I'm still learning my way around this amp, but figured I'd put some initial thoughts up. My needs were for a decent practice amp that I could get decent sounds out of if I wanted to record or play along to stuff or what not, BUT I still needed to be able to crank the volume way down to keep my sleeping kids in their beds, or not wake my wife who gets up for work at 5:30am.
I wanted a TT, but after a few test runs, it wasn't quiet enough when my needs. So I tried a few solid state amps, including Fender GDEC Jr, Orange Crush 15 and a few others. They all had 8" speakers and really sounded like garbage. Plus no speaker out for my 1-12 cab.
The Spider III 30w comes with a stock Celestion 12" speaker, and while it's not a Greenback or one of their top models, it's still got great sound quality, and is a close competitor for the old school Celestions in my Carvin Cab.
The amp has 4 channels:
Clean: is exactly that, very clean. The equalize response is pretty wide rangine, allowing for a variety of sounds. It also sounds great with the pedals I've run through it. It does get a little finicky with my GSP-7, but I've only messed with it a little. It also has a hidden boost feature if you hold down the channel button until it starts to blink. I've only turned this on and off and not really fiddled with it.
Crunch: is supposed to be based on a Marshall Plexi, and it does an ok job of Mimicking this sound. Not great, or good, but ok. the manual claims it will give you "that brown sound", but I think it really lacks for that. But if you're not hellbent on faking Marshall, it's a very nice overdrive/distortion channel which I like with country or southern rock. It's very nice when you roll the mids up, very smooth indeed. Low drive, moderate mids and slightly rolled back and you've got Steve Miller band all day.
Metal: is a Model of the Mesa Boogie tripple rectifier. It does this pretty well, and you can really nail Master of Puppets type sounds with about a 90% accuracy. Old Slayer sounds pretty good too.
Insane: who names this stuff? It's like the Nu Metal version of the Metal Channel. Scooped mids and plenty of bass. It's not too bad for this, but I think and external eq would help clean this channel up.
It also has 6 built in effects that you can use two at a time (sorta). I'll write about those after my lunch break.
Line 6 Spider III 30w (initial review)
Moderated By: mods
