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Topic: Alesis Spitfire (aka Wildfire) Amps |
Tom Olson
From:
Spokane, WA
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Posted 7 Aug 2004 6:27 pm |
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| I was curious to know if anyone has any exprience of knowledge of these amps. From what I know, they are small combo amps, but they have digital modeling features like the POD, and they have tons of effects, and you can run multiple effects at the same time. They're also very inexpensive. Anyone know anything about them? Thanks. |
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Donny Hinson
From:
Glen Burnie, Md. U.S.A.
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Posted 7 Aug 2004 8:28 pm
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Tom, to be honest, I haven't tried one of those Wildfire amps, but I always advise players to buy amps designed for steel rather than lead guitar. I can tell you that while it may make a decent practice amp, it doesn't really have enough power (even their biggest one is only 60 watts) for playing medium-to-large gigs. These amps were no doubt designed for lead guitar players, and if they have 80 presets, at least 79 are probably designed for lead guitar. It wasn't really made for the steel guitar, which has altogether different tonal requirements, and you might even think it's pretty good...until you set it beside a real steel amp!
"Modeling" amps are much more suited to lead guitar. In that application, their various distortion/overdrive caracteristics, and the combination of multiple effects (fuzz + flange + echo + reverb) will be of much more use. For the majority of us steelers, though, they're not that great.
However, if you just want to "rock out" at home, with a Robert Randolph type of tone, it might be a little fun.  |
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Tom Olson
From:
Spokane, WA
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Posted 8 Aug 2004 8:05 am
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Hey Donny,
Thanks for the post. Yeah, actually I was thinking that one of the Alesis amps might make a good practice amp for use at very low volumes, or with headphones.
I get the impression that quite a few steelers use the POD. From what I can see, the Alesis is basically like a POD, but integrated into a small combo amp. The Alesis appears to have features similar to the PODv2.0, but with the Alesis Spitfire15 you get an external speaker, plus line in (for piping in a rythm track), and you can run multiple effects simultaneously -- all this for half the cost of a PODv2.0.
HOWEVER, while the POD is pretty popular and has gotten good reviews, I haven't heard much about these Alesis amps. So, I thought I'd check to see if anyone has had any experience with them. |
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