The Spartan wrote:Cool. I had a Tech 21 XXL at one point and it wasn't as heavily made as I would like. Too much plastic in the body, too lite. From a construction standpoint, a Boss pedal is much better put together. I've also handled Dunlop pedals (in fact that's who made my wah pedal), which are just beasts, plus I used to have a Tubescreamer reissue that was quite rugged.
Yeah, Boss makes tanks. The previous owner of my DS-2 once had it fall out a second storey window, and it just bruised the ground. Crybabies are basically brick shithouses as well.
Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:Some related questions...
Being more of a noob at this, I'm not totally sure what I'm looking for in general. I want to achieve tone in
this general range (especially the first part of the guitar solos). I'm looking to do some serious gear upgrading after Christmas, as right now all I have beyond the guitar itself is just a little Crate amp with a (I'm guessing) passable DSP (it's got a small variety of chorus, reverb, delay, flangers, etc). For what it's worth, I love chorus effects to death.
So, what should I be looking at in terms of amps and other gizmos? Mostly looking at intermediate stuff right now, I'm not quite a total noob but I'm no Hendrix by any stretch of the imagination.
Ah, some real metal.
DSP tends to be garbage, and even for the good sounding stuff, if it's not fully-adjustable, you'll just have someone else's sound. Since you'll probably want to upgrade to pedals sooner or later, you might as well save yourself from wasting money on stop gaps and buy something that you'll still want to use a few years from now.
For amps, it really depends what you want to do. If you're just playing in your room, buying a half stack is stupid, because you won't be able to crank it. And if you don't crank at least a bit, instead relying purely on preamp gain, you'll sound all hissy and naff. So I'm going to assume that you predominantly play/record at home, and go with smaller amps. And if you want to play live with such an amp, you can always just mic it, which gives you greater sonic flexibility anyways.
The most important thing is to stay the hell away from modeling amps, and go with valves. They bring out so much tonal responsiveness in your playing, you won't believe your ears. Especially for stuff like Judas Priest, you'll need that spongy characteristic which solid state can't provide. If you're really worried about reliability, you can buy a hybrid transistor-valve amp. The Kustom HV is pretty good, as is the Marshall Valvestate (particularly if you get an original series 1990-1992 amp, like my 8240. The newer AVT's sound a bit more lifeless).
But you should really go with an all-valve model. My first and foremost recommendation is always for a Traynor, probably a YCV-20. The overdrive channel with boost mode is pretty heavy, and you can kick it up even more with one of the pedals I discussed above. If you can't find one for a low price, you can also try the Peavey Valve King (I much prefer the tone of the Classic or Delta Blues, but you'd need to get most of your drive from pedals with those), one of the smaller Laneys (the LC-15 is probably your best bet, and if you tune down to C# you can nail Tony Iommi's tone on Master of Reality with it), or another Crate.
Crate makes some good valve amps, their best being the Palomino series, but also the more aggressive (and brittle) V series. The Blue Voodoo is actually quite a good amp, Glenn Tipton uses it... but it's a 100 W head, so very loud, and you'd have to buy a cabinet for it. While we're on the topic of higher volumes: if you have the money, definitely look at Orange, the Rockerverb and Thunderverb can give you this sort of articulate but spongy crunch with ease.
As for chorus and other effects, I'm actually looking into getting a few of those myself, I've been woefully under-pedaled for years. Live and for recording, I just rely on the (utterly gorgeous) stereo chorus of my Marshall Valvestate, but from what I've seen/played so far, both the Boss and MXR chorus and flangers look fantastic. I've been looking for a good Uni-Vibe, though I'll probably end up with the Voodoo Labs one. For reverb/echo/delay, the Danelectro Dan-Echo is shockingly good (too bad about the case, again), and the Electro-Harmonix XO is of course a solid choice. Other than that, I'm afraid I can't help too much in this regard, you'll really have to go to a guitar store, choose a guitar and amp similar to yours, and try every effect you can.