My Gear, past and present. |
I do not consider my self a “gear junkie” however; I have had a few ”boxes” during my 16 years as a guitarist. Here is a little history for the tech junkies. When I first started playing I couldn’t afford a guitar amplifier, so I built one myself. This was basically a 25W solid-state power amplifier put into an old Tanberg hi-fi speaker with a 6” driver. I removed the crossover and the HF tweeter, and was happy with this for the time being. Remember, I couldn’t really play anyway… I bought some really crappy stomboxes to get the distortion I needed, and played my Van Halen tapping licks all day long. It was actually the only thing I could play… However, as I got better, my brother in law took me to a music store in Oslo to buy a used amplifier. This was an old Peavey backstage 30, and even that was a major improvement to the homemade one. This was my trustful workhorse for a couple of years, until I bought a Session “Sessionette” 75W solid-state amp from a friend of mine. This was actually a pretty cool sounding 2-channel amplifier. A few years later, I had saved enough money to by a Marshall Stack. My dad took me to a large music store in Oslo, and I ended up buying a Marshall JCM-800, head and a 4x12” cabinet. This was a serious upgrade from my previous system, and a real “kick ass” system. I can’t really remember why I sold the whole thing, but as far as I can recall it was hell to carry the thing around. Later on I got in to the jungle of rack gear. The first preamp I got was the ADA MP-1, which was really cool cause it was mid controllable. The sound was great, but it had a very noisy FX loop. (it probably didn’t help that at the time I was running a Zoom 9030 effect processor) My life as a “rackoholic” continued, and I soon discovered
the Rocktron products. First I bought a Chameleon preamp, which at that
time I thought had the ultimate lead guitar tone. The problem I had with
this unit was that the low end was not tight enough for the rhythm sound
I wanted. I sold it, and bought the Vodoo Valve which had an even better
lead tone, but still that same problem with the rhythm sound. I tried
several poweramps to go with these, including Rocktrons own Velocity series
and the mighty Marshall 9000 all tube poweramp. Later I sold the Vodoovalve, and bought a Marshall JMP-1 preamp. This improved my rythmguitar sound a lot, and the lead sound was also quite nice. I kept this for many years, until I recently replaced it with the mother of all tube based guitar preamps, the Mesa Boogie Triaxis. This is without doubt the best sounding tube preamp I have ever tried. You can get awesome crunch rhythm sound, as well as the most aggressive hi-gain shred sound, and even really nice sweet clean sound from this wonder. I am currently running the Triaxis trough a Demeter Ignator head (into the loop return input). For direct recording applications, I have been a die hard Line 6 fan from the release of the legendary POD, and upgraded to POD 2.0. Just recently I sold my POD 2.0 and replaced it with the POD XT. I also had a guitarport, and sold that as well, as the new POD XT is guitarport compatible. This is only a short resume of the products I`ve had, and does not include
any of the numerous effectprocessors or stomp boxes I have enjoyed. |