CRguitar. Pile on??????????? heck no. i enjoy your posts because you obviously have alot of experience with equipment. but...........
i gotta have the tubes. gotta have the tubes.

Versatility has more to do with your needs. For me, all the effects just get in the way of my guitars tone. All I need is a tiny bit of reverb or a little slapback echo, a rarely used wah and a boost pedal once in a while. All the swirly, chorused, flanged, phase shifted, overly wet reverb with too many echo repeats on top of it just leaves me cold. Any effects I want, I either build them myself or hand pick them. Built in effects have their limitations too in the versatility department, and I see a lot of players adding pedals to their modeling amps. It's the department of redundancy department. I like the stuff I build the most, because I usually mod the effect to taste.

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Life...... It's sexually transmitted and always fatal

Well, thanks for your kindness - there seem to be a lot of threads on this Forum lately that involve piling on. That said, I should point out that I'm an older guy and as I have, um... matured... I find that at least 90% of my guitar playing these days is clean. While I own, let's see, six tube amps from different manufacturers, not including two hybrids;, I never turn them up loud enough to get that tube overdrive and these days I'm just not much interested in pedal overdrive either. And though I own a wide variety (most listed below) of Fender amps, some tube but most solid state, I'll admit that they do sound a lot alike when I'm playing clean. Fender is what it is.

I guess that's why right now I'm on my Roland kick. It has great effects, some very smooth and tasty amp models and if I get the urge to dirty things up a little, again the Roland comes through handily. I guess I'm just outgrowing the high volume lifestyle I enjoyed so much decades ago. As to why I have so many amps, all of them just sound a little different, one from the other and I'm just addicted to collecting them, pure and simple.

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Dennis in CR
Rockin' since 1963

I have played through a couple of the different Cube models, and I'll agree that they're good. I was very impressed by a friend's 80-watt version...for clean sounds only, though.

It's probably just my personal preference, but I didn't like the Cube's overdrive or distortion effects with my single-coil-loaded guitars. It was very thin and processed sounding, even after a but of tweaking. However, the overdrive and distortion from the amp sounded great with a humbucker-equipped guitar.

Oddly enough, he agreed...he has several guitars with P-90's loaded, and he relies on an outboard overdrive pedal when using any of those. He said when he played his one humbucker-loaded axe, it was straight into the amp, no OD pedal.

Once again, it may have just been us, or it may be the room he was using it in (bright, bouncy room with a lot of cement and harsh angles), but I thought it was very nice clean and very meh-to-bleh dirty...JMHO.

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Good Vibes To Y'all!



Screamin' Armadillos
Texas Roadhouse Music
Guitar/Slide Guitar/Harp/Vocals

just to throw it in the mix, i once borrowed one of those ZT lunchbox amps for a gig and was blown away by the sound. worked great with my pedals too, was even loud enough for the gig and when mic`d up was faultless. Seemed not a million miles away from a cube, but for me it always stuck in my head.

Kind of a small niche in the market its aimed at though i guess, and perhaps not relevant to this discussion.

I`ll get my coat.

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`I prefer not to listen to music that I can't rip off or improve on` - Ian Dury