What was your first amp?

[Rocco Crocco]

 

[DrewJD82]

Not my pic….mine met a horrible fate one evening at about 50mph in a head on collision with a hard wood floor after it stopped working.

 

[Riffraff]

My first was a no name mid 70's solid state piece of garbage with an 8" speaker that came with an equally sh!tty guitar. Within weeks I got a '70s solid state 2 channel 4x10 combo that I internally connected a guitar cable to do I could jumper it to this...

Both were bought used. I cranked both and ran a Big Muff in front of them. The feedback and squealing was legendary.

There were no decent low cost options in the '70s. Loads & loads of terrible MIJ entry level garbage parents could buy for their budding musicians to make sure this new fad stuck before scraping up $100 more for a Champ or similar.

2 years later I bought this. My early amp years were sad.

 

[fretworn]

Horrible solid state beamy af mofo (80s clean plus MXR dist. Lol) Circa early 1980s


Eventually put a 4x10 fender super rev combo on the bottom.

 

[bgh]

The first one I used for gigging was a borrowed Fender Super Reverb 4x10 (it may have been a 2x12 ... its been 50 years). Heavy as all get out. The first one I purchased was a Peavey Musician 200 watt solid state with a 4x12. Used it for a number of years.

 

[jay mitchell]

There were no decent low cost options in the '70s.

If you looked carefully and bought used, there were some around. In 1971, I had a Kustom 200 bass rig (I played bass as well as guitar) I had bought as an insurance theft recovery for $175. A friend of a friend was playing bass through a brownface Bassman (with some other cab). I offered to trade him the Kustom head for the Bassman head, and he accepted. I then had the brownface Bassman head, the Kustom 2x15 cab with JBL D140s, and a 4x12 cab I had built with Utah speakers, all for less than $400 total. Later that year, I bought a used 1962 Epiphone Wilshire for $150 at a music store.

 

[KHAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!!!!!!]

First amp I ever owned I bought from my brother. It was an early '70's Dual Showman Reverb head and an extension cab made to go with his Legend amp (natural wood/cane grill) with a JBL E130.

 

[itchyfingers]

I had a navy blue MIM Strat plugged into this solid state Dano "Dirty Thirty". There's a knob labeled "Dirty Sweet" thats basically a fuzz. Sounded great to me for disguising bad notes and mushing up already muddled chords. It now serves as the garage entry doorstop, so yeah, still getting good use out of it.

 

[TravisG406]

I had some flavor of Crate that came with a Hamer guitar I bought, then a Vox modelling amp, but my first tube amp I purchased was a Peavey Classic 50 4x10 in 2008 or so I think? Cranked it outside once and it was amazing!

 

[mbenigni]

I don't think I could pick my first amp out of a line up. It was some kind of cheap Fender SS practice combo, maybe a sidekick, or maybe one of the 500 products Fender has called "Champ" over the years. Would have been 1982 or so. It was tiny, it sounded terrible, and I didn't help. No idea what became of it.

Then I spent a few years completely broke, plugging my terrible knock-off Memphis strat (with the stock pickups ripped out and an X2N dropped in) into whatever stereo equipment I could find. And then one day, somebody said, "My brother's selling his amp - you have to buy it." A couple of days later he walked into my dorm room with a MkIIc+ and said "$350." That was my second amp. Alas, I do know what became of that one.

 

[andergtr]

a fender sidekick practice amp. and then a peavey encore, which was a 112 tube combo.

 

[santiall]

One like this, which I ended modifying to add distortion

 

[JerEvil]

Marshall Lead 12 combo

 

[ptb1]

My first amp (bought used in 1980) was a Telrad TR-35. A 35W 2x10" combo made by a Norwegian company called Telrad Radiofabrikk.
Their "factory" was in a cellar of the house of one of the owners, and they were located approx 0,5 mile from where I grew up and lived at that time.

Their production lastet to 1977, when both the owner and his collague retired.

 

[Stratzrus]

If you looked carefully and bought used, there were some around. In 1971, I had a Kustom 200 bass rig (I played bass as well as guitar) I had bought as an insurance theft recovery for $175. A friend of a friend was playing bass through a brownface Bassman (with some other cab). I offered to trade him the Kustom head for the Bassman head, and he accepted.

The exact reverse of my situation.

I got a Kustom 200 with the 2x15 tuck and roll cab like the one below after having had a Bassman (for the life of me I can't remember what happened to that amp) and gigged with the Kustom paired with an Ampeg Gemini II with a JBL for a couple of years.

I used to play the Star Spangled Banner through it and Patti LaBelle said she could hear it in her 6th floor apartment a block away.

 

[ejecta]

Peavey Solo Series Bandit 65

Same and a Peavey guitar.

 

[hippietim]

Acoustic 134 4x10 combo. My dad got it from a classified ad. He had no idea what he was buying - he just saw that it looked like a real amp compared to the cheap garage sale amp I was borrowing. That 134 was loud AF. Years later I found out that Pat Metheny used a pair of 134s for his live rig for a long time. A few years back I acquired a couple in great shape for nostalgia. They're still loud AF. They actually sounded pretty great. I ended up selling them when I moved though. I have no idea what I would do with them now.

Here's a pic (not mine):

 

[spawnofthesith]

A lil 10 watt marshall MG

a few months later I "upgraded" to a crate flexwave combo or something like that

 

[mavrick102000]

Yamaha TA-60 initially

Within a few years got a deal on an Ampeg VT-22. That thing was a heavy pig but a fantastic pedal platform for my SD-9 and EH Small Stone, very very loud. This was in the early 80's.

I much preferred carrying around the Yamaha.

 

[SillyOctpuss]

Dean Markley K-75 - like everyone else this is not my pic

Horrible colour but pretty loud and actually sounded decent. The clean channel was pretty good but like most solid state amps the drive was terrible. It had a proper spring reverb though which was cool. In my first band aged 14 I used to think I was cool as hell hitting the amp in our last song with my distortion pedal and wah turned on so you got the large crash from the reverb tank.

I'd like to have a go on one now to see if it actually matches my memories of it.