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My mom bought me a Gladiator Strat style guitar for my 15th birthday, $50. She didn't have the money to buy me an amp, so I got a job at a pizza shop... bought a small Crate amp.

My first amp (came with my Rhodes piano but i used it for guitar when I started learning a few years later) was a Marlin bass amp. It sounded like a fart in a shoebox. Terrible thing.

My first amp was a 10 watt Crate. I later upgraded that to a 30w Crate. Those were decent little amps, honestly.

"First amps" today are actually pretty decent. I got a "free" Silvertone 10w bass amp when I bought my Silvertone bass from a dude on Craigslist a while back, he had gotten one of those package deals and didn't end up taking to it. I actually use the shit out of the little thing with guitar, it sounds really, really good cranked all the way up and naturally distorting.

My first amp was one of the first MIM Fender 15Rs. One of those with tons of hiss and the volume knob that reaches maximum at 2 and only gets more fizzy and farty from there on up. So the same problems most new Fender SS amps have, actually.

Pens wrote:"First amps" today are actually pretty decent.

They are. All the Orange Crushes, for example. And for $100 you can get a Roland Cube or Line 6 that'll be a pretty good practice amp for a long time.

Will wrote:My first amp was one of the first MIM Fender 15Rs. One of those with tons of hiss and the volume knob that reaches maximum at 2 and only gets more fizzy and farty from there on up. So the same problems most new Fender SS amps have, actually.

Mine was like that too. It's in the storage closet at my apartment now. The thing served me well for years as a practice amp, but the distortion was useless on it, and like you said it couldn't really be turned up past 2 without sounding like crap.

Agreed about the Orange Crushes too. I have a Crush 25 bass amp that my girlfriend gave me for christmas last year and I absolutely love it! I use it for bass and guitar all the time and it sounds great! I've actually been wanting the little tiny Crush 3 for guitar. It actually sounds fairly decent, especially compared to the other 9 volt battery operated amps out there, it has a built in tuner, switchable clean and distortion, and it's made of the same materials as their other higher end amps... plus they look cool as hell.

A lot of the students I teach have Line 6 amps and I hate them, they sound overly bright and tinny, and the effects are annoying. Any time you switch a channel they come on automatically, even if the effects knob is set to 0, you have to sweep the knob all the way up and back down to 0 again to shut it off. I despise line 6 amps because of teaching lessons. I have one kid I teach who has the peavey equivalent of the line 6 and I hate that amp too, and I usually like peavey. This one sounds even tinnier though somehow.

Pens wrote:My first amp was a 10 watt Crate. I later upgraded that to a 30w Crate. Those were decent little amps, honestly.

when i first got a gx30 i was stoked. when i was testing it out at the guitar shop, my dad says "why does he (me) sound like shit on this amp but good on this one?"

i don't think they're great amps, but they were a step and a half over what they could be at that price level.

Mine was the unavoidable squier strat pack. I played it for 4 years with the stock .9s on it. At some point I decided a fretless guitar would be a cool thing to have and then 20 minutes and a screwdriver later I realized it was not....

^ LAWL

nyck wrote:Mine was the unavoidable squier strat pack. I played it for 4 years with the stock .9s on it. At some point I decided a fretless guitar would be a cool thing to have and then 20 minutes and a screwdriver later I realized it was not....

Sounds eerily like something I'd do.

Doesn't every new guitarist go through that fretless phase when starting out?
I did lol

The first guitar I played/learnt on was my mum's old 'Hotspot' nylon string axxxxxxe, but I can't find any photos online of it, as unremarkable and generic as it was.



MY actual first guitar was a rip-roarin' Sunn 'Mustang' purchased from Langdon's Electric Music, along with the ubiquitous Squier 15 amp. I guess I lucked out with getting a humbucker'd guitar from the get-go, considering I knew nothing about pickups when I was like 12.

It was supposed to be a Christmas present but I remember being so fucking excited about it, I'd always get it out of their closet when my folks were out, screw-in the tremolo arm and BRAAWWWNGGGGGOWWWOW the shit out of E chords for ages. So often and to such a vigorous extent I did this that the screwthread for the arm in the bridge exploded during my first official day of ownership.



Things really stepped up a notch when I got the G1, though..

NickS wrote:

pumpkin wrote:

Your first guitar was a Gibson? I remember a lad at school got a Gibson Les Paul Gold Top from his Gran, who went into Yardley's and asked for the best electric guitar they had. There was a lot of muttering among those of us who were making do with Ekos and Futuramas.

Yeah, I hated it though. My Dad (who plays guitar as well) found it in pawn shop and apparently "got a good deal on it". It was a 1980s white Gibson Explorer with a Kahler locking trem. It was very James Hetfield, and I hated Metalica... still do infact. It was the early 1990s, I wanted a Jazzmaster or Jaguar, not a what I considered to be a "metal" guitar. Anyway, like a moron, a traded it for an Epiphone tele copy.

I will buy another one some day for sake of nostalgia.

hohner hw300g

90 bucks. got it around 1991. ive broken the headstock off it twice now, repaired it myself both times and the thing still plays like new. recorded over 200 songs on it, before i got my DBL fender

dezb1 wrote:Avon Rose morris Les Paul Bought from a guy at school for £10

looks just like my first electric. Mine was given to me by someone (I cant remember who), tuners were all bent too. But I gigged it!

When I was 12 my dad gave me his Fender F-35 and his 70s Musicmaster bass. I still have the acoustic, but the bass was stolen back in 98 or 99. My first electric was a MIK Squier Tele (black w/ single ply whiteguard) that I got for xmas in 96. I've had a bunch of guitars since. I think the first guitar I bought with my own money was my Eko Ranger VI acoustic.

gaybear wrote:

Pens wrote:My first amp was a 10 watt Crate. I later upgraded that to a 30w Crate. Those were decent little amps, honestly.

when i first got a gx30 i was stoked. when i was testing it out at the guitar shop, my dad says "why does he (me) sound like shit on this amp but good on this one?"

i don't think they're great amps, but they were a step and a half over what they could be at that price level.

Oh. yeah they totally sounded like ass, but most amps did during that time. The Crate was perfect for trashy punk that I was doing at the time, though.

My first guitar was a Samick Valley Arts strat....LPB with maple neck. it was bought new for like my 11th birthday in 1996. I think my mom spent too much but there were no Mars/Samash/Guitar Centers in my area at the time and it was the cheapest new guitar the store had. Great guitar, I would put its quality on par with a MIM standard, but I sort of destroyed it over time. Still have the parts, but they're all in such a dire state that it's not worth putting back together. This was the infamous "stripe store" guitar that I wanted to make look like the comp mustang from the SLTS video.

I disagree that strats don't make good first guitars. There's a lot of tonal variety. Only problem I had was I never knew why my guitar hummed in 3/5 positions with distortion. I even learned how to string and setup the strat trem on my own and a pretty young age, but yeah I can see where it would have been simpler with a hardtail.



On the subject of firsts, my first amp was a solid state Ross 60 watt 1x12 combo (looked like this)

Had a drive channel and built in chorus/reverb.


My first pedal was this:
and my first keyboard was this:

Ooooh, first pedal?

Ibanez Soundtank SlamPunk



I hated the name but it sounded the best out of the lot at my local shop, that I could afford at the time. I replaced it with a used 1986 RAT that the shop had gotten in one day, and I'd heard that Babes in Toyland and the Melvins used one of those.

Still, the lil Soundtank was a fairly decent pedal for a 14 year old.

My first guitar was one of those argos cheapo classical 3/4 sized guitars. It did however play suprisingly well and still does. It actually belonged to my sister but I claimed it as my own when I was 8. I played that for about a year and a half, then my parents said I could get an electric if I saved all my pocket money and had it for Xmas. So I then got a Turner strat copy that was short scale. I played that to absolute death, nearly ruined the damn thing and then sadly sold it to buy a superstrat when I was 13 or 14.

My first amp was a little marshal mg10, I just used to crank the gain and contour controls and thought I sounded amazing, but nothing was as exciting as when I got my first pedal, the good old zoom 606 which had no setting which sounded good.