Solid State Amps Suck

on today's episode i'm not going to play a tube amp you know why they're too good i'm going to play solid stamps you know why because they suck i'm going to make you listen to all these sucky horrible solid state amps and you're going to whine about it in the comments get ready [Music] when guitar was first electrified in 1931 they were amplified using radio circuits and those radio circuits were tube circuits so the very first amps were tube amplifiers and they sound really good now the difference in a solid state amp and a tube amp is that solid-state amps don't have vacuum tubes those vacuum tubes have been replaced with transistor style circuits now i'm going to play a bunch of crappy horrible sounding solid state amps because you can't have good guitar tone unless you have valve tubes we all know this it's a fact solid state sucks but what am i going to do i'm going to play a bunch of horrible sounding solid state amps you're going to hate it and in the comments i need to know how bad you hate it let's get going the first horrible solid state amp that i want to demonstrate today is the vox pathfinder 15 r 15 stands for 15 watts r stands for reverberation i think they said reverb but i like to say reverberation now this amp came out in the year 2000 that's when i graduated high school and became a real man let me show you the this is it pretty small has the classic vox look this was also the actual prop from petals the musical where i played a vox engineer and nick played a guitar player who kind of invented something moving on the controls are on the top and it has a really nice tremolo channel i'm gonna put that on very subtle and i'm gonna max the reverb out it has fantastic i mean sucky reverb horrible horrible spring reverb and i'm gonna have the gain about halfway so when i bite into it it'll break up a little it's really touch responsive but it sucks it's a horrible amp i'm gonna play les paul with lawler imperial humbuckers and beautiful gold the gold paint sounds best let's just see how bad it sucks um and just i'm sorry that you have to listen to this because it sounds horrible [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] oh [Music] [Music] i feel like that song it reflects what the pathfinder's about finding a path that's the soundtrack to finding your own path you can have that in 1972 the united states faced its biggest scandal to date watergate i rhymed that that was a hot rhyme right anybody i just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done and an amp came out from electro harmonix now electro harmonics was only was that five years old at this time so five years in they're making a name big show-offs they are but here it is it is the mike matthews freedom amplifier yes the name of the model of the amp is the mike matthews amp freedom amplifier can we get a zoom on this can we get a zoom right here right here right mike matthews freedom amplifier you have volume which i'm just gonna put on like 80 it's going to hurt then you have tone i'm maxing it out and then you got this bite control now this amp was designed by bob meyer who designed all the original stuff lpb1 big muff black finger compressor memory man basically this was a mistake he said he told me that it was an accident it messes with like the top high-end frequencies mike loved it they put it in it's a killer amp it's closed back it's pretty heavy and when you open it up it's a little scary it looks like you're looking into some alien spaceship or something we're gonna play it and um it's just not a good ant you know you're gonna you're gonna hear it for yourself and you're probably not gonna like it and that's okay [Music] [Music] so so [Music] that was a healthy amount of mid-range that's what i like i mean that's i don't like it's the worst thing about that amp that's the thing i don't like in the 1990s dod started focusing more on their digitech line their digital line of pedals they're in salt lake city and the company was basically handed over to a guy named jason lamb i have done an episode on this many of you may have seen it but it's called the lamb series dod pedals go check those out the biggest most popular dod pedal from that era and one of the most popular dods ever is the grunge the fx69 i don't want to talk about the grunge but while we're here there's bass grunge i have the box warranty warranty cards i have the 69b box sticker manual this is another of the same i have two of those so weird oh is that the original stickers did i get that for 25 there's the more crackly looking one where they changed butt and face and all that and then you could have this one too it's a lot of grunges but let's move on to what really matters and it is from 1997. it's the dod grunge reverb real spring reverb that i'm not going to turn on because i need to play some grunge let's focus on the controls here we have volume and a grunge knob i'm just gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna crank that up this has the actual grunge pedal in it i'm gonna quit talking and just let you decide for yourself how horrible this sounds there's no way this solid state amp with a built-in pedal that's that's so gimmicky is gonna sound good in a mix with drums and bass there's no way no way [Music] [Music] do [Music] what's next marshall lead 12 micro stack it's from the 80s the 12 stands for 12 watts so i'm about to pick up a marshall stack you ready yeah i'm pretty strong a lot of people don't know this my arms are totally ripped all the time but i wear these hoodies so you can't see it all right here's the head look at this one finger holding it up with my thumb hold on let me wait whoa there it is [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] uh [Music] i don't know what that was so here's the deal in the comments you better be rating these because we have to uphold the fact that solid state sucks we're all here doing this thing if you don't vote that these amps suck you've been living a lot all right next up the templo nomad templo nomad this is a new thing you should go check this company out it's really cool first off i'm gonna start here i'm gonna turn it around you can do open or closed back you see that big thing you think that's a reverb tank no here's what it is it's magic whoa it's a battery-powered amp it runs for like 10 hours i think it's 50 watts it has reverb it's actually like a slap echo so i'm going to turn the slap echo all the way up i'm going to max the tone control all the way up and i'm going to play it at like 70 volume and i'm going to add a little grit with a session man that's from the power series it's the ts10 tube screamer and the slap echo let's see what happens [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that jam i liked it a lot i know that solid state sucks but that amp i like what happened there it takes pedals really well adding the ts10 screamer gave it this incredibly mid-rangey thing edge of feedback i'm starting to break down a little bit i think i liked it there's a link in the description go check out his site support him it's awesome stuff he's making no i'm sorry it's not it's solid state so there's no way it's good let's move on that is not what i'm saying i'm not saying at all no no i don't like anything next up is an amplifier invented by pat quilter of quilter amplification it's i think it's a great and it's not good it's not a good amp it's not an amp i absolutely love i don't love this amp i don't love this amp listen it's 200 watts 15 inch speaker with a 3-inch cone it's made for steel guitar players it's crystal clean amazing huge cleans that i don't like like i don't like plugging in a strat you know putting it right here in that position and playing into this crazy clean perfectly designed amp i don't like it at all and i'm not gonna stand for it okay wait wait wait wait wait wait i don't love the sand enough that i actually have the extension cabinet too so it's 215s i don't love the way a tube screamer sounds hitting it as well i'm sorry to interrupt i know we were getting started i just want to use the extension cab because i don't like it [Music] [Music] [Music] if you think that jam was horrible in the comments say so let your voice be heard next the johnson millennium 250 it weighs 250 pounds it's 250 watts stereo it has a digital display it has xlr outs it has a tuner it has effects in it you know why because there was dod right early 70s digitech comes along they dropped stuff in the 80s 89 the whammy you know we get into the 90s we see the lamb series you saw the grunge stuff did you know what happens they get sold the co-founder of dod and digitech john johnson starts an amp company johnson amplification the effects in here are digitech effects basically some will say they're not but i'll argue that there's some good stuff whammy space station weirdness but one of my favorites is the dual rectifier sound because it's from 1999 and if you were in a band in 99 you craved the dual rectifier okay we're gonna play that it's gonna have a little gate on it it's gonna be dry and crispy huge big small medium big you're gonna like it [Music] wow [Music] that damn i don't know i felt like it caught out of hand it's a lot of sounds i'm barely scratching the surface it needs the floorboard i don't have it foot switching i like it though and i don't like it it's horrible i hate solid state amps well i mean i wasn't gonna say it what say it but this amp actually has tubes in it so no it doesn't yeah it does no this is a solid statement no it has tubes in it [Music] well there's an audio block diagram on the back but it clearly shows that well i made a horrible boo-boo and when i do that i have to give away a piece of gear so i'm gonna give away this amp to one of you go follow us on tik tok find any of our videos doesn't matter and stitch yourself explaining why you deserve this far superior to bam the best explanation the most convincing video over there i'm gonna mail this to you i'm gonna give you an amp you know because that's my punishment for being stupid i'm gonna give you the amp i'm gonna have it in 1975 the world was forever changed when roland released the jazz chorus here it is um it's the jazz course 120 that means it's 120 watts it's solid state horrible horrible solid state it's famous a lot of bands have used this metallica west borland of limp biscuit notably the cure used it i think it's on the 1975 records it's a big deal but it's horrible it's one of the most legendary amps ever but it's sad that it's solid state because solid state sounds so bad it spawned this a year later the boss ce1 the world's first ever bucket brigade chorus um this is literally the chorus vibrato circuit that was first introduced inside of the amp and then later we end up with the ce2 which is a more simplified pedal based on the success of the ce1 it's true stereo we're going to mic it up with 257s we're going to let it kind of swirl if you're wearing headphones you'll enjoy this more but honestly what's to enjoy it's solid state here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey [Music] what have we learned today well we learned that if it doesn't have a tube in it it sounds horrible and it's completely unusable and you should stay away because that's what i've read on the forums stay away from anything that doesn't happen wait you forgot this one the line this is the line six spider everybody this is why would you need this one it has sounds such as insane and such as metal and such as crunch and clean but why would you want clean when you have insane you um you also have the sweet echo and you can tap it you can tap it in with this and then there's also tape echo and then what you can do is you also it has an mp3 input so you can put your favorite most favorite songs on there and play along with your most favorite songs today's record time is brought to you from 1987's the cure kiss me kiss me kiss me uh this is an overlooked cure record in my opinion um disintegration is what most people think of very classic my favorite cure record is wish can't find it and you know what i've never done this on record time i want to get back to this but right now i really need a copy of wish on vinyl i'm shameless at this point i've looked for it for three years if you have one i have things i can trade i'll buy it i'll beg i'm begging right now back to this great record uh a lot of solid state on this a lot of amazing gated snare tones and i don't say that like cheekily is that a word cheekily like i don't say it jokingly this is a cool record um there are things from the 80s that get really dated sonically but there's some weird vortex that the cure lives in that in my opinion even though the sounds are definitely 80s and even though no one's trying to reproduce them which technically means they're dated they don't sound dated i can't explain it just listen to this record you've heard the title track just like heaven may be the most popular cure song i'm not sure what is it's one of them um it's on this as well yeah catch a thousand hours hot hot hot's a weird song you know i'm not a fan of that song but it's on the record so i'm a fan of that song check it out in the comments let me know what your favorite cure record is um i loved it i went to a cure sound check and uh robert smith just had a bunch of solid state amps behind him with boss pedals he had a boss chorus pedal set always on gaff taped behind the amp always on that's a real man it's just true thanks so much for watching this episode i hope you enjoyed it can you enjoy an episode about horrible sounding amps is that possible i guess i guess it is uh anyway hit like subscribe click the bell icon to get notifications also in the description below you can go over and check out the jhs show band lab account you can jam with any of these jams you can sing over them you can play harmonica accordion you could bang pots and pans along with us you don't even have to be a musician you don't 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Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 485,502

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer

Id: x9TYCes1lTU

Length: 27min 20sec (1640 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021