Why Guitar Players Are Throwing Away Their Amps

hi my name is Mike and I happen to be a guitar player and like a lot of my guitar playing peers around the world over the past 5 to 10 years there's been this nagging question in my mind that keeps circulating my brain and my thoughts whenever it comes to this weird guitar world that we talk about and that question happens to be is it finally time for amps to be dead is it time for us to all throw out all of our amps and there are a couple specific reasons why this question has been so prevalent not just for me but for every guitar player and here's why that might be you see for me just like for a lot of other guitar players this isn't a question that's just coming out of the blue about 6 years ago I was a very young and very arrogant guitar player with dreams of being either a touring musician or a sid man for some artist in Nashville basically anything to help me achieve my dream of getting to play guitar as many hours in the day as possible and if I was going to be able to achieve my dream there was one thing that I knew I needed I needed a tu bamp because good guitar players play two bamps and bad guit guitar players play solid stams at least at the time that's what helped excuse my lack of playing ability so of course it was in my very best interest to try and get one of these tube bamps and because I had a little bit of money left over from right after ID quit my job at Guitar Center and if you want that full story please let me know in the comments my plan was simple and I'm sure it's not the most original thing I'm sure people have done it before I was going to go online and I was going to look up the cheapest Tamp possible the cheapest one on sale whether I was on Craigslist or some used website and what I found was really interesting because you see as I'm scrolling through these pages I had about $300 to spend and all of the amps that I was Finding once you includeed shipping and handling and taxes they were well over $300 into the $4 and $500 range and I thought to myself I don't know what I'm going to do right now I mean if I don't get a tubeamp I'm never going to be able to fulfill my dream because I'll just be the laughing stock of the Guitar World and I'll lose all of my street cred I'll never be able to hit that professional level that I want to and I'll never be able to stand amongst the Great so in the moment I decided to look up Alternatives like what else is there other than Tu bamps and on the used page I found something interesting it was called a line 6 hd500x which is an almost Ivan as level long name but the point of this video is not to question the capabilities of naming of line six but to tell you what happened and as soon as I saw that I was like I don't understand this thing is it a pedal is it an amp is it both I had heard of multi effect pedals before but what is this thing actually so I drove to the nearest store where I could find one about an hour away it was used and I brought it back home I opened my door I plugged it into my little Focus fright scarlet and I turned it on and this was the most anticipation I had felt with a piece of guitar gear in a while cuz like I said I didn't really know what this thing was and as soon as I heard the first tones I immediately thought to myself this just ain't it I don't get this now you got to know that this is not me trying to talk crap on the line six hd500x again pretty long name I've seen people known guitar players who have been on the road for 10 15 20 years who use that unit in the most professional settings but at the time never having used a digital floorboard amp model or unit like that I don't think I ever could have come to terms with it so I returned it I just didn't know how to use it I didn't understand it and I didn't think anything like a digital unit in that realm could ever get two bamp level tones fast forward a couple of years I learned a couple more scales I learn a little bit more about gear but I'm still a tube amp player and I will say that to your face and I walk into one of the church gigs that I'm playing and our leader Chris he comes up to me and says Whoa Mike you're always carrying that tube amp I just got a helix why don't you go through one of the patches that I have on here and I'm like patches Helix I think I tried one of those things before a couple years ago I don't actually know what a patch is I'm good but he insists he's like these sound really good for worship and I'm like fine I'll try some of your patches some of your weird digital units we'll see if it sounds good the only reason I had been using some of the digital or vsts before is because they were really easy for not getting my neighbors to get mad at me while I was making videos recording something but in a live setting when I can actually crank an amp why would I ever use one of these other than out of convenience but I'll take his word for it and I plug into his unit and I strum these first couple chords I play a couple notes from our lead lines of our solos and I'm like nobody told me I'd be getting some of the best tones of my life today I didn't wake up thinking that I mean I was I was genuinely floored at how good these sounded you see these might have been some of the best tones that I'd ever heard out of either a digital or a tube amp in my entire life which actually is and leads me to my first point if you've been anywhere near the guitar world or the gear community in the last 5 to 10 years there's a phrase you've probably heard often and that phrase is if you get you 90% of the way there no one will ever notice in a live setting or no one will ever notice in a mix but the thing is which is my first point there are a lot of people who would argue that not only does a helix or headrush or any unit like that get you 90% of the way there it actually gets you a 100 and some people actually prefer those digital tones to the miking of a two band they might actually have a point to their argument cuz those tones can get really really good let me show you real [Music] quick [Music] so that was like some country rock stuff through a fender style amp a lot of stuff I've been playing live more recently but more on that later if I wanted to dig in really get heavier it would be right at my fingertips or I guess in this case my toe tips [Music] a [Music] now convenience might not be the only reason why a player might throw out their physical lamp but I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is not a factor I mean it is genuinely something to take into account for example this right here is my PRS archon 50 it is a fantastic tube amp that I've been using for a lot of my heavier tones in some of these videos and just for recording for other people the amp sounds definitively amazing for heavier tones but I'm not going to lie this thing is super heavy and that's without the cab the Helix with this being the bigger unit as opposed to the LT is a lot more compact even a lot of the competing units to the Helix that happen to be a little bit bigger are a lot more compact than carrying around a tube amp and a cab depending on the circumstance but really it just depends on what you like and what you want but also putting in into consideration when you're considering a digital floorboard unit you can't actually feel the air move when you're playing a note on your guitar which is something that a lot of people like for example I've been to open mics singer songwriter open mics where I've seen someone bring a marshall stack and cap like that's not that's not a joke okay so my third thing and probably just as if not more important than the actual tones themselves is the actual versatility the fact that all in the same gig all in the same unit you can get a fender style amp [Music] with the push of a button switch to a marshall [Music] Plexi that's a really really hard addition to compete with now something that I feel like isn't address half as much as it needs to be especially when it comes to discussing digital amp model units is the actual learning curve outside of the pros like one of the not necessarily cons but things that I feel like would be hard for is if someone's never used any sort of digital platform before this the quad cortex any other digital unit that I've used they've all been fairly easy to get the hang of it's only taken about 30 minutes at most with using various YouTube tutorials but I'm also a millennial and I grew up with this stuff so I can imagine that if someone's a little bit older than I am that might be a little bit more of a difficult transition not just because of the tones but because of the actual workflow so here's basically what I'm thinking there are a million different reasons why someone would want to throw their amp away and use a digital floorboard unit and real quick I do want to say there is one thing that I was struggling with before I ever opened up this unit or took it out of the box that's the fact that not even just the line6 Helix but I feel like a lot of the digital really big modeling units that are known as the high quality high-end ones they've been out for five or six years some of them even a little bit more so I was really really scared cuz new modeling units are coming out every day I was like how are these going to compete with the new modeling units why haven't they come out with one in like five or six years and then I started hearing some of these tones and I'm like do they really need to these things hold up so well and if they sound so good now like I can't even imagine five or six years ago like this thing sounds incredible even today getting that out of the way those are the main ones those are the main things the main reasons why I think someone would want to buy a helix or would want to make the Great Migration over to the digital world kind of like they did in Digimon season 1 but I'm not blind to the fact that I know a lot of people a lot of guitar players some of them a lot better and more knowledgeable than myself with differing opinions like I said I know people who play $300 digital units in front of literal Coachella crowds where they are playing for some of the biggest musical artists in the world that is not a joke and that's not Hyperbole and I know some people in that same vein who were like I would never use anything less than a vintage handwired Twin Reverb and if you would use anything else other than that you just haven't played out of the twin yet or the dumble or the ac30 or whatever it really all depends on the person I personally I'm about 50/50 at this point depending on whether I want to run something out of the ox boox just because my neighbors and then the other half of my playing and my recording comes out of either a digital modeling unit like this he look right here we out of an analog modeling pedal that I love that I've had for almost four or 5 months now that I've never once mentioned on this channel let me know if you want to know more about that but anyway it doesn't really matter what I think what matters it what you think how do you feel about the lion 6 Helix have you used one before have you used any digital modeling platforms before do you hate them do you love them let me know in the comments anyway thank you so much for watching this video it was so much fun just to be able to finally get to use a helix in my house for the first time outside of the live setting to see how it sounds when I have a little bit more time to play with it and I'm not just borrowing one from a friend if you want to know anything more about this bad boy you can get it from the homies of Sweet Water the links will be in the description make sure to check it out it's one of the best ways to support the channel if that's something you want to do or if you're just curious about any of the other gear that I use in this video or talked about make sure to check out those links and also let me know if you think it would be cool if I made some Helix patches and just put them out there I don't know I think it would be a fun idea let me know what you think like And subscribe if you had a good time most importantly like most most importantly have a fantastic day

Channel: Mike Cole

Views: 244,398

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Id: hFDf2GyMcs0

Length: 12min 1sec (721 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023