Your first guitar & amp

Asbury Korean floyd super strat/jackson copy I bought in a pawn shop in Newark NJ and an Ampeg Gemini II rescued from the storage closet of a social club on the other side of town.

$200 total investment.

The Ampeg had a replacement handle on it.

I left it a friends house when I was a kid and never saw it again.

Subsequently I have seen it in GC about ten years a go for sale and then last year yet again at the local Sam ash for sale. She gets around.


Edit: I wish we had an ampeg Gemini II model.
 
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First guitar was a spanish acoustic (Espala C8) - I still have it! The first electric guitar was a Framus solid body (forgot the type) and a Dynacord Twen (18Watt Tube Amp with tremolo and a rectifier tube....I sold that amp later....stupid me!). 1991 I switched to a Fender Stratocaster and a Laney Klipp 100 Tube head with a straight Soundcity 4x12 cabinet....what a tone when you crank this amp! Booah!!!
 
My first electric was a Gibson SG copy from a no name manufacturer and it had 3 humbuckers...... Ha...Ha...Ha... Worse than that you couldn't access the upper frets very easy as the body started at about the 15th fret. First amp an early 2 channel Crate.
 
My first real guitar was a Hagstrom. It came equipped with the usual Hagstrom stuff, whammy bar guaranteed to go out of tune if you used it, genuine imitation red Naugahyde covered with genuine clear plastic, filters on the single coil pickups that looked cool but did nothing, and a small piece of genuine silver plastic with pointy little plastic diamonds (like a cheese grater) between the pickups. Only the Marquis De Sade would design a guitar with a cheese grater between the pickups, with those busy little fingers working so hard right over the danger zone. 80's guys think they invented shred, but anyone who played a Hagstrom like mine knows full well that the 80's guys were 20 years behind the curve when it comes to shred. Heck, why bleed from just one hand when you can bleed from two.

Those of you who just jones after vintage gear, try not to wet the britches when you gaze on my Hagstrom. I fired off a gazillion Ventures licks from that tone monster. My Hagstrom had such mojo, my friend and bass player (Fred) went and got himself a Hagstrom bass. And who could blame him?

First amp was a Danelectro. Not exactly a Kiss backline, but the look and sound just made those 60's girls swoon. Unfortunately the 60's description is spot on. My band chicks from back in the day are either passed away or are stuck in the 60's (age not era).

For those of you who are so struck by the gear, I'm the guy on the left. Freddy is on the right with his bass.

 
Used Peavy Patriot and NO amp. After a few months, my dad wired up an RCA to 1/4" cable so that I could plug into his beloved stereo that he brought back from Japan during the Vietnam war. That changed EVERYTHING. Also, if I turned my volume all the way up, it distorted, which was the coolest thing ever!

Eventually, my buddy and I split a Crate GX130c. We traded it monthly for about a year before I bought out his side of it.
 
1st guitar: my mom's Spanish nylon string from about the 1920's. I put steel strings on it, because I wanted that jangly sound. Guitar was barely playable. Actually, it was excruciating to play.

1st electric: Aria Pro II strat copy. Better than the cheapest things you could buy.
1st amp: 70s BF Fender Vibro Champ all tube 6 watts. Sold it to my drummers brother. Tried to buy it back several times, but he won't budge...
 
1969 Sears Silvertone guitar with a 100w Silvertone Amplifier 4-12" Jenson speakers (purchased used but only 1 year old)
A rig like this for a young boy was nothing less than HOT!
Absolutely no idea what kind of tubes were in this thing, a row of 5 small ones and a couple big ones.
 
First acoustic was a Guild F-30 I bought in 1966 and still play almost everyday and at gigs. First electric was a Gibson SG Standard bought in 1969 along with a Vox Superbeatle.
 

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The year 1986, my first electric guitar was the Hohner Arbor series.
My first amp a Marshall 30 Watt amp.

The day i got this amp we just saw Back to the future 1 in school.
Michael J Fox cranked up his amp too and got literally blown away by it...
Will never forget this day that i bought this amp but never blew me away like that haha.....

I got this set on photo. I was taken at my sisters weddingday.
tunete3u.jpg



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Wow, been a long time since thought about how started with guitar. Had tinkered around with my fathers Kimball initially (in rough shape) enough to know I wanted to try guitar and was getting tired of trying to play Metallica (black) and Anthrax (POT) on Sax since that was my instrument for band... But had the guitar books lol. Eventually got a Samick, it was what I could afford and had 24 frets rather than 19. It was a diamond in the rough and just a killer axe... Matt from the band Morticia in Minneapolis helped pick it out and set it up. He was also upgrading his rig as they had just released their 13 Nightmares album so he sold me his old rig which was a 70s Traynor Reverb Master (YRM1) and custom 4x10 cab for an unreal price to help me get started. Added the Boss HM2 and eventually Metal Zone MT2 and I felt like king of the world playing it! Unfortunately house was broken into and lost it all including the Sax nearly 20 years ago... Insurance was a good thing but could never fully replace such a personal items... Matt's enthusiasm and showing me the basics is really a huge factor behind my playing today.
 
I got my first guitar in summer 2006 - a Jackson Dinky DKMG with EMG HZ pickups (swapped them for EMG 60/81 combo half a year later). My first amplifier was a Line 6 Spider III 30. I still own both of them.
I bought the second amplifier in late 2008 - an ENGL Powerball mit a 4x12 ENGL cab with V60's in it, which still is the only tube amplifier I have ever actually owned.

... yes, I am only 24 years old, so no old stuff here.
 
First guitar was what looked like a 70s era Martin Sigma. I say looked like because someone attempted to scratch off the headstock logo. Maybe someone was ashamed of the name Sigma and wanted people to think he had a real Martin. Who knows? I'm honestly not the nostalgic sort, so I sold it in a yard sale a couple of years back. Never really bonded with it.

My first electric was an 1987 black Ibanez Roadstar. It was the last of the old headstock line before Ibanez totally switched the Roadstar line over to the pointy headstocks. This was the style of Roadstar that sort of resembled a Strat. It sounded and played nice, though the tremolo was mainly just for show. It went out of tune if you so much breathed on it. Still, for $175 in 1988 on closeout, it was a good price for a nice Japanese built Ibanez.

The amp my mom bought it with was not such a good deal. A Peavey Audition Chorus. I wanted to play metal, and if there was any amp in the universe least suited for what I wanted, this was a strong contender. Unfortunately I went for months practicing and practicing and always sounding like crap. I saved my money for a DOD Hard Rock Distortion pedal. Poor me, I plugged it in, hoping for metal goodness, and I just got scratchier sounding crap :-(

I know we sometimes tend to bag on POD and other cheaper modelers, but compared to what I started with, I would have been in heaven with a modern modeling amp.

If anything, I was persistent. I played for nearly a year with that setup before upgrading to a Peavey Bandit 112 and a Boss Heavy Metal pedal. Still fairly pedestrian, but for me it was a night and day difference.
 
Ben Randolph said:
My first electric was an 1987 black Ibanez Roadstar. It was the last of the old headstock line before Ibanez totally switched the Roadstar line over to the pointy headstocks. This was the style of Roadstar that sort of resembled a Strat. It sounded and played nice, though the tremolo was mainly just for show. It went out of tune if you so much breathed on it. Still, for $175 in 1988 on closeout, it was a good price for a nice Japanese built Ibanez.
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Roadstars are wonderful guitars. They play like butter. I've got an '84 Roadstar (check my avatar). It's got the Pro Rock'r trem bridge, and it's rock-solid stable.
 
my first electric wasn't an electric..
my first amp wasn't an amp..
i had a no-name acoustic pickup stuck across the sound hole of a tokai dreadnought acoustic, plugged into a no-name clip-on amp.
good times..

i then progressed to an epiphone strat and a park transistor 10-watter.
 
Stillbruch said:
I got my first guitar in summer 2006 - a Jackson Dinky DKMG with EMG HZ pickups (swapped them for EMG 60/81 combo half a year later). My first amplifier was a Line 6 Spider III 30. I still own both of them.
I bought the second amplifier in late 2008 - an ENGL Powerball mit a 4x12 ENGL cab with V60's in it, which still is the only tube amplifier I have ever actually owned.

... yes, I am only 24 years old, so no old stuff here.
Click to expand...

One thing about being younger is that the "crap" gear you start with is as good or better than some of the "good" gear for us from the earlier generations :)
 
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