New Guitar Day: Yamaha Pacifica 812S

Just an awesome guitar. Instantly one of my most favorites.

Plays like a dream. Sounds like the Gods of Thunder and Rock and Roll.

Awesome rock tone, but twangs like the strattiest strat you can imagine.

Those are really nice Brain, Yamaha's are another undiscovered gem for sure! Love the tele-ish vibe.

Don't know what else you use for amps, but you need a great amp to go along with your nice guitars. A great amp will let you clearly "hear" each guitar's voice as it really is. Maybe that's your next step? Great amps make just about any guitar sound better! I recommend a tube amp if you haven't had one yet. And a lower wattage (not 100) so that you can crank it a little. The sound of a good tube vs. a solid state needs to be experienced.

I have a tube pre-amp that I've never tried to plug in.

What do you recommend as a good amp for a reasonable price? I have only used solid state amps.

I'm extremely happy with the Roland mini-cube for its great sound and portability, but it is solid state.

The main reason I've hesitated to go tube is that it locks you in to either British or US sounds, and locks you in to specific national sounds, i.e. Soldano vs Peavey vs Mesa Boogie or Marshall vs Orange.

So the fact that I can skip all that hassle with a Line 6 AxSys is attractive to me.

But I will admit: for all the different sounds you can get from the AxSys, or even the newer Spider (I have a Spider III in the background of the picture) amps, I don't like most of the preset sounds.

So I'm open to the Tube Amp arguments.

I wondered the same thing, so I did some sound testing on Youtube and also in stores. I'd hear something I liked and looked to see what it was. In most cases, a great amp will cost a descent amount upwards of $500. But it's so worth it.

You may want a combo amp, speakers built in. You could go with a nice Fender Hot Rod for less money (Fenders have a nice clean channel) and run pedals through it for overdrive/distortion. But then you need to buy a bunch of pedals. After testing a lot, I ultimately went with a Marshall JVM205, CLICKY HERE! Blackstar, Peavey 6505+, Carvin V3, any of these will sound great.