neutron619 Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 Hello Chaps, I'm a noob here on the forum and with respect to playing a 6-string so I'm hoping to get some advice from more experienced folk about what to do in the situation I find myself. I think I might want to buy a new amp of some kind, but I'm an untalented guitarist and not experienced enough to know how to weigh up the factors involved. So - quick sit-rep: I'm a bassist by trade and play in a small trio band and the local church band. I play a little guitar (badly!) when I have to - e.g. to fill in some rythym / strumming if that's more helpful than bass on any given Sunday. My daughter is currently learning guitar and flying along with it. I'm doing my best to encourage her. I have a couple of guitar amps I've picked up over the years - a small Marshall Practice amp (10W, I think) and a Fender Champion 100. I don't like the Marshall amp - it's small, nasal and boxy (but I got it for free). It's currently on loan to a friend. I like the Fender amp very much, but it's far too big for home practice - we can't turn it up past 2 on either channel before we risk complaints from the neighbours / blowing the windows out / deafening ourselves. On the other hand, we've been using it quite effectively in both of my bands (in church-sized spaces) and all the relevant guitarists seem to enjoy it. My daughter currently practices on this one. I think I'd like to stop carting the Champion around and just leave it in the church which is far more convenient for both bands' practices. I think I'd then like buy a smaller practice amp for my daughter and I to use at home. On that basis, I've been looking at things like Fender Champion 20 / 40 Fender Mustang LT25 Line 6 Spider V 30 Line 6 Catalyst 60 Questions I can't satisfactorily answer: I already have a Helix Stomp which I use with both basses and guitars, so do I need to bother with a modelling amp? Flipped the other way: my daughter isn't capable of using the Helix as she's still small-ish, so perhaps a modelling amp with presets will encourage / excite her into making new sounds without the complexity of creating Helix patches? I like the whole Helix "ecosystem" so is it better to buy a Line 6 amp that has some of the Helix FX built in because it'll be familliar? Or, should I go with the Fender amps because they're cheap, cheerful and I like them, and, if I went with the Mustang, give me another implementation of "modelling" for an even wider variety of tones? The LT25 sounds like a good option: [+] it's the right size, power- and feature-wise, but [-] it only has an 8" speaker. Perhaps I'm biased as a bassist but isn't that rather small? Overall, the Catalyst 60 also seems like a good option: [+] it has a 12" speaker, which ought to sound better with modelled tones, but [-] it's hardly any smaller / lighter / less powerful than the Champion 100, but [+] it does have a half-power switch so I could run it at 30W at home, which sounds a lot more reasonable. [+] The app that runs it looks simillar to the Helix interface so it would be familliar, [-] but the FX / etc. on there are straight off the Helix, so there's nothing "new" - I could probably create an identical Helix patch for any sound it could make, so I'm essentially paying for a speaker in a box. If I were a more experienced guitarist, I could probably give weight to each of those considerations and come up with an answer, but as a bassist, it's not my area of expertise. Please could anyone lend some experience to the questions above? Many thanks in advance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dad3353 Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 1 hour ago, neutron619 said: Hello Chaps... Good evening... As you have already found, 100w is way too much for domestic use, so keeping the Champion amp somewhere where it will be useful is a splendid initiative. As for the conundrum : with what to replace it..? I'd suggest a fairly simple amp that should do the trick. Of the four you mention, I'd suggest the Fender Champion 40 as being the best compromise between small practise amp and boxy-sounding 'toy' amp. As we know from bass, speaker size is not the only factor in cabs, so an 8" can sound glorious, but it's probably not the case in the Fender 20w. If you liked the native sound of the Fender 100, the 40w version would probably please most, and your Fx will add any extra sounds you want. Your daughter will, in time, find her own way with Fx; meanwhile she will have a solid, quality native sound when using the Fender 40, without the fuss and bother (and distraction...) of Fx. Not that the others are not good amps, and there are many more that could be considered, but the Fender Champion 40 has the advantage of being already a known starting point, very close to the Fender 100 that you liked. That's my tuppence-worth; welcome to the forum. Douglas 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ezbass Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 Running the risk of muddying the waters even further, the Boss Katana range get an awful lot of love and have a number of models to suit different scenarios in terms of output, size, etc. Oh yeah, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dad3353 Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 14 minutes ago, ezbass said: Running the risk of muddying the waters even further, the Boss Katana range get an awful lot of love and have a number of models to suit different scenarios in terms of output, size, etc. Oh yeah, I deliberately neglected mention of the BlackStar range, precisely to avoid 'muddying the waters'. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neutron619 Posted January 21 Author Share Posted January 21 Thank you all for your comments and your welcome. I'm going to have to spend some time digesting them and doing some more research it seems. Douglas's points make perfect sense and can't (from my point of view) really be argued against - I do like the Fender sound. That said, a quick look at the Boss Katana range when I had a moment earlier looked positive - but obviously I'm going to need to listen to some sound demos and probably go and hear one at a shop somewhere too. Same with the Blackstar. Don't worry about muddying the waters! - there's no time pressure on this so if anything, it should be an enjoyable exercise. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crusoe Posted January 21 Share Posted January 21 I bought the LT25 recently. It's great for home playing. I haven't had the volume up high, but suspect that it could be used in very small venues for gigging. It has 30 built-in profiles, with another 20 or so "hidden" profiles. It has about 25 empty profiles that you can customise. There are a couple of built-in profiles that I really like when playing my Ibanez and Harley Benton. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
