you can play with a nice tone in another room but other people in the flat will hear it. And I have a 5 watt tube amp that everyone says is tiny but you can't really get past 3 on the volume knob before you worry about the neighbours. I really don't know who can use big amps anymore.

If it helps I've got a Positive Grid Spark that I enjoy using immensely the modelling software is decent and you can get a variety of decent tones with little effort. The only drawback is for the pedal modelling you need to use your phone to switch the pedals off/on which gets a bit annoying if you're in the middle of playing when you want to lose the overdrive, however this is set to change soon as they are about to release a Bluetooth pedal unit.

Also my brother traded in his tube amps of a Yamaha THR30IIW when his nipper came along and he rates it massively it's a little bit more spendy than the spark though.

Do you have a Mac? The GarageBand amp sims should be very decent if they're anything like the Logic ones, so you'd only need a pretty simple interface to plug into (they can be really cheap these days!) and you're away. Also quite nice if you plan to play along anything as what you hear then is de facto mixed with the track!

I just picked one up used, tones are generally great but I can’t work out how you make new ones… Do you need to do it on a computer?

https://ml-sound-lab.com/products/amped-roots and an iRig for all your Dimebag needs.

I don't. There is such a wide variety of tones on the soundcloud that I find there is no real point in doing it myself. Search for a song by a player whose tone you want to emulate and there is normally a minimum of 5 or 6 different variations.

Yeah I had a look at that, perfect for guitar karaoke! It was more for emulating my own specific tones from the past, which I’m sadly not famous enough to have anyone do for me.

This is exactly my situation

• THR5 (tiny modelling amp) for when people are in
  
• Silver face Champ (5w -1x8” toob amp) for when people are out (sorry neighbors!)
  
• Silverface Vibrolux (40w 2x10 toob amp) for when I’m out (sorry everyone)
  

I’m now pondering an Orange Micro Terror. I hear it’s good enough for gigging. Tiny and not mega bucks.

Once you find a setting that's nearly there you can fiddle with all the variables and dial it in.

If all you want to do is play it cranked at low volume, an attenuator on its own would do the job. Cab sim pedal only needed if you want to play it through headphones or record it without mic’ing it.

They are better than you'd think but you'd still need a cabinet to make it work. A combo is probably a better bet for home use.