Garth wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:19 am

TylerDeadPine wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 9:40 am

penningtron wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:49 am

Guilty here as well. Saved up for it mowing lawns one summer. I did trade it in (+ $350) for a plexi a few years later, not that I really knew what to do with the thing. "How do you get more gain?" Dude at the shop kindly brought over a Vox tube screamer as well..

ha! I did the same, mowing lawns and refereeing soccer. Bought it from a pawn shop - an experience that I wish the internet hadn't diminished. I eventually blew it up by playing through the headphone jack with nothing attached, so I learned about speaker load...

I'm confused about this. You're talking about the Valvestate, correct? Why would this blow up a solid state amp? Or a better question might be: why on earth would a MFG add a headphone jack to an amp & still require the player to have a speaker load on it?

That's a good point - Maybe it was a coincidental problem. It DOES have a tube in it. But that 12ax7 should have enough load on it. I have to think about this!

tommy wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:18 am Had a silverface Princeton Reverb I hated because it was too clean.

One of the pull-boost ones? I have one and it's my main squeeze. Really helps to have a balls klone in front of it. It also sounds good with volume, bass and treble all at 10 if I can keep it from going into squealing feedback.

tommy wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:18 am

penningtron wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 6:49 am

TylerDeadPine wrote: Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:20 pm marshall Valvestate

Guilty here as well. Saved up for it mowing lawns one summer. I did trade it in (+ $350) for a plexi a few years later, not that I really knew what to do with the thing. "How do you get more gain?" Dude at the shop kindly brought over a Vox tube screamer as well..

I embarrassingly went the wrong direction. Had a silverface Princeton Reverb I hated because it was too clean. Traded it at a pawnshop for a solidstate Laney halfstack because distortion. DUMB. Luckily I traded that Laney for a silverface Pro Reverb a few years later. Order restored. Wish I still had that Pro Reverb.

I also did something like that, except with a great sounding Garnet stencil amp. I ran a HM-2 in front of it and I hated that I needed a distortion pedal. I traded in the amp and gave the pedal away

Valvestate hive rise! I knew absolutely NOTHING about amps and got a Marshall 1987, but it blew a fuse. So I took it back to the Guitar Center where I bought it. They said it was "defective" and let me trade it for a Valvestate! Straight up.

Jokes on them, I brought the Valvestate back a year later and I traded that for a 83 Marshall 2204 straight up. That's when I figured out amps.

twelvepoint wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:23 am

tommy wrote: Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:18 am Had a silverface Princeton Reverb I hated because it was too clean.

One of the pull-boost ones? I have one and it's my main squeeze. Really helps to have a balls klone in front of it. It also sounds good with volume, bass and treble all at 10 if I can keep it from going into squealing feedback.

Oh yeah. I just didn't know what I had. I was into punk rock and was trying to recreate the sounds I had gotten with a Bandit 65 with that Fender and a DF-2 distortion pedal. It was brittle as hell. I've had a 1966 Princeton Reverb since about 2002. Best amp ever. They didn't change much when it went to silverface but the original Jensen C10N I have in mine is definitely a lot better than what they were throwing in there in the mid to late 70s. I typically run the volume and treble around 5 and the bass a little lower.

The first nice thing I ever obtained was an old Mesa Boogie Mark 3 head. It was the era of seemingly every band having Dual/Triple Rectifiers, but those were way out of my teenage budget. So when this Mark 3 showed up at Music Go Round for $700, I traded anything I had (which wasn't much) to get it. In hindsight, I almost wish I had kept it because I feel like now I could probably dial that thing in to sound pretty good. It was the short chassis Simul-Class model, 100/60 watts switchable, with onboard graphic EQ and reverb. Cool amp with lots of options, but 18 year old me struggled with it at the time I owned it.

I eventually traded it straight up for an '81 Marshall JCM 800 2203, which blew it away. That's an amp I should've kept.

all this valvestate talk and hoo-boy if anyone needed any evidence of Marshall being high on the smell of their own farts, read this groaner.

I've heard people sounding good through Valvestates but that's because A.) they were good B.) it's in spite of the Valvestate, certainly not because of it and C.) most of their sound was coming from a pedal board. All the shitty punk bands that I knew and recorded and played with that had these...they all had reliability issues and would be DOA or sent in for repair...