Amp Camp II

On Oct 11, 2004 I headed North towards Albany with Jim Weider to test out a bunch of Two Rock amps and some more random amps. He has been borrowing a Two Rock Custom Reverb and liked it but thought something else might work out better.

Here is the crew with the five Two Rock amps and Jim's 1x12" Buzz Feiten cabinet with a Carr speaker which we used to test all the amps:

I'm plugging in the guitar, Jim has his ever present Tele, standing on the left is Mark Giammattei who graciously hosted the event at his studio. On Jim's right is Dave Ponte from Guitar Center and below Jim is Wasyl from Black Creek guitars, a Two Rock and Analog Man dealer.

We had a Custom Reverb, Custom Reverb Signature, Onyx, and Opal (two of these).

Here we are testing one of the amps. I liked the clean sound of the Opal best, nice and crisp and chimey, good match for the Tele. The Custom Reverb was nice and warm but I think it would get lost on stage with the band. We also really liked the Fargen Bordeax, you can see it behind Dave and Wasyl. The Fargen had an awesome lead sound, really sounded like Jim. In the half power mode it was not as good though, but it did not seem too loud in full power mode. It was custom ordered with 4 6L6 tubes and made to be "not too loud".

Here is how we changed the amps over in 1.3 seconds. I changed the guitar cable while someone else changed the STANDBY switches and speaker cables.

We also tested my 10" DeArmond amp and slaved it into a Two Rock to try to see how Steve Kimock got his awesome slide sound. It was good but not as POWERFUL as Steve's. I built a box to tap off the speaker jack and go into a box with a knob to set the signal strength when sending the speaker output to the input of another amp. Steve told me how to do that and it worked well.

We also tested guitar cables. The George L's had the classic Fender tone, nice and bright, but lost some low and low mids. The Pete Corni$h cable was very dark, did not sound good with the Tele at all. The Two Rock Crystal cable was excellent, it actually sounded like Steve Kimock - a full round tone. We also tried a Monster cable and it sounded quite good too.

Mark also had speaker cables but we did not test those as our ears were hurting by late in the day.
All pictures above thanks to Ange for her steady hand!

Here is a shot from AMP CAMP I at Andy Fuch's place in New Jersey in July. We had a blast testing Fuchs amps and heard a pair of Dumbles that day, including Steve Kimock's which he used at Mexicali Blues.

Here is Steve Kimock and some of his amps at Mexicali Blues.

Ask me about Andy Fuchs, the DeArmond amp, and Kimock's "ESP"!

Have fun!

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