What was your first amp?

[metropolis_4]

I was just reminiscing, remembering my first gear.

My parents bought me my first electric guitar for Christmas, but they couldn’t afford to buy an amp too.

We had a bookshelf stereo in the dining room that had a mic input for singing karaoke, so for the first year I plugged my guitar into that mic input and played through the stereo.

Next Christmas they bought me a Crate GX-15 and it was the greatest sounding thing I had ever heard!

No amp will ever sound as good to me as that amp did the first time I played it

What was your first?

 

[Stone]

Boss Katana MKll did not keep it for long

 

[TSJMajesty]

Peavey Classic. It was a 50 watt, tube combo w/ 2- 12" speakers and a built-in phaser. It sounded good airc. Lot better than the Yamaha SS combo I got talked into for my next amp.

 

[TimOwens316]

I don’t remember what it was but it wasn’t a guitar amp, it was a mono hi-fi tube amp that my mom bought for me at the Goodwill. Then my cousin gave me a Fender Blender and that’s what started it all for me

 

[scole]

I still have it- Yamaha G100-210 Mark III

Solid state, weighs a ton, and has horrible distortion. Apparently these are now viewed favorably in jazz circles and as a pedal platform. It is frigging loud..

 

[RaceU4her]

an old Bogen tube pa amp.

 

[Alex Kenivel]

Peavey Solo Series Bandit 65

 

[Boudoir Guitar]

I got a Marshall MS-2 with my Squier II guitar. I plugged a pair of Koss over-ear headphones into it and cranked it up full volume for dirt. I kept the headphones around my neck or just sitting out b/c it was too loud to wear. Pretty sure I blew those headphones out doing that. 10 months later I got a Fender studio 85 - my parents were pretty freaked out because they figured if that tiny little MS-2 was as loud as it was, how insane was this huge box gonna be?!? "Don't worry!!! It's got a bunch of different volume knobs so you balance them out!!". It took about six months for someone to finally convince me reverb didn't always have to be on 10....

 

[headcrash]

Mine was this:

Marathon MX 11 | Reverb

Heute frisch im Angebot ein mittlerweile sehr gesuchter Marathon MX11 Amp. Die PushPull Funktion erzeugt einen wunderbaren TS9 Crunch, der für die Größe ( ca 27x27cm ) des Amps wirklich seinesgleichen sucht. Er ist in voll funktionsfähigem Zustand und hat ässerlich dem Alter entspr...

reverb.com

This was wayyy before the internet, like 1991 or so. I ordered it at Voelkner or Conrad, which were or are mail order companies for everything electronic.
That damn thing just couldn't really distort, the pull overdrive function must be something like a simple overdrive, and I remember soon getting a cheap plastic overdrive pedal PSK SOD-2, which still wasn't metal enough for me, so next was the Ibanez 10 series Metal Charger.

After that came the first real amp, a Peavey Envoy 110 (blue/alu stripe). That one was tested in German Metal Hammer in early 1993 or so, and thus was convincing enough to me to save up for this

 

[paisleywookiee]

Fender M-80 combo. Okay cleans, awful distortion. I naively thought as a 16 year old “well yeah amp distortion is bad on every amp. Everyone uses pedals for that”.

 

[Piing]

I had no money for that luxury. I was interested in electronics, though, and I managed to hack a AM transistor radio to plug the Framus that I had borrowed from a friend.

 

[Sascha Franck]

This, a glorious Echolette CA30 (yeah, they really named it that...), made in GDR (former east germany). Unlike some other Echolette units (such as their tape echos, small tube PAs and what not), this populates the other end of the "collectable" spectrum:

As a funny side story: Last year, I put it in the backyard for a while to get the car, finally wanted to take it to a place caring about to-be-trashed electronics (no idea about the english name for such a place...) and also take a picture beforehand. But while I was getting the car (which took like 5 minutes or so), someone stole the thing! And it looked really *way* worse than the one in the picture. Also, as said, that was in the backyard - sure, a place shared between different houses, still something where someone might easily watch you. The good thing being that I didn't have to care about it any longer, the bad thing being that I couldn't take the planned farewell-picture.

Soundwise, the thing was supposed to stay clean (solid state and no drive circuit) but didn't exactly, as neither the amp nor the speaker were up to perform at band volume - which I used it for anyway. The only thing I owned along with it was an original (first series, malaysian chip) TS-808, a match made in hell. The amp was kinda fullrange-ish, constantly running into PA and speaker "edge of breakup" (ahem...), then gloriously pushed into more gain territory by said TS. It only got better because I fed it with this kinda guitar:

So, now you know a part of the tortures I went through in my younger years...
However, in case I had a Kemper or QC, I still would've taken a capture of that amp. Unfortunately, there's no recordings of it anymore, but for a certain kind of really strange indie sound, it was doing quite a great job - certainly something pretty much impossible to achieve with quality equipment.

 

[jay mitchell]

Heathkit TA-16. Christmas 1966.

 

[sleewell]

fender blues deluxe reissue

i sold to my dad at some point before i left for college and then bought it back from him over a decade later and still have it.

 

[Whizzinby]

Some glorious POS, Peavey Rage combo.

 

[FAKA!]

 

[la szum]

I am in the Peavey Solid State club, too. Peavey Studio Pro 40. Nothing Studio or Pro about it.

I somehow convinced my Single Mom to put it on a CC and I paid it off over the Summer. It
was Hot Garbage!

 

[KingsXJJ]

A tiny Crate 15 watt combo… the old wood stripe “Crates.” Because it had more gain than the others in the pawnshop where I bought my first Ibanez guitar and practice amp.

 

[Stratzrus]

My first amp was an Epiphone Galaxie like this one that I got in 1966 to amplify my mahogany Guild acoustic with a DeArmond pickup in the soundhole...

But the next year I talked my mom into buying me a piggyback Bandmaster like this one and a Stratocaster.

I loved that guitar and amp!

 

[laxu]

Crate GX-15 (not my pic). With mids on zero of course because "that's what Metallica does"...when I figured out that's not going to work, I did get a pretty half-decent Santana tone out of it.

My first guitar was an Ibanez Stagestar H/S/S Strat copy. Literal 1cm thick finish on the body. Neck like a baseball bat. B-string tuner that needed a wrench.