A late Merry Christmas to anyone who reads this. My big (=only) present from my parents was a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, aka 40 watts of pure, unadulterated, rich vaccuum tube goodness. It's one of the cheapest reliable-brand options for anyone wanting to make the jump to a tube amp without selling vital organs on the black market (I was previously using a solid-state Marshall MG80, which was a great starter amp, but there's just no comparing solid-state sound and tube sound).
I'd played through this model (briefly) before; Mike Tosto ("Mike T., the Ladies' Choice"), a former Master Kong bandmate, plays through this and kindly let me try it a few times. The cleans are absolutely gorgeous. Some complain about the drive channel; my philosophy on this is that you can always add a distortion pedal to power up your drive channel, but no effect in the world is going to compensate for poor base clean tone. My guitar sounds so good through this thing. I've only gotten to play around with the settings a little bit, but straight out of the box it's got beautiful tone, and I've been able to get some good bluesy sounds out of the drive channel and even crunch it up to quasi Enter Sandman level. I'll be tweaking and exploring a lot more in the coming weeks. As for power, well, all I have to say is that I had my family surprised at my volume when I was set on volume level 3 of 12 (sorry, Nigel Tufnel, my amp goes PAST 11!). \m/
Other than that, Christmas was pretty calm. Kevin was out here all day and we played some board games, some poker, had lots of good food, did plenty of relaxing, etc. He gave me a GB of RAM and a fantastic sound card, both of which I've now installed in my (newer) computer. I went to his house for the night and we stayed up watching several episodes of the HBO series Rome, which is fantastic (probably more on that later). Speaking of HBO, thank you Best Buy for having a 50%-off sale on all HBO box sets on Christmas Eve; I decided to save a lot by spending a lot, so on their way to me are The Sopranos seasons 2-5, Rome season 1, and the Band of Brothers miniseries. I'm going to have a lot of things to entertain me before too long.
I'll stop there for now, because that's my Christmas in a nutshell and that was the point of this post. Merry Christmas (late) to all, I hope you had as good a day as I did. More than anything I'm just glad to be back in Virginia with my favorite people in the world.
Song of the night is Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters", the song I play almost every time I pick up a guitar and my new amp's inaugural piece.
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