So I’d been getting slowly more tired of my rusty, trusty old Fender Prosonic. It just didn’t give me the tones I wanted. But I’ve had it since it was brand new, and what can I say? I’d gigged with it for years, and I’d grown sentimentally attached to it. But gear is gear, and life is too short to play on gear that doesn’t blow your skirt up.
So yesterday, I played a Traynor YCV40WR at my local mom n pop, and guess what happened. Trade!
Here’s my old Prosonic:
And here’s the gorgeous new Traynor that scampered home with me:
This thing really has a slew of nice features, and it smokes. I played it for hours last night. It’s a bit of a tweaker’s amp (not meth, you weirdos,) but I’ve been able to find a lot of really great tones in it so far.
Ogre, you may be surprised at how re-capping that amp improves the sound. I recently re-capped a musty, rusty old Bassman that someone had neglected and it was literally like night and day, the difference.
Very cool. 40 watts of 6L6 power is still loud for a basement, but I bet it sounds great! I love Vintage 30’s - so that must Marshall-up the tone a bit for what is basically a Fender style amp?
And yeah, re-capping an old amp is a big deal - but that’s cuz those old caps were rated to last maybe 10 - 15 years and they can lose their capacity. I don’t know that tweaks would focus on that; I suspect it would be more like jumping channels, swapping out the reverb circuit for an extra gain stage or swapping transformers - how’d I do Ogre?
But before you do any of that, you have to live with the amp and hear what it can do on its own. Get past the honeymoon stage…
The amp is pretty darn versatile, to be honest. The clean channel is pretty Fendery, but the dirt channel can go from Fender or Vox OD all the way to compressed high(ish) gain, and even into Orange stoner sludge territory. I’m going to have a great time figuring this amp out.
In the meantime, I plan on retubing this thing soon with SED 6L6’s, and some different 12AX7’s. I’m sure that’ll improve the sound a bit.
They’re the YCV40WR Clean and Dirty clips ( :o ), and you should pardon my hack playing. I have some Hank Williams, Porter Waggoner, and Buddy Miles in there, but just listen to the amp, not my sausage-fingered playing.
Re: the Prosonic - yeah, I recapped it, and even put in a better transformer, but it just wasn’t flipping my lid, y’know?
Listened to the first couple clips so far. The amp has a great vintage crunch to it! The clean sounds very good with your guitar. Fender’s sound great clean, especially through a good amp.
I think I might just pick up my guitar and dick around a bit. (I have a COMPLETELY different setup. Carvin SC90 plugged straight into a MTS 3200 100 watt head with a crappy home stereo 1 x 10" speaker cabinet rigged as a practice amp. Heavy, thick distortion (I play punk music) and some nice jazzy, crisp clean tones when I’m mellow.
Believe me, when you finally get that amp that sounds perfect, your playing becomes 10x better. The Carvin was perfect for me. My previous amp was a Fender DeVille 4x10. Had an outstanding clean sound (as usual for a Fender), but the distortion lacked low end balls which was required of my style of play/performance.
Enjoy your amp. Maybe someone should start a thread (and recommend or host a site) where dopers can post a few licks of what they play. I’d contribute in a heartbeat (as long as no one laughs at my playing).
Thanks for the comments, Flander. I guess I haven’t figured out how to mic this thing yet, because it actually has a lot more bass response than is coming through in the recordings. Back to the drawing board!
As for sites, I’ve had pretty good luck with Soundclick. It’s free, and you can post all the songs you want. Give it a shot.
And Octalcode: wow. That’s a lot of low-end rumble.
Nice tones - and nice playing. The clean is all about your ASAT Tele, right? I hear a big chimy Tele twang, especially for the first bit you played. For the crunch, I like how open the tone is; an articulate tone, but then again I’m a sucker for tube amps. I’d back off the Tone on the guitar a notch or two, but that’s just me (I prefer a Gibsony crunch tone; I roll my Tele’s tone down to 5 or 4 for bridge crunch…).
That happens here on the Dope maybe once per year. It’s been a while - maybe you should go for it. My only suggestion would be to not limit it to guitar or rock music; you’ll get more participation if it is Doper musicians of all stripes sharing what they got. I don’t know that I have anything newly recorded, but I can add a link to a clip or two that I had previously. In the past, one or two Dopers offered to host clips; now, I suspect most would have online access, but if not, I am sure you could include a recommendation to check out Soundclick or an equivalent, they could set up something for themselves and away we go…
Actually, believe it or not, that was some Mark Knopfler quack. It was on position 4 on my strat.
Thanks, man. I reeled off the crunch clip super fast with my 1981 Ibanez AS50 (has a DiMarzio FRED in the bridge.) Like I said, maybe I haven’t quite figured out how to mic this amp yet.
Damn - I was gonna say I heard some Strat quack, but since I thought you were all about the Tele and it has those MFD pickups, maybe you found the tone via that. How is the twang on that thang when you play the Tele through it?
You know, when I was trying it out at the store, I was playing an ASAT Classic through it, and it was just full of Tele twang and slink. But the ASAT Special? Completely different. Those soapbar MFD’s are more like P90’s than Tele pickups. Way, WAY more Pete Townshend than Danny Gatton, if you catch my drift. I mean, sure, the Special is shaped like a Tele. It’s made of about 75 pounds of swamp ash. But it’s a completely different monster.
:eek:
