New amp day!

Ok, but let’s talk about that receiver at the top right. Pioneer?

Seriously, congrats! I bet that amp sounds awesome. Would love to get into some real tube grind that didn’t weigh 60 lbs. is that a 12 or a 15 cab?

Oh duh, caption.

@devilsrancher I was slow with the caption writing! It's a 12" cab, but it really sounds much bigger than that. The amp doesn't get a lot of grit from goosing the gain, but i've only played with it a 20 minutes or so. Great range of tones to work with, i'm just scratching the surface.

And yes, the receiver is an old Pioneer, i picked it up at a garage sale years ago with the matching speakers.

Ooof. I have only a 40 watt practice amp for bass and I am jealous.

Of course I only ever play in my office so even 40W can get pretty egregious, so I have no plans to upgrade. But I'm jealous anyway.

fwiw Andy Field, who designed the Shuttle series of amps, and less frequently Jim Bergantino, both hang out in the talkbass forum. I've learned a lot reading their posts.

It took me years to realize how much I really liked tube distortion on the bass- but it’s heavily dependent on the tone stage. Like, a 100 watt Marshall almost does it, but the low end gets farty when you really crank them- SVT’s get way too loud before the god tone happens, 200 watt Hi-Watt bass amps are crazy rare and expensive…

I had a Mesa Boogie D-180 for years, but the distortion on it was just kind of buzzy and fuzzy, which always stuck me as odd, because the tube structure and gain stages were not unlike a Marshall? Except more? It was a beast, but really only clean.

By accident I stumbled on a Peavey Rock Master 120 watt guitar amp made in the early 80’s, with a very similar gain structure to a Marshall, but the tone section it just… I dunno, different. I run the bass wide open, and there’s a shift on the treble that says “pull thick” which is damn, it’s like John Wetton on King Crimson. I am fucking home. But it weighs So. Much. Argh.

Anyway. /blog

Post a link to some music through that beauty- let’s hear it!

@ardgedee I got this amp from the talkbass classifieds (the cab i found locally). I agree, it's a great resource. Knowing that Andy still does factory service on the Genz-Benz amps was a big factor in getting this. I was seriously looking at the Mesa Subway amps, but nobody near me carries them and used postings for the smaller 350 i'd get isn't much cheaper than new.

@devilsrancher The tube on this doesn't give much breakup, at least with my pj bass and initial testing. I was able to get it pretty gritty through headphones, but i'm going to play around with some pedals to see what a little extra drive does. The EQ range is really useful, it's going to fun to play with on different basses.

That Rock Master sounds cool, never heard of that one.

@wjcstp Yeah. If I was planning on playing out, I'd probably get one of the amps Andy designed because they promise to be low/no-stress devices whether or not they manage to achieve whatever kind of tone I'm angling for. Funny you mentioned the D-350 because one just popped up in the talkbass classifieds over the weekend for dirt-cheap. Downside would have been its scratch-and-dent condition because the seller had tried to install it in the amp slot of a combo he was restoring.

@ardgedee I saw that one, I probably would have gotten that if I were still looking. The used price for those should be more like 500, but so many are around 600 that it’s almost worth getting it new for 8.

I’m a little tempted to make a bracket and turn this new rig into a Genz Shuttle-like combo. Unless I find an original bracket for cheap.

@wjcstp Asking price for used music gear generally got ridiculous when the pandemic hit. The current standard starting price for used bass models on Reverb that are still in-production is about $100 less than new, which when combined with >$100 shipping because basses are large, means there's no damn point to it.

@ardgedee It's hard to get prices back down once they've inflated like that. I agree that prices on Reverb seem uniformly too high, but things seem to move there anyway, and it's used as a centralized reference so that becomes the baseline. I'm sure we lost some small guitar shops during the pandemic, which only reinforced the online marketplace.

Craigslist and the TB classifieds feel closer to correct pricing for most things. Mpls/St. Paul has a lot of music shops and prices are fair, but it's still really hit and miss finding some things locally.

@wjcstp Craigslist is pretty bad here. People sell on FB and Nextdoor. It's a pretty popular question on the local subreddit, even: Where to sell if you don't do Facebook; the only answer is have a yardsale.

We also have slim-to-nil for music stores. A couple Guitar Centers, there used to also be a Sam Ash. Maybe a half-dozen independent stores left, some of them only running appointment-only or specializing in folk instruments, for an urban population of over 2 million. People who want serious equipment roadtrip to Greensboro or Charlotte.