Guitar Gear

In my humble (or not so humble 🙂 ) opinion, there’s no better way to evaluate gear than to gig with it. It’s one thing to play with a piece of gear in a controlled environment; it’s an entirely different matter when you use it to perform your music. Gigs can be a chaotic affair, and when you gig with something, its quirks and strengths show themselves.

For instance, let’s say you want to evaluate a new amp. It’s easy to twiddle with the knobs in the shop or in someone’s garage to evaluate the sound it produces. But when you gig with it, there are a lot of factors that come into play such as transport weight, the ability to cut through a mix, tonal quality when played in a crowd – lots of things that aren’t apparent when you’re in a controlled environment.

So if you’re evaluating a new piece of gear, ask the person or shop selling it if they lend it to you, or if you can rent the gear so you can try it out before you buy it. That way you can bring it to where you’ll be using it the most – studio, rehearsal, etc. – to see how it performs. Personally, I wish I had done that with my Line 6 Flextone III amp. Once I got it, it was great for studio work, but transporting it was painful (the damn thing weighed a ton), and it sounded horrible when I gigged with it. Had I evaluated it before I made a decision to buy it, I probably wouldn’t have bought it. Oh well, as a friend of mine once said, “You just got levied a learning tax.”

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