Leaderboard

I had a Tanglewood, electro acoustic, cutaway many years ago and it was really good value for money and a nice instrument, plainly modelled on a Takemine. I moved it on as it was for a specific project that folded, in retrospect (see below) I should have kept it. I currently have an Epiphone EJ200 as I decided I wanted a jumbo (oh the irony). Ideally I would've bought a Gibson J200, but at £3.5k that was never going to happen. Therefore, I trotted off to Guitar Guitar to try one out and took Lady Ez in tow (not quite, but nearly kicking and screaming ). I tried a few EA cutaways, but it was the EJ200 that I preferred. For poops and giggles I tried it alongside a proper J200. You could really feel the difference against your body, the J200 was like a living thing. However, Lady Ez, who was sitting opposite (I'm going to say patiently) said she couldn't really hear any difference, although this is because she could perhaps sense an awful lot money leaving the account. So I settled for the, by comparison, tight feeling and sounding but still very nice to play, Epiphone. Move onto today and I love the EJ200, the access made possible by the cutaway cannot be overlooked and, with playing, the sound has really opened up and it's a lot nicer than it was when I first bought it. Is it Gibson nice? No but, at under a 10th of the price (I went for the natural finish which was, IIRC, £329 at the time), it is much, much more than a 10th of the quality. If you like a big old flat top, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Ah, but this is the joy of the various 'Chat' forums, the OP is dealt with and then we're away with the fairies, often changing the original theme into something else entirely. How we're not discussing samurai swords Vs broadswords is beyond me - we must try harder .

Ive got lots of Behringer effects pedals and all work really well and are great value for money.

Just a bit of technical background: overdrive covers a huge range of sounds. Fuzz is a particular type of overdrive, characterised by a very fizzy distortion ( @EdwardMarlowe, the unit you're thinking of is called the Fuzz Face more here, a '60s throwback probably best known for being used by Jimi Hendrix but in truth most rock/blues guitarists had one in their rack at around that time: they're still popular today, and despite being a very simple circuit wrapped up in a funky container, '60s originals in good nick go for silly money). Overdrive/distortion/fuzz/high-gain are all terms associated with this type of pedal, and there are almost as many variations on the basic idea as there are guitarists using them. My suggestion would normally be to visit your nearest guitar shop and try a few out in the price range you're looking at. However since that is likely to prove difficult (not to mention risky IMHO) right now, you could do worse than check out some YouTube reviews. They won't really tell you how it will sound with your gear, but they will at least show you some of the common variations, and give a bit of insight into how they work. While I'm here, many guitarists feel that a good valve amp is as far as you need to go with overdrive, but since they're mostly expensive and mostly heavy there's quite a lively market in amp modelling pedals, so you might want to have a look at some of those as well. Here's something to get you started:

The Tech21 Trademark 60 was very convincing and fooled hardened valve purists; I had 2 way back when (not at the same time).