Originally Posted by
52telecaster
Trakhak said,
"And the myth of harsh-riding aluminum eventually hardened into dogma. It's the bike sideshow among the current black-and-white, us-versus-them, rules/sucks soccer field melees: vinyl versus digital, tubes versus transistors, aluminum versus steel."
As a working musician I have to respond that tubes and solid state in a guitar amp are extremely obvious to the player. Maybe not the audience, but my hands and ears know almost immediately. The rest of this discussion I will simply read and learn.
Agreed, except for (finally!) the current crop of modelers. I have no interest in buying one, but plenty of people who have been playing guitar as long as you and I have are buying them and happily going ampless on stage, using in-ear monitors.
They sometimes even get their drummer to go for an electronic kit. In this era of noise level restrictions being increasingly enforced for live bands (but, often, not for DJs, which is a whole other topic), that's a savvy way to ensure an easy-to-control mix and volume level, which makes club owners happy and increases the likelihood of being booked in the same venue repeatedly.
By the way, if you happened to find yourself playing on Broadway in Nashville in the last year or two and used a house amp, there's a good chance you'd have been playing through a Fender Tonemaster Twin or Deluxe. Fender had had the brilliant idea of designing painstakingly accurate software versions of the amps, and stopping there. Those amps were the result.
No Marshall or Vox models in the same amp, no endless chains of effects. Just the one amp model for each, with the same cosmetics, the same cabinet, and the same control panel responding the same way. Everything the same.
From what I read, the first week or so that the Tonemaster amps were on stage at one venue, someone saw the nameplate and objected. So the stage manager pulled the nameplate off. The same amp was subsequently used by countless guitarists---Nashville guitarists!---who didn't suspect that it had a digital front end.