Greatest amp for recording.. ever!

Not familiar with those tubes.

I put a set of Watford valves in mine and a better reverb tank. Kept the stock greenback because it sounds great., The valves made a very nice difference. Have tested my ac15 against other stock ac15’s with friends and everyone involved has said they preferred mine for a sweater more 3d tone so I guess the valves have been the difference.

I’ve used an ac30 for recording a fair bit and I prefer the ac15 by a large amount. I’m convinced I can get any tone I need in a very short time. In a session recently we were going from doom rock to more classic rock tones, then cleaner chimes with a combination of boost pedals. There is a sweet spot with the gain staging . that’s easy to find and I haven’t found on marshalls or fenders.

at the last session we plugged in a bass vi through a rat clone and immediately found the best fuzzy bass sound I managed to record so far. Granted by this stage I had the output on 10 and started freaking the speaker would blow.

I’m amazed at how many used ac15’s there are locally. Always with the same comment. “Tried Vox but it’s not my thing”…what are people doing? Probably getting too hung up on the top boost channel.

Am thinking of getting another and putting a 50w bass speaker in it and one more to run as an extension cab with an alternative speaker like a blue.

I am very much onboard with tracking 2 amps.

Last session I had the guitarist with his pedals into his ac30 then split the signal with a submarine pickup on his guitar and ran that into my ac15 with a matamp flavoured boost pedal. '

His amp had u47fet centre and sm57 mid way from cone and off axis. I pushed the bass eq a bit on his amp. The submarine went to my amp doing a cleaner overdrive with more pick attack and chime with a Serrano 87. Hands down best distorted guitar tone I’ve captured with loads of options.

would love to try a blue speaker extension cab or another ac15 so I can dual amp my own setup.


A fenderesque amp prob would provide additional options too. Been looking at champs of late.

Favorites here are a '72 Princeton Reverb with a Celestion Gold in it (such a sweet sounding amp); a '65 Deluxe Reverb, and a drip edge ('68?) Vibro Champ. So, I'm mostly a Fender guy. Some small, old Gibsons get work, too.

I have an AC15HW that gets some run, too. I should use it more for rocking stuff.

I have talked to Weber about an all rounder loaded in a cabinet for me.   I forget which one they recommended right off.   I love their attenuators.  

I guess there must be AC15s and AC15s? There was a time when all the bands I recorded seem to have reissue AC15s of some sort, and I always thought they sounded crap. Muddy and lifeless and mushy and nothing like a good AC30. But maybe there is another model I don't know about that sounds halfway decent...

I love my old Vibrochamp with a weird Jensen speaker.

The hardest thing about reading threads like this is I have almost all the amps mentioned and use them every week on people's records. Some get used almost daily.

The most overlooked part of any conversation about amps is the speakers and cabinets.

We all have personal favorites but there is not denying the tonal footprint of alnico speakers with guitar amps.
Favorite here is the Tone Tubby 12" Chicago blues . . . but the Celestion Alnico Blue Ruby and Gold 12" speakers are also strong contenders. A combination of one blue and one gold is magical.

I'll still take a VOX AC30 2x12 cab with a pair of Chicago blues over anything for any music style. And the Dr. Z Maz Jr/18 is the most versatile single channel tube amp I own or have ever used.
Mine is sloe to 20 years old but the new ones are out of this world amazing!

So what’s everyone using to split the signal into multiple amps when trying to get fatter tones

You can run an extension cab as the main speaker instead of the internal 1x10, or on amps with the ext speaker jack you can plug in both. I also run my Princetons into my Captor X for silent recording. 

Two different ways:

Radial BigShot ABY - Fender for verses, Dr. Z for chorus, both for solos or to route to different amps. Has an iso transformer and a ground lift. 

Temple Audio SUM MOD 2 - this is a module for their pedalboards that takes a stereo input and if you plug two amps in, stereo. Plug in only one amp and it automatically sums to mono without collapsing.

I use E906's on both amps.

My Ampeg V2 is pretty hard to beat for almost anything, especially when you can actually crank it into real distortion. I have one of the less desirable "Distortion" models, and like my tech said, "You will plug into the distortion circuit once, and then never use it again" And he was correct. But the regular channel is amazing. The reverb is amazing. It is also very clean and full when not really driving the power tubes, so you can get almost any dirt pedal to really shine. You can also crank a bass through it. For the studio, it is a very underrated bass amp, and also just an underrated amp in general.

That being said, you need a good amp tech that deals with Ampeg stuff to really get it up to snuff.

My V2, cranked to 10 with a P-bass through a custom 2x12 bass cabinet literally dislodged a glass window panel from my practice room. The building had to replace the entire window.

I find a Deluxe Reverb/Tremoverb head or a blackface Bassman can cover a lot of ground. For all manners of rock, a Marshall 2204/2204 can do just about anything with the right combo of pedals.