What are the BEST hyped pieces of gear you have owned?

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Scumback anything - he does the best modern repros of old celestions, period. I like the BM75LD, but there's a scumback for you if you love old celestions. Yes, if you already own old celestions you don't need to shop around, we know. For those of us mere mortals without access to vintage, it's unbelievable how great his products are.

Larry anything - you guys can make all the jokes you want, but the real joke is your tone compared to his amps LOL

Tonenerd anything - Scott not winding anymore is probably the biggest RT tragedy. The Roxy is the best pickup period i've ever played, and I'm among the most picky pickup guy here.

Griff anything, but especially the Chiron (griff hit it out of the park). His combination crunchlab/lightspeed is even better for me personally, but that's to be expected, it's my pedal lol

Mark II and III - not that the later revs aren't great, but those two are loved for a reason. I've never gotten along with them as much as I should, but I can recognize the greatness.

Gibson Les Paul - there is literally no replacement for a great les paul. If you don't think so, you haven't owned a great les paul. No, an esp or eII eclipse is a great guitar, but it's a different tone, different neck feel, and different thing.

Free the Tone Flight Time - I was skeptical at first, but I came around and many others are as well.

Strymon Volante - truly the best strymon pedal ever made. Yes, it's better sounding than the big sky and the timeline, and not by a small amount.

V30s - what generally seems to happen is people get a cheap chinese one, or a bad mesa one, and write them off. No dude, there's a reason people buy dozens of them trying to find the magic one. Once you find it, it's forever gear.

Classic era heavy metal guitars - 80s BC Rich, Hamer, and Dean. They are all way better than modern production guitars, and anyone who tells you differently is lying out their ass or hasn't played one that has been well kept.

Diezel VH4 - it's not a tone that I would use all the time, but holy shit that channel three is a monster. One of the biggest rhythm sounds ever.

That's just the first handful that come to mind immediately
 
Seymour Duncan JB and a Bad Monkey

I dont know....everything else Ive owned which has been "hyped" has not been without fault I guess.
 
IndyWS6 said:
Axe FX. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great piece of gear…
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Honestly I would put all of the "big four" modelers in this category - the axefx, kemper, QC, and helix

They are all awesome and they all have selling points for what they do best specifically

It will never "replace" tube amps but there's a reason why they are so popular and loved
 
VHT Deliverance
Peavey 5150
Maxon od808
Mesa cabs with v30’s
Suhr SL series
Strymon Timeline
Chase Bliss Brothers AM
 
So once again, I'm primarily referring to the hype I've been exposed to on this forum, so keep that in mind:

Wizard amps: yup, they are special, and definitely live up to the hype. My MCIi is one of the best amps I've ever played, and will probably be with me forever.

Bogner 101b: these always get a ton of love around here, and justifiably so. Super fun to play and sounds incredible on all 3 channels. Can do just about everything, and its all footswitchable. Probably the ultimate live amp for people that need to cover a lot of sonic territory. Just remember to crank up that audio taper treble pot.

Diezel VH4: channel 3 is beloved for a reason, but don't sleep on the other channels. Mine is from around 2020, and I get great usable sounds out of all 4 channels. But nothing out there sounds like channel 3. Just massive.
 
IndyWS6 said:
Axe FX. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a great piece of gear…
Click to expand...

I consider the Axe-Fx to be the most important piece of gear I’ve ever used when it comes to my understanding of tone, hands down. I’ve learned more about guitar tone through the Axe-Fx than all my years of trying out analog gear and reading forums combined.

To my ears it’s very close to the real thing, sure, but more importantly there’s something that happens when you have a virtual warehouse of gear instantly available, routable in just about any way you can think of, and you can start swapping around and in and out pieces of gear and dialing stuff in (without worrying about breaking anything), and effectively modding stuff (bigger/smaller transformers, bias adjustments, messing with overall negative feedback and speaker cab impedance curves, etc) to hear which part of the chain actually does what in real time.

You start understanding the cumulative nature of everything, that your sound revolves less around your amp than you’d think and more around your cab. Amps are still important of course but I’d have never believed they played 2nd fiddle to the cab as far as tone goes unless I was able to swap them all around instantly in real time, that kind of thing. In the real world, you almost never get the opportunity to shootout roomfuls of similar gear. In the Axe-Fx, you can do that with amps, cabs, drive pedals, delays, EQs, whatever.

You can get deeper than that if you want. You can get under the hood of an amp and learn the exact impact of preamp gain vs phase inverter gain vs power tube gain vs transformer heft that you can’t do in the real world nearly as easily. For drive pedals, you have models of basically every popular drive circuit ever made to audition right there. For time-based effects like delay, verb, chorus, you actually have access to a lot of models of specific pedals of those types but more importantly you can isolate things like analog delay vs digital vs tape. With compressors, you can hear analog vs digital vs optical. With drive pedals, you can swap around different diodes, internal voltages, you know, real nerd shit you can’t really do anywhere else in the same way.

Then after you learn all that stuff, you can carry that knowledge into the analog world and have a much better idea about what you actually want.

I know this is common knowledge these days but I don’t think it can be understated just how important that piece of gear is. It can just about give you a doctorate in guitar tone all by itself. In that way it absolutely lives up to all the hype.
 
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glpg80 said:
Lexicon PCM81
Damage Control Timeline Delay

I’ve owned both of these for decades. They do something no other effect can do - they have character in the tone not just the effect they are creating.
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Lexicon makes amazing stuff from hardware to plugins. 😍 Never seen that damage control timeline.. looks crazy. Tube delay!? Must have.. 😣 were these the strymon guys?
 
Omnipotent1 said:
Lexicon makes amazing stuff from hardware to plugins. 😍 Never seen that damage control timeline.. looks crazy. Tube delay!? Must have.. 😣 were these the strymon guys?
Click to expand...

Yes exactly. Tube buffered digital delay mixing built in. The analog signal passes right through tube buffered and the digital delay is mixed in with a DAC. Let me see if I can find a video where I’m using it
 
The Rockett Blue Note was pretty hyped at it's inception. I got one a few years later, around 2012. I still have it cause it's such a useful pedal. There really aren't any bad tones in the thing. That and my Griffin Analog pultec EQ are among a small handful of pedals which I will keep for the duration of my life.
 
TheGreatGreen said:
I consider the Axe-Fx to be the most important piece of gear I’ve ever used when it comes to my understanding of tone, hands down. I’ve learned more about guitar tone through the Axe-Fx than all my years of trying out analog gear and reading forums combined.

To my ears it’s very close to the real thing, sure, but more importantly there’s something that happens when you have a virtual warehouse of gear instantly available, routable in just about any way you can think of, and you can start swapping around and in and out pieces of gear and dialing stuff in (without worrying about breaking anything), and effectively modding stuff (bigger/smaller transformers, bias adjustments, messing with overall negative feedback and speaker cab impedance curves, etc) to hear which part of the chain actually does what in real time.

You start understanding the cumulative nature of everything, that your sound revolves less around your amp than you’d think and more around your cab. Amps are still vitally influential of course but I’d have never believed they played 2nd fiddle to the cab as far as tone goes unless I was able to swap them all around instantly in real time, that kind of thing. In the real world, you almost never get the opportunity to shootout roomfuls of similar gear. In the Axe-Fx, you can do that with amps, cabs, drive pedals, delays, EQs, whatever.

You can get deeper than that if you want. You can get under the hood of an amp and learn the exact impact of preamp gain vs phase inverter gain vs power tube gain vs transformer heft that you can’t do in the real world nearly as easily. For drive pedals, you have models of basically every popular drive circuit ever made to audition right there. For time-based effects like delay, verb, chorus, you actually have access to a lot of models of specific pedals of those types but more importantly you can isolate things like analog delay vs digital vs tape. With compressors, you can hear analog vs digital vs optical. With drive pedals, you can swap around different diodes internal voltages, you know, real nerd shit you can’t really discover anywhere else in the same way.

Then after you learn all that stuff, you can carry that knowledge into the analog world and have a much better idea about what you actually want.

I know this is common knowledge these days but I don’t think it can be understated just how important that piece of gear is. It can just about give you a doctorate in guitar tone all by itself. In that way it absolutely lives up to all the hype.
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For me, this is where Fractal really has the advantage. You don't have to tweak to that level, but you can. And you're right, doing that really helps understanding how everything fits together, with the entire guitar rig, with the mix, and with the song. Once you start hearing those things in a bigger context, I think, becomes the bridge between just being a guitarist and being a musician. Any gear that helps you do that is worth its weight in gold, I think.

Not really anything new, but the old Portastudios helped do that for me. Hyped back in their day, and completely worth it.

I'd add pro-level converters to this list, too. Seemed to me that the quality of even mid-grade interfaces greatly increased about 10 years ago. A great interface, a good mic, and just about any modern DAW fills the same purpose and is so far beyond those old 4-track tapes. Recording in general got me focused on the whole band and the song, and not just sitting around wanking out the fastest licks I could. That was life-changing.
 
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