The Watering Hole

I've been testing out a few different vst amps today, scuffham, vintange amp room, metal amp room, amplitube, poulen and many more.  

The one thing they all have in common is that rhythmn playing sounds ok on them but playing a solo sounds like crap.  Everyone one of them has a really horrible raspyness to it., really sucks big time.

I'm having another equipment clear-out here getting shot of all my gear except the guitars. Don't need big amps anymore as I won't be playing "live" again anytime soon and if I do then I will rent the gear for the gig and pay someone to  deliver it and take it away too....too fucking old for all that anymore.

Anyhow, I am really looking for a very small amp that would be great for recording...must have a small speaker, 6 to 8 inches as I have had great sucess in the past with micing up small speakers.

Any thoughts ?

Sorry!  :-/

actually I will keep the peavey c30 as that has an glorious "in the room" sound, mostly due to the open back cab I suspect....but everything else has now gone...all sold on ebay with a couple of days of listing, mostly consisting of various pedals that I have had for ages but never use, except of course the germanium pedal, won't sell that.

;)

I've just tried out the 5 watt blackstar. NOT bad at all. Good cleans ( a bit of SS taste...) and a good OD channel.
There's also the 1 watt combo!
Here: http://www.blackstaramps.co.uk/products/ht-1r/

I think the fundamental disappointment with recording any amp is the lack of volume at the recording stage.  It doesn't matter how good the amp is and how good it sounds, without massive volume you just don't get good recordings.  When I recorded years back in a rehearsal studio we managed to get fantastic recorded tones, not because the amps were better than any other amp but purely because we cranked the fuckers up to ear splitting levels.  The way the amp reacts with the speakers, the cabinet, the room and the way that the microphones hear sounds differently at different air pressures all adds to the end result.   I would really love to build a completely sound proof room and just run an amp in there on its own at full crank with various microphones in the room on the speaker at the back and at all corners of the room etc, but back in the real world I can see that will probably never happen.  What I think I might have a crack at soon is take a DI track to my local rehearsal rooms and crank an amp with my DI track and record that from various positions, each mic on it's own track and then bring the result of that back to my home mix and see how that sounds, or even take my backing track along to the studio and record "live".

Fender champ.  Totally the way to go.  Perfect little big amp.

Jon, for cheap, try a VHT special 6 or Special 6 ultra. I have both.  Just got the ultra but it shows promise. Ive had the special 6 combo for a while now.  Finally replaced the stock tubes and it has really great cleans and mild breakup.  The ultra has the same cleans on one channel and nice gain tones on the other.