What was the best investment you've ever made on gear?

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
What's given you the best bang for the buck over the years? And what was the worst?

My Suhr Badger 30 is probably the best overall purchase I've made. I can't imagine an amp fitting me better than that one. Guitar-wise the McFeely and both Suhrs. It's a little hard to choose a "best" since I own a handful of pieces of gear that I've accumulated over many years that make it easy for me to work with. The amp was a game changer for me though.

Worst would have to be my Line 6 Duoverb.
 
best would be either the Behringer bass amp, or the Peavey bass.
I've had both for a long time, and only ever had one issue with each.
the amp issue was someone else's fault.
the bass issue was too many years of spilling beer into the knobs :embarrassed:

worst?
probably the LP
not that it was a bad guitar, but it wasn't cheap, and I didn't bond with it well.
so it was kind of a waste of cash, I guess.
that said, I wouldn't mind having it back :lol:

actually, I think that Bullet Strat would have been the worst, it just wasn't a good guitar.
but I did break even on it, so that's okay.
 
Best guitar is no doubt the Reeves Gabrels. It will of just about anything fairly well.


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My first thought is my Taylor acoustic.
I find it so easy to play that I try new and more difficult things on it and then I am better able to translate that to other guitars where I can then work on the sound with amplification, pedals, etc..
I need that little stepping stone to make me work on the tougher things that I now realize I was avoiding on other guitars because it was hard to do.
 
By far, the worst purchase I made was my purple web suhr. I bought it when I was new to Suhr guitars. I lost $600 when I sold it a few months later. Horrible.

The best investment I have made is probably my music mans. I bought them both at really great prices. The y2d was used. But both are such outstanding guitars.
 
My Tech 21 has been my go-to gigging amp for the past few years. It has paid for itself many times over.

My worst was a 70's Deluxe reverb amp. I traded a much better amp to get it and I was never really happy with it. I won't do vintage amps anymore.
 
I think my biggest surprisingly useful purchase in the past few years has been the POD HD500....while I love the tones of my AC15 & Mesa, the convenience of the POD and good SQ are just hard to beat. Practice, lessons, recording, you name it, it can pretty much cover my daily needs.

Biggest PITA has become Guitar Rig & the Mobile I/O. I'm not throwing away any more time dealing with it. I've constantly struggled with getting the tones to a point were I'm satisfied and with numerous program problems and now it looks like the I/O is kicking the bucket.
 
oh yeah, the Pod! totally forgot about that.
that's be right up there with best innvestments, for sure.
I'd like to upgrade to the HD500 some day though.
 
Best would probably be my JBL PRX pro powered speakers. They pay for themselves many times over in power, sound quality, ease of use, lack of spinal cord crushing. Love love love them.


Worst would be every piece of Line 6 gear I've ever owned. Pod, DuoVerb, Spyder, Bogner Spyder.... every single one was soooo cool at first. Bells, whistles, etc. But when I've used them with other musicians I realize how fizzy, underpowered, and generally weak sounding they were.... and I've lost money on every single piece of L6 gear I sold, regardless of how good of a deal I got on it in the first place. :annoyed:
 
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oh yeah, the Pod! totally forgot about that.
that's be right up there with best innvestments, for sure.
I'd like to upgrade to the HD500 some day though.

I've played the prior versions and the SQ improvement into the HD series is pretty substantial, IMO.
 
My steinberger GL2TA. I can make it sound like almost any kind of guitar with the active EQ, and the composite connection makes it rock stable regardless of temp, humidity, etc. It plays great too. It is a 'go to' guitar when I want to try to dial in a sound. One guitar to rule them all. I bought it as a NOS left over from a music store when Steinbergers were no longer popular. It was sitting in the shipping box in the back room of the store. I paid 1550 bucks for it.
 
All in terms of value...

Best Guitar: My 1953 Harmony Hollywood. Bought it from Dave's for 150 bucks, and it plays and sounds fantastic.

Best Amp: At Mars Specialist (recent purchase). One channel of awesome. Can't say enough about it, really. It's pretty technical though, with 2 knobs instead of one. I'm starting to figure it out. :grin:

Worst Guitar: Probably my absolutely gorgeous PRS Signature Limited. It was beautiful, and it sounded great, but it was the heaviest double cut I've ever picked up. Also, as much as I liked the idea of a single-coil tone without a drop in volume, it was difficult to discern the difference in tone at bedroom volume, which is pretty much all I ever play. Then I absolutely lost my shirt on the resale.

Worst Amp: Orange Tiny Terror LE (hand wired edition, made in UK). Loved the size, and kinda dug the dirty sounds, but mostly I just didn't think it sounded very good, and I especially hated the cleans. Lots of people love these and make them sound great, but I didn't. Because it was the LE, I paid a lot more, and lost a lot more when I let it go.
 
I would say both of mine are mako products. the mak4 has just completely ended my amp quest. I bought a couple amps after it and sold them bc they weren't needed. clean to crunch to high gain it covers everything and having 4 separate channels is really sweet. the mako 412 is the best cab I have ever heard too - low end, clarity and very 3D.

my worst would be a line 6 product as well; a flextone II XL. that thing just got lost in any band mix and took forever to sell.
 
Best? Gotta be the Mesa Quad. Got it very cheap through a friend who deals guitars and gear almost for a living. Unbelievable how little these go for, considering how versatile they are. Shimmering cleans, and the smoothest gain I've yet to hear coming straight from the amp. I run it through a Scarlett 2i2, Tom Quayle recommended it as a cheap but reliable recording interface, and I use the cab simulator in Logic Pro. Yeah, it doesn't feel anything like the real thing, and I often crave the tonal benefits of a cranked amp pushing those speakers hard, but in an apartment building? I care way too much about my neighbours to subject them to me doing melodic minor drills at every waking moment...

Worst, that's easy. I got Ruokangas to build me a custom pickup config for my main guitar, thinking I needed something a lot more versatile if I wanted to "cover all bases," so to speak. Best p'ups they could offer, too, and those don't come cheap. I put it together solely through what I assumed would work out, and I was even advised against it by fellow guitarists who suggested getting Dimarzios instead. But no, Yngtchie had his mind made up, and shelled out the big bucks for what should in theory be the ultimate setup. Boy, did I fuck up big time.

I got the pickguard with everything ready to go, had a friend install it, and gave it a test run. Now, there was nothing wrong with it on a purely technical level, but it turns out that this was in no way 'my' sound. Too hot, and the pickups just didn't work well together, to my ears. It bummed me out so much that I stopped playing for several months, and eventually had the whole thing removed and put the old one back on.

The original pickups were just dandy, totally my sound, and looking back, I realize how wrong I were. Very expensive mistake, and I still haven't sold the thing. Dunno what I can get for the pickguard with everything on it, or whether I have to sell everything piece-by-piece. Here's what it looked like:

Ruokangas.jpg
 
I still use the Boss DM-2 delay I bought back in the 80's. I'm so attuned to its settings that I've been unable to bond with other delays.

Money-wise, the best investment was the Gibson ES-335 I picked up in 1981 for $700. Turned out to be an unusual custom model, and was appraised recently for a crazy amount.

Worst? I don't know. I've owned tons of crappy gear over the years. Most of it was pretty cheap. I got in a bidding war on ebay over a 60's-era Japanese knockoff of the Vox Mark VI and overpaid on what turned out to be practically a toy that I should have sent back but never did.
 
Best, as in my fave, The American Standard Tele HS.
Best bang for the buck, Blacktop Strat.
 
Hard to say because the best from a discount price standpoint is my Tele but I might still go with my strat since I like is as much as MIA versions that I tested and it was much cheaper. I could also argue that the Reverend was probably worth 2x what I paid for it even though like the strat I did not buy it on sale

Amps that would be my Crate V18 which I still have though I am not using it these days. $149 shipped for a 18W combo all tube amp that sound pretty damn good too...probably that's why it's in the garage and not sold :shrug:
 
I bought a Squier Master Series M80 at blow-out for $200. Traded that for a Breedlove acoustic. Traded that for a Jerry Jones Electric Sitar. Sold that for $800. If I could do this everyday I could quit my job.
 
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