My Gear
Here are a few pictures of my guitar collection.
Epiphone Del Rey & Silvertone 1482. I bought the Del Rey new in '95 for $600 with a case. It had two high-output blade type humbuckers when new, but I recently installed a Seymour Duncan Invader pickup in the bridge. The tone control has a pull-up knob that gives me coil-splitting so I can have single-coil sounds as well as humbucker sounds. It's a very versatile guitar with a fast neck and lots of sustain.
The Silvertone 1482 was a great little amp. 12W of power and a single Alnico 12" speaker. It's a copy of a Fender 5E3 Deluxe except the engineers for Danelectro (who made these amps for Sears under the Silvertone name) decided to add a fantastic tremolo circuit. The two channels have independant volume and tone controls, and the tremolo has speed and intensity controls. The tremolo had a nice choppy sound, not like the Fender or Magnatone amps below. The 1482 has a 6AU6 pentode for the tremolo oscillator instead of the more common 12AX7. It really rocks when cranked up, but rattles like mad! I wasn't using it, so it was sold. I've still got the schematic so when time and money allow, I might clone it.
The Peavey Studio Chorus 210. Quite possibly the best solid state amplifier ever made. It's stereo, 35W per channel with two 10" speakers. It's stereo chorus has that great 80's metal sound and the Super SAT channel is just insane! I can go from nice Texas blues sounds all the way up to Texas metal, as in Dimebag & Pantera! As if that wasn't enough, Peavey also put one of the best solid state driven reverb tanks I've ever heard in this amp. I'm keepin' this beast!
My 1961 Fender Princeton is also in this picture. It's 12 great sounding watts with a 10" speaker and tremolo to die for! Leo Fender did an outstanding job on this little amp. It's only got four knobs: volume, tone, speed, and intensity. What more could you ask for in a non-master volume amp?
My 1965 Magnatone MP-1. This is my surf-music amp. I bought this at the Bee3 vintage guitar show in Spartenburg, SC for $200. The guy who re-wired this before really made a mess of things. Someone hacked this amp bad by removing the original 7189-A power tubes and cutting new holes for some octal sockets and installing 6V6's! Not only that, but they had the phase-inverter screwed up as well. It took a little while, but I've got it in fairly good shape now. It's got a great Blackface Fender style tremolo, a really springy reverb, and a microphone channel. The tremolo and reverb are on the instrument channel only. The instrument channel has bass and treble controls, and the mic channel has a dark sounding tone control. It's also got a normal/record switch that works like a built in power soak, and it's got a light-up faceplate w/ dimmer, but unfortunately the light strip is broken.
This is my Ovation Celebrity Deluxe, Yamaha classical, and Rogue ST-3 strat copy. The Ovation has a book-matched bird's eye maple top and diamond shaped pearl inlays in the bound rosewood fretboard. I've also got Schaller strap-locks on it. The Yamaha is a CG101-MS, matte finish with a solid spruce top. The Rogue ST-3 was a pawnshop-prize. I got it for $38 off of e-bay, and it's become my go to guitar for bottle-neck slide.
I bought a banjo a couple of days ago. It's a Rogue (Musician's Friend house brand) Traveler Banjo. It's a fun little instrument, and I can get some good tones out of it.
I've also become somewhat of a drummer over the past two years. Here's my drum set:
This is a set of Ludwig Rocker Elites. 22" bass, 16", 13", and 12" toms, and a 14" x 5.5" snare. The cymbals are 14" Paiste 502 hi-hats, 16" 502 crash, and a 20" Sabian ride. The heads are Aquarian Studio X on the toms, and a Remo controlled-sound head on the snare (changed since the picture was taken). Since this picture was taken, I've added an LP cowbell and a Wuhan 12" China cymbal to the set.