Can annybody point me to a nice drum machine type thing? I’m not as concerned about sequencing but want somethig I can play my little drum sounds on the pads and not have it be stupid loud (electronic drum kits, while not being the super loud of real drums do sound like smacking a stack of notebooks with a plastic ruler as hard as you can so I wouldn’t actually call those a quiet option), maybe usinng the little pad controllers. I don’t know what’s good
1 Like
am considering just putting piezos on chunks of wood and glass and not worrrying about any synth processing stuff. possibly a bad idea?
3 Likes
Get crazy with those contact mics!
So you’re looking for something live performance-y rather than programmable?
yeah my first suggestion was gonna be volca beats but it has no pads really
yes! live stuff. programming is ok but not a skillset i currently have, and recordingwise I feel more comfie with a pocketstudio than a daw
1 Like
I’m not sure how it’s stood up but I got an MPX8 for a friend a couple years back and he seemed to dig it. He had been using one of those Yamaha silver plastic midi drum pad things.
i saw a “squier champ 15gr” speaker for $20 on my nextdoor, which is a basically nonexistent amp from the 90s that in addition to spring reverb apparently has “Dual Cascading Gain” controls (2 gain knobs and a volume knob) which is probably stupid but extremely interesting to me. i love the sounds you can get out of cheapo solid state stuff, and while i do have a similar (and recent) “fender frontman 15r” to play with actual spring reverb instead of a pedal, this sounds so much more awesome and of course someone (some asshole) on muff wiggler (mod wiggler now?) says it’s their secret weapon so now i feel compelled to get it and ditch the crappy frontman
(that said, my “vht special 6 ultra” still rules and i love that you can basically get any blend of preamp and poweramp distortion at listenable volume due to being able to control the number of tubes and watts involved in each… only thing i haven’t thought to do yet is go boosted straight in to the effects loop and bypass the preamp completely and cook the hell out of the power tube, so maybe tomorrow? i don’t play that much. this champ gr15 is the fake version of that which is sort of why i want it)
the link above is a solid state beast from 1974 with reverb and tremolo. i am becoming obsessed with tremolo but i don’t even have a pedal (i think it’s either gonna be something extraordinarily cheap or an eqd nightwire one day cause it’s basically a phaser and envelope filter too) so that’s what led to this search. i would love a 15 watt solid state with tremolo too but all i can find are monsters like this. its pickup only in california but i bet it’s actually the greatest amp in the world for some reason. i just know it. the people liked to be into old solid state acoustic 360 and kustom amps (both very ugly) and doom lawyers have gotten sunn betas, coliseums, etc to pretty high prices. following that your best bet for an intimidating doom rig was those ampeg-mixed-with-a-4-channel-p.a. looking peavey heads with the big knobs on the front, or the awesome earth sound research amps. well, i think this thing is probably nauseating at any volume above “1” but i think someone will pick it up and at least take an extremely cool gear pic with it.
1 Like
this can be pretty cool! mesa boogie mk series, soldano SLOs, fender prosonics, probably some other stuff I’m forgetting have a cascading gain design.
1 Like
i meant stupid in this cheapo little squier! but ironically i have much more confidence in even two crappy circuits i can fiddle with than just one that is designed to be catch-all and/or palatable when dimed by the kid who got it in a starter pack. ty for the info tho.
edit:
also i am extremely prescient i guess 2 vids about the carvin within the last 2 years and they sound dope of course (tho nobody tests the tremolo???) one on a slightly different model (no graphic eq, 4 setting tone switch, dedicated “bass” channel) even calls it a “sleeper stoner doom amp” lol i knew it. sparing you the giant yt thumbnails anyway
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVrGa3UKr4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCcjYKGnOD4
I put in an offer for an (Eastwood) Univox Hi-Flier. They have a headstock that looks like Bart Simpson and it’s pretty distracting.
3 Likes
Hi fliers are so cool. Did you get it? Also, is the Eastwood stuff any good? I remember them having a lot of things that are MSRP 600, 850, etc when it may not beat a good old squier for 300. But hi fliers rule and same with those old Epiphone style bodies and ovation magnums and guitar/bass doublenecks… all too good
I bought that lil amp for $20 and have an ongoing gear text with the dude (I never laid eyes on him tho). He lives in a $$$ area next to an amazing playground for kids that had all these shared toys and vehicles and stuff but they all went away cause of Covid 
Also I ended up buying it because I was passing through anyway so I didn’t have to round trip (visiting my dad so I can’t test amp till I come home in 3 days) but I went into the wawa by his home to power up for the drive and it is just supposed to the wawa version of your local walkable bodega or something, there’s no gas pumps just an array of Tesla charging stations. Real bullshit for the gentry. I needed gas!
i did a setup on one of their warren ellis models and it was fine
they’re nerds
1 Like
fwiw i have a frontman 10g and i hate it, it’s the first thing i upgraded when i came back to guitar. i figure p much anything is better, i remember it being super noisy on clean channel and very tinny on drive
thinking about getting a princeton reverb re-issue actually, classic fender amp without being ear-bustingly loud (so i hear). played thru my friends deluxe once, and saw him play outdoors today where he was playing out of it, set on 5 that thing is 85db from across the street
1 Like
Yeah they’re so horrible. The frontman 15r I have also sounds basically bad but I like that I have reverb without worrying about another cable, power cable, and pedal. Also headphones! The gain is really bad tho it’s true
I think this will be good for hunch-based reasons. Also I think 80s and 90s electronics were built for different purposes, have a different variety of components available/economical for use depending on what else was in production at the time, sometimes sturdier, etc. My solid state ampeg svt200t/810e has a cab made of particle board and ripped tolex and can’t distort pleasantly, but has an incredible 6 band baxandall eq has heat sinks instead of fans so it’s silent. I used to use it as a sound system for house parties. I have some kind of early 90s tech fetish basically, and this lil amp will certainly let me at least have molten and fucked up tones cause again… 2 knobs. I also have a small collection of 8” speakers I’ve inherited or gutted and I will find the right one for it I’m sure
I also got a trashed organ (Hammond brand so I was excited but it was a Lowrey or some shit just Hammond branded) a while back and had to destroy it to get it out of my house. It eventually developed a stuck bass pedal and lots of instrument voices were starting to go, but I kept a few things (drum machine, reverb tank, 12” speaker, 8” rotary speaker motor w/cone thing), so eventually I’m gonna turn one of these tiny amps into a dedicated servant for the rotary speaker once I build a little enclosure for it. Close to identical to this:
No elaborate horn situation and might be only single speed so not a true “Leslie” but it certainly wobbles and I think I’ll be able to make it sound good for guitar changing the orientation 90 degrees from how it was in the organ (should now be shooting upwards / launching forwards out of the spinning cone)
So… 60s/90s spinning volcanic trash guitar is the objective
Princetons seem awesome. They have tremolo yeah?
1 Like
i’m obliged to mention that a lot of the reissue classic fender amps have been cheaped out on filter caps so they tend to go bad rather ahead of schedule
a good tech will replace them with good f&t ones
2 Likes
:o what yall think… market rate looks like 1500 ish… this seems nice
another craigslist find… this one a Fender Special Run standard strat per the serial number… on reverb it’s around 500-900… the color is “Spiral Gray Metallic”
2 Likes
It’s supposed to arrive Monday or Tuesday. I don’t know much about Eastwood, but it seemed like pretty much everyone had good things to say about their repro of the Hi-Flier and I offered $420 for it, so I paid less than what a lot of non-Stratocaster Squiers are going for. You can probably get one for around the same price, I see the Eastwood Hi-Fliers (and other Mosrite-clone repros) on Reverb for around $450 to $500.
I also grabbed a used Boss DS-1 for like, $36 on eBay.
Thinking about turning my Paranormal Cyclone in a fake Cyclone II by dropping in the Jaguar pickups and then getting a cheap early 2000s Cyclone and dropping in the prototype Jag-stang pickups (Texas Strat Special Bridge in the neck, Seymour Duncan 59 in the bridge) to make an esatz Jag-stang (Jagstone?). It’s too bad the Fender Deluxe Cyclones are stupidly overpriced – they are not at all worth the ~$700 people try to ask for them when you consider there’s no demand, most of these weren’t taken care of enough to justify charging what the guitar cost when it was new, and for $200 to $300 more you basically get into the cost of used Cyclone IIs (also overpriced but the better guitar, plus they have stripes so the guitar goes faster).
I’d get it because that looks like a cool color (better than black). There’s an FSR Lake Placid Blue guitar on Guitar Center that appears to be a slightly lighter shade of LPB (though the Fender website just says LPB), but since (a slightly deeper) LPB wound up being a color for the guitar the following year to the present, it’s not really noticeable as an FSR so doesn’t not really worth anything because nothing makes it unique aside from the serial number. “Spiral Gray Metallic” sounds a bit more unique, though, so you might be able to bank on that in this case.
Squier needs to re-release this.
3 Likes
recently acquired a bastl softpop 2, excited to mess around with it
5 Likes
My unpopular opinon is that when considering spending 1k or more on a guitar, you may as well pay somebody to make something custom.
3 Likes
I’ve looked, I don’t think I can find a custom semi hollow at that price range. All custom stuff I see is usually 1500+
1 Like