I got a little x-mas present this year, a vintage, but mint Kramer Striker 200ST. It looks pretty close to this image I found, but mine has chrome hardware and a way better Floyd Rose “whammy bar” trem system.
This new guitar is amazing, the action is perfect on it, and it’s going to get a workout this Friday, when I use it for the Kennedy Open Mic. I plan on shredding up some The Sword and some improv off my own material. This thing can get the most amazing tones with its really hot Seymour Duncan pickups. I'm playing through a new rig too.
I used to own some big old speakers that weighed about 60 pounds a piece, and a crappy Marshall MG100HDFX. It was the crap, the clean was muddy, and the distortion didn’t really have overdrive, it had some weak form of tube modeling that epically failed to come anywhere close to creating any warmth in the sound. Luckily I got a few bucks outta the guys at music go round and some other pawn shops for this gear. The Marshall made decent money, but the dudes laughed at the speakers. He said if you played anything any louder through them they would blow up.
Despite all this I got enough to buy a little old late 80's KMD 130 watt solid state amplifier. This rig is insane; I can get perfect vintage sounding distortion through these big old analog electronics that are hanging out of this thing. It’s got this spring reverb in it too. It’s completely analog. People always ask me where I find this stuff, and It’s really luck of the draw when you hit all the little music shops in town. You just have to know what you’re looking for.
When I hit a local shop I hook up gear simmilar to what I already own. You're not going to find anything close to your sound when you hook up to a $2000 JCM-900 Mashall Plexi and you're playing out of a dinky 5 watt Roland Micro-Cube in your mothers basement. Another thing, is you really wanna screw with every knob and hit every button on the gear, and make sure you know what it's capable of. A lot of used gear is in really good shape, but you'll always find a few lemons. One good way to look for problems in a guitar is checking the neck. Holding it like a rifle and looking down the neck like a sight, You can see if it's bent or if it's really straight. This can be fixed on most electrics at a cost, but on an acoustic you're better of looking for a different guitar. Amplifiers are much more tricky. You really need to turn all the pots (knobs) and make sure theres not any crackle when you turn it up and down. You want to bend the EQ in all sorts of directions from Scooped to Crunch style, you want to make sure that the speakers can handle different styles. The speakers are pretty important too, because while they can be replaced, it can be upwards of $100 a speaker for celestions. If it has a foot-switch, you also wanna make sure it hasn't been used by bigfoot or anything, and hasn't been smashed to bits. These are usually inexpensive to replace, but again it can be a deal breaker with the higher-end ones. Used distortion and FX is probably the scariest region of used gear. First, I will say that I personally avoid used Wah Wah's because of the fact that they are the most abused pedal on the board. When you're looking at it, you can usually tell how screwed up it is. The spring will be very loose and will not stand up on it's own, and it will have all sorts of nasty hair and dirt and other crud crammed underneith it. This is why I avoid all of that, I'd much rather pay extra for a new one that hasn't been on the frontlines getting beer spilled on it and whatever else happens on stage. Digital Distortion is a very economic way to go. Digitech has a series of RP pedals that hold a wide arrangement of FX stored on a microchip. It's an entire stomp box in one. The downside ofcourse is that it's not the real thing, obviously, and some of the lower end models can begin to sound rather computerized. I personally have been using the RP250 for about a year now and I have no complaints. It's not the real thing, but they've come really far since the earlier days. The amp modeling sounds really good too, and you can get all sorts of Phasers and Chorus FX without having to spend 5 times as much. I picked up an RP150 used awhile back just to get into different sounds, but the 250 and up is where it's at. Anything lower and you should just buy the real pedal. A lot of new players don't realize that their amp alone won't get them that sound, and that they need to get an overdrive/distortion pedal to boost the gain. Currently i'm looking to replace my Digitech with the FX i've come to like. MXR is probably one of the best distortion pedal companies out there. The Distortion+ and Phase 90 are well known around the world for being some of the best FX out there, it's what people like Randy Rhodes, Eddie Van Halen and George Lynch all use.
In short, These are just a few things you can do to make the most of your dollar when you hit used gear and pawn shops. I'll post more info about my different gear in the future.
Keep it Metal.
-StuTheDew
Good post.Nice tip.
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