The Steel Guitar Forum

I just got a nice lap steel guitar for $200 on eBay. I need an amp now. The music store guy suggested a small new portable Pignose as a personal amp for 79 dollars.

I haven't played Hawaiian guitar since I was 9 years old. After 10 months of lessons, my teacher was then drafted into WWII. Four months later we got word that He was killed in the Pacific. that ended my formal guitar. Retired and restarting.

Should I buy that amp?

Better listen to it first. If it's like the Pignose amps I played through in the 70s it only has two settings: Fuzzy and Fuzzier

Blues or pop in the David Lindley style might work with one but I wouldn't think a Pignose would go well with Hawaiian music. I COULD be wrong . . . maybe they changed 'em, but I kinda doubt it.

LTB

Pignoses are fuzzy. I'd recommend a Fender "Ampcan" as a small portable amp (the size of a paint can). It's clean, sounds great, and you can use a small reverb/delay pedal like the Boss RV-3 or another effects unit to wet the sound. Plus, it can be run off batteries so you can take it and play it under a palm tree!

A Peavey Classic 30 works well.

I have a pignose amp like that and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a steel. It's kind of a toy to me. You could play really, really quite through it, but you wouldn't have much tone. It does have a line out, so you could use it as a pre-amp. I would recommend a earphone amp called a pocket rocket w/reverb for portability. Also Crate makes a nice battery powered amp now, and I don't have one, but I would bet it would sound pretty good. It has a 12" speaker.

I'll second Mike's recommendation for a Classic 30 for lap steel. It's a very inexpensive all tube amp that also looks cool (especially the dark tweed ones). One of the best small tube amps out there for less than a grand (and it's a lot less than a grand).

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www.tyacktunes.com

The Fender Blues Junior is also nice.15 amazingly clean watts thru a 12" speaker.It has reverb and a nice retro look.Also,it can be "souped-up" real easy.Around $375 new (but who buys anything new)

I also have a blues jr, and it is a very cool amp. They've got one that's even smaller, with a 10' speaker, not sure how many watts (maybe 10?), all tube...if you're looking for something even less costly.

I like to play my National 8 Steel outside the back of the house, where I can watch all the wildlife on the edge of the wood which is out there. When I do this I use a horrible little Dean Markley battery amp.
This is a plastic box with a very small (about 2.5") speaker.
The thing is, if you turn it right up, and you can live with the distortion, and you use a lot of imagination, you could believe it sounds like a resonator guitar.
It actually occurred to me to have a go making aluminium cones for an old speaker to see if you could actually make a resonator amp.
I'll get round to it one day, maybe.

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Cheers!

Small amps sound good for me for lap steel. When I record I have a Yamamha 15 watt in a small wooden cabinet (boogie look-alike) with reverb that sounds great, 6" speaker, I think. I also have a gorilla keyboard amp (yard sale, $5.00) that sounds good with some compression and delay for clean stuff. Low-tech, but works. I use 3 lap steels, 2 gibsons (54 & 59 with small soapbar pickup), and a rickenbacker, and all sound good and record well with these amps. You should try it out first, and try it for clean tones (as mentioned) if that is your thing.

I like the sound of the Blues Junior and my 15 watt Velocette too but, overall, I like the versatility of my Classic 30 a lot better. I've used it both live and in the studio and I've always been satisfied with it as a kind of utility amp.

I've recorded through a Pignose and I liked the sound for those particular tracks but I would have a hard time recommending it as a general pupose amp, even just for practice.

If you like the "Hawaiian" sound at low (house)-volume, a little vintage tube amp can sound great. Like a little Gibson BR-9 amp or GA-9 (class A) or Oahu. Sometimes they still can be found fairly cheap. They're light too and if yor steel is vintage... it will look cool too.

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jaydee@bellsouth.net

The BEST battery powered amps leave a LOT to be desired.

I have a little speaker cab that I picked up at a thrift store, and it sounds pretty nice with my National lap steel. It is a bell & howell movie projector speaker from (what I could figure)1948. It has a 12 inch alnico speaker(16 ohm). It sounds pretty good with my bassman head, or my EL84 powered Harmony amp ($25 used). What does this mean as far as you original question about the pignose amp? Nothing really, but there are some good deals on useable old stuff out there. I would skip the pignose, and go for a used tube amp, whether it is a Peavey Classic 30, or an old Alamo or Harmony.

The only possible benefit... and I mean only possible benefit of a Pignose... is that it is battery powered, if you want to play in the car, by the lake, etc.

It was designed for rock guitarists as a backstage amp or for beginners to get into a cheap amplifier. I said cheap amplifier.

I would go an extra 125 bucks, get up to the $200 range, and look for an amp in that category that had 15-20 watts and at least a 10" speaker. The Pignose will be a disappointment.

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Herb's Steel Guitar Homesite

I recorded some overdrive lapsteel parts through a Pignose years ago but for steel it`s definitely a one trick pig;distorted or very distorted.Did get some interesting tones though, by putting the Pignose on it`s back (speaker and snout upwards),putting a tuba on top and miking the mouthpiece!Those we`re the days..

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Olli Haavisto
Polar steeler
Finland

Olli--we always had suspicions about you.

I resisted this as long as I could but I finally broke down and broke out the Pignose to see for myself and.....nobody here lied. There is no clean volume level. (And this was with an ac adapter). Your choices are funkier and funkiest. I could definitely imagine some usable sounds with lap steel and close mike. But unless this exact sound was your tone quest for pedal steel, uh uh. Not gonna happen.

Wow! Thank you for the update on the pignose. I have cooled a bit on the idea. I've purchased an amp can. . . on the advise of two people; one person early in this list said to consider an amp can.
***** and ****
Two days ago I was working on a constuction job with a carpenter who said, "Guess what happened this weekend. I was in a jam session with a couple of guys. One of them had a gutar plugged into what looked like a syrup pail. I said, 'nice sound out of a syrup pail.'"