Minor League Rocker

A photo from a far better night of rockin'.

A few weekends ago, I put in one of my most shambolic performances in quite awhile. It was just one of those nights.

But I must’ve sounded OK enough for the dad of a young thrash metal guitar-in-the-making’s dad to seek some advice from me: What sort of gear should he get a 15-year-old who wants to do a few coffeehouse gigs to get comfortable in front of audiences, but wants to eventually progress to get into a thrash-style band?

Something tells me my lineup of Superstrat-style guitars and big ol’ VHT head convinced him I was the right guy.

We talked for awhile and came to some good conclusions:

Guitar

The young dude has a taste for Ibanez RG Series guitars. Not a bad choice – proven, economical, reliable. I prefer the S Series, both for the sleek body style and the awesome Zero Resistance tremolo bridge. Floyd Rose should consider itself lucky that the ZR isn’t taking a big bite out of its sales. Anyway, finding a decent deal on one of the many levels of RG’s isn’t a bad deal.

I’d also recommend he check out the Jackson DK-1 and whatever LTD guitars catch his eye. He might also catch a nice Carvin Bolt+C on eBay.

Amp

This is always the tricky part. We bandied many ideas back and forth, and I think the best to come out was a Marshall Microstack. Worst case, it’s $325. It’s very portable and not ultra loud, which should be good for our budding thrasher’s early gigs. The Micro won’t keep up with him when he makes the jump to playing in a band. But at $325, he can turn that Micro into a great practice amp.

So what should his next amp be? The safe choice is a used Peavey 6505 and an Avatar 212 cabinet. The 6505 is good enough for plenty of touring musicians, so our buddy can grow with it. One caveat: hundred-watt tube heads get loud in a hurry, and tube amps need to push the output section a bit to get their best tone. Local venues really get annoyed if guitarists crank their heads too loud. Seriously, a 20-watt tube amp will get you by (I gigged for years with Hung Dynasty using a THD Univalve set for 8 watts – including unmic’d gigs). The only X factor is that I haven’t seen a low-wattage high-gain tube amp that fully convinces. That’s how I wound up with my 60-watt head … which I’m considering pairing with an attenuator to push the power section without going absurdly loud.

Some other random advice for our young thrasher:
-Resist the modeler temptation. You’ll disappear in the mix onstage, and you’ll barely have any definition in your playing. Modelers sounds great at low volume or on certain recordings (studio magic!), but they are buzzy and poorly defined onstage.
-Don’t crank the pre-amp gain. That’s a good way to make your tone get flabby, buzzy and blurry. And it invites the bad kind of feedback.
-Use your EQ wisely. I know it sounds cool in the bedroom to crank the bottom end and scoop the middle frequencies for an evil metal tone. But if you’re playing with a bassist or another guitar, you’ll get tonal oatmeal as you step all over each other’s frequencies. The guitars need to cover different parts of the sonic spectrum, and they need to avoid interfering with the bassist’s sonic territory.