Home (amp tone and effects placement)

>Your rig is too complex. I'll just take a Fender Champ and cheap guitar cable.

A Champ is so loud. I don't like loud noise, but I love good Tone. I play nylon-string guitar as an alternative to electrified guitars. There's something unnatural about putting electronic components inside of musical instruments. Steel-string guitar is such a new type of instrument, it's not used in classical music.

If every guitarist tried to use your approach, there would be no Champs available. I've been plugging the idea of 5-watt amps as well as my control-freak system. Even 5 watts is louder than I like however, when at home. And when playing with drums, a Champ isn't loud enough, unless mic'd.

My system *is* complex -- but it can do some stunts that other systems can't, including genuine cranked amp and speaker tone at headphone levels, which is an important capability that most guitarists want very badly but can't get, because they've never heard of speaker isolation cabinets.

Many guitarists have a tube amp and effects unit. And they would buy an isolation cabinet if they knew about them. Once you go that far, I'm pointing out the advantage of an additional effects unit after the amp, offering programmable post-amp level and eq control *as well as* post-amp effects which sound very trippy and clear. And I've taken the idea to its logical conclusion by defining an entire standalone unit including final power amp and monitor cabinet.

I dislike the complexity of this system, but it could be manufactured as a compact and inexpensive system. Such a system has several powerful and valuable capabilities unlike any guitar processing approach we've seen. This system deserves to exist, despite its complexity. It does what it does, very well. You should hear it, when it's properly set up.