This leads me to my New Gear Day. My birthday was last weekend, so I took my birthday money, sold off some RC stuff (one of my other hobbies), and I bought my first real head and cabinet. NLCC&OMT = New Laney Cub Cab 212 & Orange Micro Terror.
I can hear the groans now - Laney... MDF, not birch,/pine/whatever... HH speakers, not Celestions... MT isn't a real amp... only has one tube...
Well, I can tell you that, to my untrained ear, they sounded pretty great when paired with one another.
Here's what I like best about the Laney cab:
- 212 cab for $240 (thanks, Amazon)
- Can be used in portrait or landscape mode
- relatively light (40 pounds?)
- Two handles on top - one at either end - so the head can sit atop the cab without wobbling.
- Sounds pretty good, and the HH speaker should only get better with use. And If I have to ditch them for different speakers, there are a ton of options.
Here's what I like best about the Orange MT head:
- I found out, purely by accident, that It is magical. No, seriously! Magical! How do I know? Well, I forgot to turn the volume down when I turned it off to swap guitars, then plugged my SG in with dimed volume controls. I flipped it back on, bumped the strings, and the resultant noise from the amplifier nearly created a load where there was none mere moments earlier! See, magical!
- Simple controls - Volume, tone, and gain. No models or effects in which to get lost. And it has that great Orange amps aesthetic.
- Seriously, guys - it's loud.
- Small and easily transportable.
- Loud. Pants-fillingly loud if you're unsuspecting.
- Decent cleans - still just the tiniest bit of hair, but really nice.
- It's the opposite of quiet - though it can do quiet cleans and quiet gainy tones, so might be a good bedroom amp... if you don't turn it up.
- Headphone jack - can be used for quiet practice.
I set everything up and tried it out with my Fender Player + Top Tele, my SG with P90s, and my PRS SE Custom 24. In each case, there were good, useable tones. The quickest to break up were the P90s in the SG. They sounded fuzzy and distorted at the same settings where the Tele sounded pretty bright, clean, and articulate. Some twiddling with the tone and gain knobs cleaned it right up. The PRS was perhaps the cleanest and most articulate sounding, though I could never get anything approaching a metal sound out of it. I imagine that has something to do with the pickups. If one were to run a set of active EMGs through it, metal tones would probably be easy to find. Though I love to listen to metal, I don't really want to play it, so this was no big deal for me.