Amps, Effects, Modelling

darthed1981

lucasharrison said:

Ah that would be cool - can hone some tones without having to lug cab to rehearsals! Nice.

They are great, I'll tag @Legionreturns as he has the head and loves it.

ESBlonde

It all depends....
What kind of guitar player are you intending to be?
Some will claim that touch response and interation between the guitar/pedal chain/Amplifier is a key part of the experience, while others will claim getting that well recorded guitar sound in thier bedroom or on stage is the ket part of thier performance. Neither is wrong, they are just different ends of the same spectrum. For commercial/covers work you can go digital and have all your 'sounds' pre set and selectable for each song or even phrase within a song. Or you can be yourself and create a sound that will fit in the context of the song but may not be the tone or effect on the original recording.

Players like J D Simo, Mark Knopfler, Peter Green, Carlos santana etc. all got thier own sounds but had no advantage of digital.
Today some players create the digital world and gig successfully with it. It would be hard to tell which current hit recordings were created withour pedals amd amps because the result is an emulation anyway. That may tell you all you need to know.

NelsonP

Katana a good shout.

Modelling very good but still not a total replacement for a great valve amp for live / band use.

I have a mesa 50 watt head and a Marshall 4x12. Nearly bought a katana 100w head for the simplicity, good tones and inbuilt speaker.

But I don't really need another head. Ended up buying an atomic amplifire which suits my home use / grab and go needs perfectly.

You can't go too far wrong these days. Plenty of excellent products out there.

mr-mac

Gsp1101 and footboard can be had very cheap s/h now.  I agree my own experience with pods of different age/model (in fact for good live sounds i prefered spider II amps to any pod).

gsp is superb in fact we have a few peavey 5150 owners on the fb group for gsp and when 4 cabled with amp almost all of them choose the modelled 5150 preamp over the real one

add the gsp to a cheaper amp with good clean sound and about volume/wattage you want.  Anything that forms a good pedal platform and has a clean side and efx loop so can 4 cable gsp allowing choice of Amps preamp or bypassing it to use a gsp modelled one.  Doing that also means if using amps preamp then wah/distortion efx come before pre and reverbs etc come after.  I have even used GSP straight into PA regularly without an amp and it still stacks up (so amp dies, take xlr straight from back of gsp... You can have it so xlr has cab/ir on it but 1/4" doesn't.  

suggest these days gsp with control 2 can be had for £200 s/h so leaves you a decent amount to pick up an amp that makes a good pedal platform.