09.15.11
Guitarring — loud, digital, not bad
Back on Made-In-China Day at Guitar Center, DD’s colleague — a drummer who does not play guitar dropped an eye-popping 900 bucks for a Roland KC-550 keyboard amp and a Chinese-manufactured Classic Vibe Fender Telecaster.
He’d been sold on the guitar by a friend, and despite my advice, bought the Roland as an all-purpose amp. Not understanding guitars, the salesperson didn’t correct him, he bought an amp unsuitable for rock guitar.
However, the KC-550 is a powerful amp with absolutely no tonal opinion, much like having a small PA system run off a mixing desk.
So I told him I’d fix the mistake by bringing in some outboard gear I no longer use, namely an old Line6 PodXT, a digital guitar computer/simulator that mimics famous brand name analog amplifiers for studio work.
In a pinch, the desk model will work fine for live performance.
Plugged into one of the KC-550’s channels, one sets the POD exactly as you would for the studio.
I picked a couple of its amp sims, an old Marshall JTM-45 and a Hiwatt 100, for a test run.
Plugged in the Telecaster and did a quick 30 minute rehearsal of DD tunes with him at the drums.
The combination was loud, had good rock and roll dynamic explosion, and, courtesy of the Roland’s huge bass speaker, great low end.
I know loud.
My rig is the same as it was in 1985. A Hiwatt Custom 50 and some pedals on the front end for delay, chorus, rotary speaker effects and so on.
The Telecaster/Line6 POD XT/Roland KC-550 isn’t the same as my stuff into the old Hiwatt. But it would be close enough for quite a few people at small to medium gigs.
Limitations? Not a lot. The high end coming out of the Roland sounds good. But I could tell it would wear out the ears in a way the Hiwatt with its analog tube tone doesn’t.
And the Roland, which is simply amplifying the computer simulation of a Hiwatt or a Marshall from the Line6, isn’t as molten, as everywhere in the room, or as late-Seventies hammer down vintage hard rock.
These are relatively picky issues from my perspective, often not worth worrying about if what have in your hands translates to noise coming out the a big speaker in a way that makes the air move rock and rollingly.
In its favor, it’s a rig that theoretically will sound the same whenever you turn it on. That’s unlike my Hiwatt and things, which always requires a daily set-up, sometimes brief, sometimes maddeningly longer.
Then there’s the entire made-in-China thing. There I was, playing a Chinese made Fender, the kind they made in a huge factory that no longer exists here, when I was a kid.
I could get started. The USA-made Fender, four to five times the cost
of the “Classic Vibe” from China. The former instruments, of course, sold at prices the young adult employees peddling them cannot really afford on a weekly wage unless still living with mom and dad.