Crazy Heart guitars.

I just watched the 2008 film Crazy Heart, the one with Jeff Bridges as Bad Blake, a down-on-his-luck country singer-songwriter. There are quite a few interesting guitars in this movie, and they help to convey something about the story and the characters who use them.

Bad's stage electric is a relic'ed Gretsch G6122 1959 Chet Atkins Country Gentleman, the hardware of which he lovingly polishes in one scene. This guitar is associated with Chet Atkins, of course, and thus has an aura of the Country Gentleman, the southern man with impeccable manners and upward mobility. The Stratoblogster blog uses the term "rustic regal" to describe another guitar, and it fits this guitar as well. It is also associated with George Harrison, which has increased its vintage value. These connotations attached to the Gretsch are at odds with Bad's character early in the film, as he drunkenly stumbles through a disastrous performance. But when he finds redemption through love, the Gretsch confirms Bad's persona as a seasoned class act who has paid his dues.

His other guitar is a Gibson J-45 with batwing pickguard, probably from the fifties, with many dings and scratches. This guitar is less pampered than the Gretsch, as is shown in the scene when Maggie Gyllenhall's character goes to sit down in a chair where the Gibson has been left, and Bad carelessly tosses it onto a nearby cushion. This seems to indicate the centrality of music in Bad's life - it is propped in a chair like a person - and his willingness to give this attractive stranger (Gyllenhall) a similar place of privilege.


More neutrally, a Kyser capo and a tweed Fender Vibrolux amp are seen, along with a Strat, Guild acoustic and a strange Tele with a three-on-a-side headstock as played by Ryan Bingham in Bad's first backup band. A nice cream Tele, played by Buddy Miller, shows up later, in the soundcheck scene when Bad is about to open for Tommy, played by Colin Farrell. Tommy's guitar is a sunburst Gibson J-200, which is as collectible as Bad's J-45 but is far flashier, as befits Tommy's character.

After all of this American guitar goodness, it's a bit of a letdown that an Epiphone AJ-220E, signed by Jeff Bridges, Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett, was given away by CMT and other media companies as a promotional contest.

Jeff Beck, back in my life.

I first heard Jeff Beck as a teenager on an old vinyl copy of Wired, his second hit jazz-rock fusion album from 1976. I loved fusion and was sad to see it go out of style in the eighties and even be the target of derision from critics (remember the "fuzak" epithet?). I think that Wired was one of the best products of seventies fusion. I think what made the difference was that Beck was a rock guitarist moving into jazz, rather than the other way around.


This was the highlight of the album for me at the time: "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat", Charles Mingus' elegy to Lester Young, later beautifully set to lyrics by Joni Mitchell on the highlight of her Mingus album. Beck plays the langorous melody rather tartly, then the band comes in and he obliges with some low-register slyness. After launching a perfectly feedbacked high C at 1:45, he begins to explore the modernist blues changes of the song with a series of small melodic cells, brilliantly fit together. At 3:30 the guitar throws up. Jeff continues on unfazed and fires off even more ideas, with extreme dynamics, in the final statement of the melody, from 4:02 on.

For a primarily instrumental artist, Jeff Beck has had a long and successful career. From the Yardbirds through the Jeff Beck Group (various lineups), Beck Bogert & Appice and a long solo career both muso and commercial, Beck remains a vital artist.  His well-reviewed new album attests to this, along with the popularity of his YouTube clips playing with (the "very teenage-looking" as Guitar Player put it) Tal Wilkenfeld on bass.

An early pop success after leaving the Yardbirds was "Hi Ho Silver Lining", a sunny Britpop song featuring Beck on unpolished but charming vocals. I get the impression that this has become something of a singalong anthem in the UK, especially for football spectators.


Lately I've been listening to Jeff's new album Emotion and Commotion, and it really is an excellent guitar album if somewhat overly smooth. Beck plays the guitar with loving attention to detail, and he's playing with beautifully recorded, tastefully arranged orchestra on some of the cuts. I'm not sure why, but I often find Beck abrasive when he is working with singers, and his cuts here with Joss Stone are no exception to my ears (though the Imelda May number is nice). But his soaring version of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" is a highlight and a good endorsement for the album in general.

Auto-wah and the dialectics of instant funk.

There's a new face in my pedalboard - an old DOD FX-25 envelope filter given to me by an old friend and guitar colleague. To be honest, it had sat in my odds'n'ends drawer for a couple of months before I chained it in earlier tonight.

It's the most pedal fun I've had in a while, and I'm a serial Memory Man abuser. Why did it take so long to get it out of the drawer? I guess that I have a weird relationship with out-of-fashion pedals (see my flanger blog post) and the envelope filter, or T-Wah, is not exactly in vogue these days. They've been around for a while; the 1972 Mu-Tron (popularized by Stevie Wonder on recordings like "Superstition" and "Higher Ground") is probably the classic expression of seventies auto-wah technology but they all work on the same principle: an automatic wah effect that opens and closes a filter based on picking strength (unlike the still-cool wah pedal, which requires foot movement for the wah effect to happen).

Mu-Trons went out of production around 1979, after the company that made them, Musitronics, was bought out by the ill-fated ARP synthesizer company. In an earlier post I recounted how the ARP Avatar, an early guitar synthesizer, essentially put the company out of business, and it seems that the Mu-Tron was collateral damage. For purists seeking the original Mu-Tron III sound, Electro-Harmonix has taken up the mantle by hiring one of the original inventors of the Mu-Tron, Mike Beigel, and issuing an update of the Mu-Tron, the Q-Tron.

I set the DOD envelope filter up with a rhythmic delay on the Memory Man. Instant funk.  Was the envelope filter ahead of its time? It seems right at home with contemporary loopy, analog filter effects. Sure enough, original Mu-Tron IIIs are sought after, though I suspect that the effect is more popular on bass than guitar. Bootsy Collins is no stranger to the envelope filter, and in fact has been known to use the very DOD FX-25 that is warming up my pedalboard's power supply as we speak.

I mention Jerry Garcia a lot in this blog, and one of his many roles in my life has been as the harbinger of auto-wah.  "Shakedown Street" by the Grateful Dead represents the first time I heard the effect, though this was followed shortly by hearing it used by a few reggae lead players and in the guitar solo from Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians' "What I Am." I had possession of an Ibanez Auto Filter for a while when I was about 16 but I'm not sure how that came to me. I certainly never owned one before now. What have I been missing all my life? It's possible that I just got a little funkier.

Glenn Gould and shred guitar.

While walking home from a gig on Sunday, I listened to Glenn Gould's 1982 recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations. Gould is by far my favorite classical pianist, and not just because I used to talk to his statue in front of the CBC building when I worked there. He was a musician who was capable of great lyricism in the slower, aria-like passages of the piece.  He even sang along sometimes, something that is sometimes distracting when listening to his recordings; on the plus side, he had a fairly tuneful and pleasant voice, unlike his fellow singalong pianist Keith Jarrett.


But it is in Gould's trills and fast passages that I find the greatest thrill, and this is where this starts to be about the guitar. Gould's trills and fast bits - his shredding - are my favorite part of his music. I'd say that it's the evenness of his articulation at high speeds that I find exciting.  This is particularly apparent in trills and other ornaments, which are such a big part of Bach's music.  In those passages, I can hear the years of self-discipline and hard work that went into Gould's craft. That is, I'm listening to Gould's virtuosity, his life story, more than to Bach's music in those moments of speed and clarity. And because I'm a musician, I associate virtuosity with work.

How much time in a day to you devote to running scales and patterns? My onetime guitar teacher Geoff Young introduced me to the Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (BWV 1006) and I've been practicing them ever since, sometimes to the expense of technical exercises. Somehow I can get behind putting great music under my fingers more than running patterns. To shred, you must run the patterns.


Yet shred guitar per se has never really appealed to me. The metal shredding of the eighties, exemplified by Yngwie Malmsteen, Vinnie Moore and Paul Gilbert seemed kind of thin and pea-brained to me at the time. When it went out of style in the nineties, I was somewhat relieved. I embraced the slacker guitar attitude of grunge, which was more about tone, melody and effects like feedback. Neil Young became, finally, a guitar icon. Rock guitar became more melodic in the nineties and speed and facility came to be somewhat ignored. This was noticeable to me at the time, teaching guitar to teenagers. Compared to my peer group and I in the eighties, they had a noticeable lack of ambition and low motivation when it came to getting 'good'.

Now we are in the midst of a shred revival, abetted by YouTube, with the flames eagerly fanned by Guitar Player magazine. Rusty Cooley has emerged as a new shred man to watch, his practice regimen positively draconian. Orianthi, Michael Jackson's unused guitarist, seems to be blazing a trail for pop shred guitar, evidenced by her recent duet with Steve Vai. Robert Walser, in his 1993 book Running With The Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, deconstructed shred as the (male) pursuit of virtuosity; total mastery. And there's something to the heroic effort that goes into getting THAT fast and THAT clean. It can give meaning to one's life. I just don't know that it's my life. I suspect that I'll never be a shred demigod, but it's nice to hear some true, 10,000 hours virtuosity once in a while.

Interview: Paul Babiak of Paul's Boutique.

Paul Babiak owns and runs Paul's Boutique, a cool little music store on Nassau Street in the Kensington Market area of Toronto.  Paul is one of the friendliest music store proprietors in town and his store is always full of interesting guitars and amps.  Paul's Boutique is also my favorite repair shop in town, especially for pedals and other hard-to-fix items. Even better, they're open 7 days a week, 12pm-7pm. Paul agreed to answer a few questions via e-mail.

How did you come to owning and running a music store in Kensington Market?

I worked for a guy in California for about five years who had vintage guitar shops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. When I decided to open a shop here in Toronto I looked around for a good location and found Kensington Market still had relatively cheap rent as well as a ton of musicians and artists close by. I took what I learned in California and tried to apply it here.

What's your take on the current vintage guitar market? Has it been affected by the 2008 financial collapse?

I always say that most of my clientele don't have much money to begin with so the 2008 financial crisis didn't really affect my regular business that much. We did see a lot of collectors unloading vintage gear but prices were still fairly high.

How have vintage prices changed in, say, the last five years? Are there any trends that you notice?

Over the past five years vintage guitar prices have continued to climb. A lot of old Fenders and Gibsons have gotten so expensive that most players can no longer afford them so now we're seeing guitars like old Harmonys, Kays, Stellas and pre-90s Japanese guitars start to go up. There are lots of good guitars coming out of China right now so the vintage market seems to have slowed down. The average player can own a great axe for $400-500. I still play my '69 P-Bass because it sounds incredible, but the for most young players these guitars are out of reach.

You also sell amps - can you explain the lunchbox amp craze?

I think the small amp craze is due to the fact that most people can now easily record from home and bigger amps are just too loud to turn up. Our amp tech Jeremy Douglas builds 5 watt class A amps that can be used as a guitar/bass head and also double as a tube mic pre. The circuits are very simple in these amps but they sound amazing! Fender, Orange and Epiphone have all built small tube amps and had great success with a combination of cheap labour and low prices.

What do you think are the best investments on the vintage guitar market these days?

In the $300-500 price range I think the best investments in vintage guitars right now would be 70s and 80s Japanese guitars. Style-wise they may be a little dated but the quality of the instruments is very high. Look for brands like Yamaha, Ibanez, Vantage, and Aria. There are also a lot of lesser known brands that were made in the same factories that had different names but are similar instruments. Moving up to the $400-1000 range I've seen a lot of American made Harmonys, Kays, Silvertones, Stellas, and Danelectros start to really climb. These are the last semi-affordable American-made vintage guitars. I also really like Fender Lead IIs and Lead IIIs as well as lesser known Gibsons like 'The Pauls' and 'Firebrands'.  Above $1000 it's tough to say. Different guitars come in and out of fashion. Lately Teles and Jazz basses have been hot but prior to that Strats really shot up. Not too many people are buying Les Pauls right now so many can be had for a good deal.

What makes Paul's Boutique different from other guitar stores in Toronto like Steve's, Long and McQuade, Capsule Music, etc?

We're different because we have a little bit of everything at the shop.  We have lots of vintage guitars and amps but we also carry some new instruments so you can come in and try a wide range of gear before deciding what you like best. We also sells keyboards, recording equipment, as well as all types of accessories. Our clientele ranges from collectors to young kids in bands but as the old saying goes, if we can provide good gear at reasonable prices with great service, people will come back.

What's the best deal in the store right now?

What's the best deal in the shop? That's a tough question because new gear comes in every day. As far as guitars I like the early 70s Ibanez Telecaster but that could change by tomorrow! 

Thanks to Paul Babiak for taking the time to answer my questions, and if you're in the area, be sure to check out Paul's Boutique at 69½ Nassau St., Toronto.

Shame, the sequel: guitar synths.

Confession time: for a couple of years in the early nineties, I owned and played a guitar synthesizer. Oh, the shame. How did this happen, and how did playing a guitar synthesizer become so shameful?

Let's start at the start. Guitar synthesizers had a fitful start with early-adopter experiments like the ARP Avatar, which listed at a withering $3000 when it was introduced in 1977.  Using new pitch-to-voltage technology (the MIDI specification was not introduced until the early 1980s) the ARP Avatar converted the signal from a divided or 'hex' pickup into soothing ARP synth sounds.  Only about 300 were made, and the Avatar was a commercial failure that basically sank the ARP company and forced them to sell out to CBS, as Fender had done in 1965.

1977 also saw the introduction of Roland's GR-500, which used a dedicated guitar (reputedly manufactured by Ibanez to Roland specs) and was rather more successful. The Les Paul-shaped guitar also had an on-board infinite sustain contraption and was used by Steve Hackett and Alex Lifeson. Roland's subsequent guitar synth, the GR-300, introduced in 1980, was my introduction to the wonderful world of guitars that don't sound like guitars. What could be cooler than when Pat Metheny came out on stage playing trumpet through his guitar, as I saw him do in the mid eighties? Robert Fripp and Andy Summers also got some cool sounds out of the GR-300, as on their 1982 duo album I Advance Masked.

No amount of techie explanation could assuage the hilarity which greeted Roland's next guitar synth controller, part of the GR-700 package. With its offset triangular shape and goofy body-neck outrigger handle thingy, the futuristic silver GR-700 guitar was not ready for 1985 or any other year. But the deal included MIDI for the first time, which allowed the forward-thinking guitarist to plug into any MIDI-equipped sound module.

At this point, I should take a moment to explain to our younger readers that there was a time when guitar synths seemed, well, cool. This coincided with a time in which synths were seen as cool by most people and guitars not so much. The eighties was basically the only time in history that this has ever happened, and I was one of the brainwashed masses.  I even stopped playing guitar for a while when I got my Yamaha DX-7, and plunked around on that while marvelling at its perfect intonation, lacking of breaking or out-of-tune strings, and ability to conjure ANY sound imaginable. Guitar Player magazine should take some of the blame, with a seemingly constant stream of articles about 'electronic guitar' and how to get on board.

In 1991, I joined a band that had previously featured a guitar player who doubled on flute. With a new record deal under our belts, we managed to convince our manager to buy us some new equipment.  I made out with a Marshall 4-12" speaker cabinet, a TubeWorks Mosvalve power amp (I already had a Roland GR-8 that I was using as a preamp/effects unit) and a Roland GR-1 guitar synth, which allowed me to reproduce the flute player's solos. This model worked with any guitar, so I attached the hex pickup to my Strat and went to town.

Around the time that band broke up, the eighties ended.  Now, it was well into 1992, but sometimes these things take a while. I still remember hearing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on my Walkman radio on the bus home from college and feeling like something was shaking loose in the long plastic winter that was the 1980s. I sold all of my high-tech gear, bought an old 50-watt Traynor tube head, and got grungy.

Ever since then, the guitar synth has seemed to me an embarrassing memory of deluded youth. I've never even considered returning to the fold, even through what I'm sure are quantum leaps in note tracking and the sonic realism of synthesizer patches. Even my hero Jerry Garcia's adoption of guitar synth later in the nineties fell on my deaf ears. Allan Holdsworth, who embraced guitar synth wholeheartedly after its eighties heyday, just seems ill-placed on his weird-ass SynthAxe:

One more video should suffice to contextualize the full-on nerddom of the guitar synth. Step forward, Stepp guitar synthesizer.

So the question remains: with all manner of formerly embarrassing eighties culture (hair metal, leg warmers) suddenly hot again, is the guitar synth ready for a comeback?

Interview: Kevin Breit.

Kevin Breit is an upsetting guitar player.  He upsets traditional notions of what is possible on the guitar.  He upsets the received wisdom of how the guitar should be played.  And he just plain upsets other guitar players, who after witnessing a Kevin Breit performance, may be inspired to slide the guitar under the bed and find something else to do.

I first became aware of Kevin Breit because of this video for "Slow Train" by the Breit Brothers. It got a lot of play on MuchMusic (Canada's answer to MTV) in the eighties. You didn't hear resophonic guitar played with a slide too much in those days, so I made note of Kevin Breit. But for the last ten years Breit and his band the Sisters Euclid have held court at the Toronto muso venue the Orbit Room (part-owned by Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson) every Monday night.  That residency ended a few months ago, but lately the Sisters are back on selected Monday nights.

Over those ten years, Breit worked with Norah Jones and Cassandra Wilson, recorded two albums with blues singer/guitarist Harry Manx, and pursued multiple recording projects at once, including the Sisters, the acoustic trio Folk Alarm and his own singer-songwriter work with his recent collection Simple Earnest Plea. Kevin kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

You're not a conventional jazz guitar player, but you've played with some artists that are considered to be on the jazz side of the music business, like Cassandra Wilson and Norah Jones, and you've recorded versions of jazz standards like "Donna Lee" and "Giant Steps."  How do you see yourself as a musician in regards to jazz musical culture?

I try to serve a song the best I can. I don't know how other musicians see themselves when they embark on playing over a well worn chestnut like "Donna Lee" or "Giant Steps." I'd like to think that i belong to some sort of tradition. I love jazz. I respect those who have come before me. Am I a 'jazz' musician? I don't know. I love making noise whenever/wherever i can.

Your latest recording project, Simple Earnest Plea, is more of a singer-songwriter effort than your previous work with the Sisters Euclid and Folk Alarm.  How do you approach your guitar parts and the parameters of improvisation differently for a project of this type?

Simple Earnest Plea is my first, all-out singer songwriter recording. I tried to serve the songs the best I could without stepping on the singer's feet...I have big feet so I was careful.

Your solo tone on electric guitar, especially with the Sisters Euclid on tunes like "Perry Garcia", often has a stark, saxophone-like quality.  Are you influenced by sax players or other instruments besides the guitar?

I love all those sustaining instruments. So expressive. Of course the person playing it has everything to do with inspiration and influence. Bandoneón makes me weak in the knees.

Is Jerry Garcia an influence on your playing? I hear a lot of his approach, refracted, in your playing. Which other guitar players do you hear in your own playing?

To tell you the truth, I don't own a single Grateful Dead record. It's really hip and would be hip for me to say I am a Dead Head but truth be known, I grew up not knowing a single thing about them or Jerry. A couple of years ago, I purchased Sirius radio for my car. There is a 24 hour Grateful Dead station. On my long trip between cities, I'd tune in and think that i missed out on something cool..very cool. I really liked Jerry's style. Very thoughtful and unique sound. There are so many guitarists I love, Chet, Django, Johnny Winter, Frank Zappa, Pat Martino, Cornell Dupree, B.B. King, Jeff Beck, Michael Bloomfield, Santana, Ry, Lowell George, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow, James Burton, Ray Gomez, Albert Lee, Hank Garland....more.

You have an unusual approach to slide, as we see in the YouTube video of "Tongue." You combine slide and fingered notes so seamlessly that your approach seems almost to be at a perfect middle ground between the two techniques. After seeing you play once, I went home and tried it for a while and it was very difficult to get going. Can you explain your hybrid slide/finger approach a bit?

I love playing the slide guitar. I play chords with the slide and fingers and mix the two up when i solo. I started doing this when i was young as way of staying in tune. I'd fret a note, hold it and play a harmony with the slide. This made me play in tune. It kind of stuck, fretting  and sliding at the same time.  

In that same performance, you build to a frenzy that reminds me of later Coltrane.  What is going through your head when you are at a high level of playing intensity, as from 5:30 on in the video?

I am so unaware of things when I get all wound up. Usually I am most clever in the first couple of bars then I go off on tangents. The Sisters Euclid really dictate what I play on a solo. Gary (drummer) may 1/2 time or double up on the time. This has a huge effect on me. Ian (bassist) will suggest other root notes, which again will make me go down another road. All of this isn't premeditated, so it keeps me on my toes. It's easy for some players to play what they've rehearsed but I am pitiful at it. I have a hard time playing the same thing twice.

How do you conceive of your improvised ideas as they come to you - are they abstract musical constructs, or are they framed by the structure of the guitar itself?

I like being aware of the melody and harmony of the song i'm soloing over. I like stretching the harmony as much as I can. So the prerequisite is I have to know the chords of the tune. Saying that though, playing over songs and not knowing its inner workings, can be a lot of fun. It may not be good, but so what.

Thanks very much to Kevin Breit for taking the time to answer my questions.  Kevin keeps a busy live schedule and you can follow him here.

GTR and shame.

I just saw a Facebook ad for a Steve Hackett album that touts him as the guitarist in Genesis and GTR.  I was a little surprised to see the GTR moniker being mentioned as a feather in Hackett's career cap, given the many jokes that followed J.D. Considine's infamous one-word review of their album in Musician magazine: "SHT". That pithy review is the most famous of Considine's long career as a music critic and was an echo of the gag in This Is Spinal Tap where Marty DiBergi recounts to the band the two-word review for their album Shark Sandwich: "Shit Sandwich."

That's hard to get over.

GTR, active from 1985 to 1987, was a supergroup that combined the talents of legendary seventies prog rock guitar heroes Steve Howe and Steve Hackett. According to the Wikipedia article, the goal was to have a guitar and guitar synthesizer-driven band with hooky stadium hit songs. When the band went on the road, though, the late 80s guitar synthesizer technology let them down with its slow, buggy tracking of actual guitar playing and they had to add a keyboard player. GTR is coming into the picture as a hapless one-album band.

But that one album on Arista was certified gold and reached #11 on the album charts. "When The Heart Rules The Mind" was a hit single (and an oft-played MTV staple on video) that stayed on the charts for sixteen weeks. The Yes fans and Genesis fans who were the base for the live concerts were generally disappointed, though, with Max Bacon's voice and the large amount of filler on the album. The base would also have been disappointed with the slick commerciality of the music and the lack of particularly interesting guitar parts. And not long into the commercial success of GTR, Hackett left the band.  According to Wikipedia,

Subsequent to an abortive lineup change in 1987, Hackett left GTR, stating it had been "interesting for about five minutes". He once said of the group, "There are artistic limitations with any successful band and it was a successful band."

 This Hackett fansite gives a more sanguine account, though the bio is ten years out of date. Steve Howe, seeing no point in going on without Hackett, abandoned sessions for GTR's never-completed second album, and that was that.  Hackett went on as a solo artists and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010 as a member of Genesis.  He has lately revisited his Genesis-era material as is nowadays common among the baby boomers' favorite musicians. This is his official website, hackettsongs.com, rather than stevehackett.com, which is owned and run by Steve's former manager.


Pretty tuneless stuff, if you ask me.  But show me a hit single today that begins with 42 seconds of instrumental intro.

Gear lust on a budget: the Vox AmPlug.

I'm disproportionately excited about the introduction of the Vox AmPlug extension cabinet, retailing in the U.S. for $30. There's a post about them over at Guitar Noize and I'll probably seek out one of these in my next string-buying trip to Long and McQuade, my geographically closest music store.

I bought an AC30 AmPlug headphone amp when I was still on the road and needed a way to hear my solidbody electric guitar in hotel rooms.  I use it quite a bit at home now, especially when I feel like rocking out.  With a good set of headphones the AmPlug sounds very nice indeed for what it is.  I don't hear a lot of Pod-like digital processing going on in the AmPlug; maybe that's part of why I like it so much. It turns out that the AmPlug is completely analog, an increasingly rare thing in the world of miniature electronics these days.

I stumbled on a trick to make the AmPlug sound more like an amp in the room - I put the headphones only half-on my ears so that I can hear the acoustic sound of the guitar.  It seems to give the sound a wider field of placement, something that is necessary especially for the complex tone of an AC30, which this headphone amp imitates surprisingly well. My most memorable AC30 experience was in October 1992, when I was performing in England with Dave King's long-running jazz-funk-rock band, Rapid Transit. We rented backline and my amp was an AC30.  It was my first experience playing through one and it was magical. It was unfortunately a little bit low on headroom to have a reasonably clean tone over Dave's thundering drum assault. A Twin would have done nicely there. But I never forgot the lush, clear sound of an overdriven AC30.

Maybe someday I'll own an AC30, but for now it's the AC30 AmPlug, for my ears only.