But for us financially challenged folks who want a decent guitar to play and dont have $1000 or more to pay out this guitar fits the bill and I like the humbucker sound alot better than the stock strat pickups. I think its all a matter of taste. I put it through a marshall MG100DFX 100 watt amp and it comes out sounding just fine. This one comes with 100% american made humbuckers. Lol!. Hey and its nice to see that some folks here are into this stuff. Just shows again how diverse B1 is. Maybe we need to start a forum for this kind of stuff. Maybe get a B1 band going. Lol! Just noticed I spelled guitar wrong when I started this thread.:eek:

I split the coils on both my guitars. You can open a Humbucker and see where they tied the two coils together. Undo the tie and run the wires to your tone controlls. Instead of 'tone' you can now 'fade' between dual or single core pickups. A Gibson will never sound like a Fender but a split Humbucker will give you a sound you can't mistake as single core.

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The only thing I play on guitars are chords...and only a few at that! My main instruments are the violin and piano.

Heck, with all the talent we have here, we COULD have a band of sorts. If you know how to play a mandolin, it wouldn't be too difficult to learn to play the violin...same fingering...without the frets of course.

Alas, my main focus was classical.

You can do that with any humbucker tube, gilmour did it on a couple of his guitars. Also not to many guitars could ever be a fender, many have tried to imitate them but none can succeed.

Gibsons are nice guitars they sound so sweet. The mahagony body with the sustain and non feedback is to die for. The weight is something to extreme though. After about an hour of playing one of them your shoulder hurts so bad you can hardly move your arm lol ..

My brother just bought a Tobias bass, that is something you should check out also. It is so light, you would never know it is a bass. I also sounds so good. Then seeing that he paid $1500.00 for it I would think it should sound good lol ..

Thinking of trading in my marshall 100 watt combo amp on a crate 120 watt half stack with 4 12" speakers.

Not familliar with your particular models but, I hope they aren't 'hybrids'. It's important to have both gain and power tube stages. For the power stage, 6550's are more robust and cleaner. EL34's are both 'sweeter and funkier'. If you know what you're doing, you can mod your amp to run on either but you need to watch the plate voltage if you mod a 6550 to run on EL34's.

If the pre and power stages are 'pure tube' then it's just a matter of taste.

About preamp tubes. Most preamp gain stages are based around the mighty 12ax7(a) with a 12at7 phase spliter to drive the output tubes. I highly recommend the Yugo (EI) "large plate" as it is a damn good Mullard clone. Mullard was a British company who made some of the most renowned audio tubes ever! In fact, the Yugo plant bought the old Mullard 12ax7 equipment.

I've A-B'd the Yugos against vintage Mullards and can state the sound is 100% true. The only prob is quality controll. If you need 2, buy 4 :D Fortunately they are relatively cheap.

More about tubes later.

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Here's a good tube source in the USA.

_http://www.tubesandmore.com


There are only about 5 or 6 factories making tubes these days. 1 in Yugoslavia, 2 in Russia, at least 1 in China, and a few more I can't remember. When you see some Ruby Red "Groove Tube" in a music store, it came from one of the above sources.

I've been buying tubes from tubesandmore for over eight years and just thought I'd let you know they are "legit" so you don't have to worry about giving them your credit card info etc.

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Price is a consideration here also $499.00 minus the trade in value of my marshall. I'll probably pick it up for 200-250.00. Not bad and some of the solid state amps emulate the tube sound pretty good. Believe me I'd rather have tubes but the price is out of my range right now. A full stack would certainly be more to my liking. I'm getting there in stages.:D

Got the new amp today. Line 6 Spider II 212
 

Spider II builds upon the best-selling Spider to deliver 12 unique amp models and 7 different effects with 3 available simultaneously using Smart FX knobs. Delay times can be adjusted via tap tempo. Features 150W of power, custom Celestion 12" speakers, a front-panel tuner, reverb, and a headphone out. . Go here for a better look:http://www.line6.com/spiderII/about_212.html

Line6 is better than Marshall and Crate combined. The first amp I had was a crate 10 watt, it was garbage. A freind of mine had a Crate Clue Vodoo Half stack, I didn't like it either. The sound of those things are just to out there. Marshall you see to many of, they are also made for one type of music genre. If you want something that is all around then something like Peavey, Fender, Line6, and Mesa Boogie are good choices. Other very goods one are Vox and Hiwatt, Carvin make some very good amps as well. But if I had to choose I would go with either a peavey or Mesaboogie Half stack with the Line6 XPod live pedal board, then the xpod rack mount system is nice also ... :)