Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

Forget all the Plexis, VOXes, Fenders, Boo-teeks, etc. The zenith of all amps was at TONEfest this year....


The venerated "Air Guitar Amp"!




If you're a serious air guitarist and don't have one of these babies, you're just posing.

Yeah, but nobody brought any air cables.

To be honest, I still don't get the tube thing. Just too distorted for me. I love the clean solid state amps, especially for Ricks. The JC-120 is king of that. And I just love the Princeton Chorus amps too. But the tubes sound great with Fenders and Gibsons, no doubt.

jdogric12aolcom wrote:PS - Hey forumites... Minutaglio even crawled out of his hidey-hole for this event to drool over some Vox amps! No picture to prove it, though - dang!

I've obviously spent too many hours on this forum; the first time I read "Minutaglio", I thought it was "Minutiae-glo"!

Apologies to Mr. Minutaglio.

jdogric12aolcom wrote:Yeah, but nobody brought any air cables.

To be honest, I still don't get the tube thing. Just too distorted for me. I love the clean solid state amps, especially for Ricks. The JC-120 is king of that. And I just love the Princeton Chorus amps too. But the tubes sound great with Fenders and Gibsons, no doubt.

Jason,

We'll need to get together. Grab a couple of your Rics (I'll bring my 350/12) and let you try out a couple of amps that I know will make a believer out of you. The first of course, is my '61 AC30 that you played through. If you turn it up only 1/2 way or slightly less, you get a perfect saturated sound for the Ric. Then my '67 50w Plexis have wonderful clean headroom for the Ric. Remember, these are the amps you're hearing on many of those great old recordings, including the Black Face fenders the Byrds used.

Many of the amps you heard at TF were either EL84 (mini Bluesbreaker types) or 6V6 Tweeds that were cranked. These are very aggressive by nature. The volume knobs are more like on/off switches. But the VOXes and some of the larger EL34/412 type amps, have all that rich harmonic clean headroom that the Rics love. We had a mid 60s AC50 there that we never fired up. You would have loved that one.

Plus, I never got around to hearing your JangleBox, and I need to hear how it compares with my comp set up.

Great thread, great pics, and it looks like it was a wonderful day filled with nothing but fun stuff. Thanks to both jDog and Nick for sharing!