Before buying this guitar, I had owned a lot of low-end guitars (laminate bodies and tops, generic pickups... low cost...), and I had owned two high-end guitars (the Taylor and the Martin mentioned elsewhere on this page). But it became clear to me at some point that I not only do I have no need right now for a $1000+ guitar, I actually will play my "primary" acoustic less if it's really expensive.

On the other hand, I do perform and record occasionally, and my cheaper acoustics (the Ibanez and the Alvarez mentioned elsewhere on this page) were falling notciably short of what I wanted. So I wanted an acoustic that sounded "real" but didn't cost $1000.

I played this guitar at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, and immediately loved it (they take really good care of their instruments). It's extremely clean, and has something of the compressed, percussive strum that I really want out of an acoustic (I prefer a slightly thinner sound than the big Martins typically give you). And I think I scored on the pickup; they seem to have accidentally installed a Fishman Prefix Plus-T in this one (which normally ships in the solid-body versions of this guitar), instead of the Fishman Classic 4T tha the BR-40CE is supposed to come with. Definitely keeping this for the foreseeable future!

I bought this guitar after deciding that I didn't want to invest a lot in a "nice" acoustic guitar at the time, but wanted (a) a second acoustic and (b) an acoustic that looks cool enough to play in a rock context. That was pretty much the requirement list.

This guitar shines given this limited requirement list. I love the blue finish, it's enormous and loud so it's great for jamming, the (built-in Fishman) pickup is actually quite good for the price, the XLR direct out is really handy, and the built-in tuner - which I used to say was a gimmick - is also quite useful. This guitar is thus a great fit for the low-end but all-around-capable acoustic.

Tonally, I love this guitar for hard-rocking acoustic stuff, but open strumming is a little thin and a little muddy; it definitely lacks both the clarity and the fullness of a higher-end guitar. But for around $200 on Craig's List, I can't complain.

This guitar has done its job for six or seven years, and I'm not afraid to carry it around or take it on a plane. Acoustics are the one thing I could never see myself spending big on and then using every day, since it's so easy to smash an acoustic and this is the instrument I travel the most with.

So although this is a low-end guitar in the grand scheme of guitars, I would recommend this guitar to anyone looking in this price range (less than $200), although I strongly recommend not going any heavier than 12's if you re-string; I have found this guitar pretty sensitive to string type. The factory-stocked strings (Elixir Custom Light Polyweb 11's), are okay, and right now I'm using 80/20 bronze 12's, which I can just feel starting to overwhelm the guitar; any heavier is a mess. I tried 13's for a while (which I use on all my other acoustics) and it was a disaster .

Nice and loud for playing outside, and durable for taking in and out of the car all time. Pickup is a standard piezo pickup, nothing special but it works.

I decided to pick up a cheap mandolin to add a little color to some recordings, and to be one less guitar as "acoustic jams", which - it turns - frequently include too many guitars. After learning a few chords on the Johnson I talk about elsewhere on this page (and actually after trying another mandolin, a Bean Blossom MM-BB-BMS-4AE that was trash and was immediately returned), I picked this one up as the cheapest mandolin with a pickup that appeared to at least be made of crappy wood instead of crappy cardboard (seriously... you have no idea what people will call a musical instrument...

I've been happy with it, and it's great for learning... even if I don't play it as much as I'd like, I love learning about new instruments, and this has been great for that. It's actually quite well-assembled, looks nice, intonates fine, and generally provides more than the expected level of quality.

I bought this guitar after tons of shopping as I was starting to play with an acoustic group that never quite happened. I loved three things about this particular guitar: (1) The Taylor pickup system really is that good compared to piezo's, and really is that versatile compared to built-in condenser mics. (2) Taylor guitars are extremely clean and even all over the fretboard, and lack the big booming bass that draws people to Martins. Personally I prefer a tighter sound, and I don't fingerpick much, so this is the type of sound I was looking for. (3) It was a really good deal; I got it new and knew I'd be able to sell it on Craig's List for the same price (which I did) if I didn't end up loving it (which I didn't).

There wasn't anything I hugely disliked about this guitar... it was a little too quiet - even at dreadnought size - for jamming unplugged, but that wasn't a big deal since this wasn't my jamming guitar anyway. Mostly I just didn't love it and wanted to try something different, so when I found myself not playing this very often, I sold it, with the inevitable "am I selling a great guitar that I worked hard to find at a low price?" feeling.

I got this 1968 guitar from my mother (who was the original owner), via my sister. It was cool having a vintage guitar around, and given the 40 years of life it had been through - including a few questionable years in my sister's apartment - it was in good shape. I gave it some care when I got it, and it played just fine.

I like that it has that tight, compressed Gibson punchiness... in fact this really turned me on to Gibsons and I think my next significant acoustic purchase will be a Gibson. What I didn't like about this guitar was that it was a little smaller than a modern dreadnought, so the neck was a little thin, and the body was a little quiet. Also 40 years had taken their toll and while it sounded good, the body had inevitably warped a little and it didn't sound as clear as I'm sure it did in 1968.

In the end I sold this on Craig's List (the only guitar I've ever shipped), to a guy in California who immediately put it back on Craig's List for $200 more. Good for him.

This was my first "nice" acoustic guitar (although still by no means top-of-the-line); I bought it on Craig's List with a Fishman Rare Earth Blend pickup already installed. I think that since I had never owned a "real" acoustic, I didn't totally understand the difference until I shopped for this guy. The key difference between this guitar and my Alvarez is clarity; there's no muddiness, and the strings are perfectly balanced.

The pickup is amazing too; it sounds a bit electrified (like you'd expect) when turned all the way to the magnetic pickup, but when the show is small enough, you can dial in the condenser mic for a much more authentic acoustic sound.

The mahogany is definitely different; it's a different look and a much darker sound. But that's really nice when there are other instruments or voices covering higher parts of the spectrum; this guitar definitely tends toward the bass end.

In the end I sold this guitar (which moved very quickly on Craig's List) because (a) I was moving and wanted one less fragile thing to load on a truck, (b) it was a little too dark for me; I prefer a punchier sound, and (c) I learned a lot about acoustics buying this guitar and I'm looking forward to shopping again in Seattle.

This guitar was alright, but it turns out that I'd really need to own about 10 other guitars before owning a 12-string was really next on my list. I got this when I was in high school (so of course it was my only acoustic at the time), and figured "hey, twelve strings is twice as many as six!" Which I suppose is true, but it's tougher to maintain, tougher to keep in tune, tougher to play, and more expensive per unit of quality.

So although this did the job, it will be a while before I own another 12-string. Also buyers should note that Celebrity is Ovation's equivalent of Squier; Korean-made with cheap parts. The one cool thing that came from owning this guitar was that one of the tuning pegs came off, and no one had spares, and it would have cost like $200 to get a full set, so I had to go to this guitar-repair dude in San Jose who dug through his pile of tuners to find me a new one and gave it to me for like $1. That guy was cool.

Sold this on Craig's List to someone who wanted it for a specific gig where a 12-string was appropriate; it was probably a good deal for him, since that's an expensive order in general.

For someone playing in a cover band - and not wanting to own 10 guitars - there's relative consensus that a Strat is the standard in versatile guitars, even if you're not playing the blues and classic rock that it's built for. When this guy showed up on Craig's List for less than the price of a new Mexican strat, I jumped on it. He had a Seymour Duncan Screamin' Demon humbucker at the bridge, which I loved at the time, since it can almost sound metal (although it always still sounds a little like a strat playing metal). When I bought it, it also had the Fender Tex-Mex pickups at the neck and bridge.

Since buying it, I've given it a new look by taking off the flashy pearloid pickguard it came with and going with standard white, I've had it set up to let the trem float a little (it was pinned way back when I got it), and I've replaced all the pickups with the Fender Samarium Cobalt Noiseless Pickups. The pickup switch was huge; I was getting frustrated with this guitar, but when I bought my Schecter and stopped depending on my Strat to be something it wasn't (a hard-rocker), I really started liking it again.

Definitely happy with this guitar; I can't imagine I'll ever need to sell it. A strat is what it is and this is no exception. I string it with 10's, currently the Ernie Ball Regular Slinky's.

I do like my Strat, but decided that I would really learn from having a second guitar, and particularly from having one at the opposite end of the spectrum in every way... so I wanted something with dual-humbuckers (every guitar I owned previously was HSS), a fixed bridge, a more modern aesthetic, and ideally even a different set of controls.

I played a couple of the mid-range Schecters (like this one) at the store and really liked them, so I started scouting for good deals, knowing that the first limitation of any medium-to-low-end guitar is that the pickups need replacing ASAP. I found this guy on Craig's List at a fair price with money already invested in the pickups: a Seymour Duncan JB and a Seymour Duncan '59 had been installed to replace the default "Duncan-designed" pickups. I was happy with it right away, and have not been disappointed.

At first I was slightly disappointed that the aesthetic wasn't more modern (I was thinking flame-red), but now I really like how this works as a classic sunburst or a late-90's shred finish. I've also been surprised how useful the pickup-split switch is; I've had one before and never used it. I can get a pretty authentic single-coil sound at the neck with this. I'm also pleasantly surprised how much I am learning just by having two very different guitars... I'm starting to get a feel for where I like to use each. I plan to keep this one, although I still feel a little more comfortable on the Strat. One thing in particular that's been really surprising is that when you're used to HSS guitars, you can always count on just kicking from the neck to the bridge pickup for a solo and getting a nice volume-and-mid boost... the pickups on this guitar are - as they should be - more balanced, which has taken some getting used to.

Update:
After adjusting to the non-Strat universe, I'm finding this guitar to be quite amazing for the price. It plays great and sounds "big", so I now switch between this guitar and my Strat at every show, using this - usually tuned to drop-D - for heavier songs that want more bottom-end kick (e.g., in the '80s cover band I play in, this guitar gets the nod for "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" and "I Hate Myself For Loving You").

I was looking for a guitar to be my main recording and practicing-at-home guitar, and stumbled upon this on Craig's List. I was intruiged... I love my other Schecter, and despite promising myself that I would never own another Floyd-Rose guitar, I was tempted to try one again to add some variety. I also had tried a different Schecter with passive EMGs at some point, and really liked them, so I decided to give this a try.

And I was not disappointed... it plays great, and I love the fact that it has a tame vintage look but plays like somewhere in between a rock guitar and a metal guitar (the passive EMGs are right where you might expect on that spectrum). I also think given that it does make me feel a little more metal than my other guitars, and that I love the super-clear sound I'm getting form it, I'll actually keep it strung at 9's, which I haven't done in a while. So a really nice bit of variety from top to bottom relative to my more traditional Strat and Schecter C-1+ (which, despite being from a modern brand, is a classic heavy-body dual-humbucker fixed-bridge guitar).

Having finally started to feel the limitations of my Hot Rod Deluxe - the best $300 tube amp in the universe - I decided to start looking for The Next Thing, and shopped every amp I could try at every store around. I found tons of amps that sounded great to me, but never felt like I found something versatile enough for what I wanted. Classics like the AC30 and the big Marshalls are great for what they do, and if you're a guitarist trying to "find your sound", you can't go wrong with any of the classics, or any of the more boutique-ish brands I tried: Rivera, Boogie, Soldano, etc. But they all had a gain channel with lots of character (too much for my tastes) and a clean channel that just wasn't clean enough to get the versatility I wanted. I tried some modeling setups too, but never found anything with adequate quality, particularly when playing clean.

Whenever I plugged into a Twin, though, I immediately saw why it's been so popular for so long. If you think your amp has a clean channel, and have never tried a Twin, plug in and see... the clean channel on this guy is just so fantastically clean, enhanced by a reverb that's definitively warmer - probably due to tube drive - than the reverb on my Hot Rod. This amp is light on features: it's very plug-and-play. But it's powerful and amazingly clean. This is just what I want for my cover-band needs; I prefer to put pedals in front of the amp to mix up the sound than to depend on the amp's gain channel or natural saturation.

So this amp gets an A+ from me so far... my only tiny usability comment is that it drives me crazy that there are no indicator lights for the switchable reverb and vibrato. You'd think you'd always "just know", but in the chaos of performance, sometimes I mis-hit the footswitch or just forget, and I'm kind of like "I wonder what's on and what's off right now".

Update: A few months into owning it, the footswitch stopped working. Whenever it's plugged in, reverb is stuck on and vibrato is stuck off. I'll report back on how contacting Fender about warranty service goes..

I wanted a little practice amp to use at home, so I didn't have to drag my heavy Twin around as much. I tried the current generation of small modeling amps - the Roland Cube, the Vox Valvetronix amps, the Peavey equivalent, etc. - and really thought they were all terrible and too expensive.

I noticed this all-tube, 5W, 12" combo on Craig's List for barely over $100 and decided to give it a try. I couldn't believe how full and clear it sounded, or how it didn't hurt my back to carry it. But here's the most incredible part... I tried it at band practice, just to see where 5W would fit in with a whole band and a fairly loud drummer. It totally held its own, without even cranking all the way! Now I'm using this for practice all the time, though I'll still use my Twin for shows. This little amp is incredible!

I would never have considered buying a guitar this expensive, but I had a very generous gift coming, so I really looked around for an exciting guitar that was really different than my two main guitars (a Strat and a dual-humbucker Schecter). This guitar, to its credit, is really different than any other guitar you'll find any time soon. Four pickups, a bajillion configurations (almost as many switches as a Fender Jaguar), custom pickups, a unique look...

Sadly it's a somewhat rare guitar, so the only way to try it out was to buy one, knowing I might return it if I didn't like it. Well, unfortunately, I didn't like it. It sounded okay - though not inspiring - at home, but the first time I tried it with a band was a disaster. The only time my band has asked "what's up with your guitar tone tonight?" The main problems were a significant lack of bass (I'd call the pickups thin), and a total imbalance between the pickups that made the neck pickups nearly inaudible when my volume was set for the bridge pickups.

Now I think that's exactly the way it's designed; Steve Morse is a wizard with the volume knob. But I just couldn't have that much process to go through to get from one sound to another. Maybe with time I would have gotten adjusted to the complexity of the switching system, but this was not a good experience.

The other issue is that the unusual pickup configuration basically prevents easy replacement of any pickups. Pickups are basically built around two-or-three-pickup configurations, but with four pickups, they have to be set way off the strings to avoid phase distortion and a loss of sustain, and Morse has designed his pickups accordingly. So for someone who can't try a zillion pickups (because it's a huge pain for most folks - including me - to change pickups), it's hard to put any other pickups in this guitar. This wouldn't have been a problem if I loved the stock tone, but...

Now none of this is a knock on the quality of this guitar. In fact I've rarely seen a guitar that screamed quality like this one. The finish was amazing, the factory setup was flawless, and I couldn't imagine a better-built guitar. And this guitar is probably the most original guitar I've every played; huge props to Music Man for doing something like this. But it just wasn't for me...

This is without a doubt the crappiest piece of gear I've ever owned. So crappy, it's interesting, actually.

I was looking for an extra guitar to keep in my office, and one to keep at home in a place where it would get dirty and beat up. I had four rules: it should cost less than $100, it should look cool, it should not look like a strat, and it should basically work. This guitar does fit those constraints.

However, the pickups sound like someone put a blanket over your speakers, no matter what you plug it into. The body has this really unique phenomenon where whenever you play a 'C', you literally feel (and therefore hear) this intense resonance that lasts way past the actual note. This resonance is pretty much always there muddying up the sound a little, making everything sound harmonically awful. Maybe best of all, even though it's not that old, when I went from 9's to 10's, the neck bent into a huge arc, and turning the truss rod as far as it goes didn't fix this. The neck is just too soft for 10's.

To be fair, I'm not going to sell this guitar. It was really cheap, and it works, and it's actually informative to own this sort of guitar. But I wouldn't recommend it, even as a starter guitar; there are better guitars for the price.

Since I play in a cover band and I'm a tech nerd, it has occurred to me a few times that I'm a good candidate for the versatility and generally hi-tech-i-ness of a modeling amp. I tried running a modeling pedal into my regular amp with pretty unsatisfying results, and I had tried a number of other Line 6 amps (Spider, Flextone) with very unsatisfying results, so I was cautiously optimistic at best when I saw the Vetta for a very low price on Craig's List. I thought, "hey, this costs almost $2000 new, there must be something to it." Indeed there is; it's orders of magnitude better than all the other modelers I had tried. It's loud, it's rich, and the two modeling chains really enhance the sound. In particular, the clean sounds on this guy are appreciably cleaner and more full than those on other Line 6 amps.

But... it still basically sounds like a good solid state amp; the lack of tube warmth really shows when it's turned up at all. And, more importantly, tweaking this amp to get the most out of it and possibly offset the price you pay in overall tone is just a massive effort, and one that I really didn't enjoy, even in the couple hours I spent trying. The interface is actually excellent; it was very easy to fire up the settings on my PC and dial to my heart's content in real-time. But there are just so many options, and the presets are totally inadequate, so it was a little overwhelming, and there was no obvious way to get started matching my guitar and my target tone to the gazillion models on the amp.

So... I sold this back to the Craig's List universe, to someone buying it for his 16-year-old son, who will love it. I would have been thrilled with this amp when I was 16 and (a) wanted to sound just like my favorite guitarists and (b) actually had three hours a day to tweak knobs.

I got this amp when I started playing guitar, and I could have done much worse from scratch. It was more than powerful enough for everything I've needed to do with it. The built-in chorus/reverb/distortion is convenient, the distortion is not bad for lead stuff, and the sound is clean. I had to open it up to re-solder a power component once, and I had to open it up to tighten some of the jacks, but it held up without any real problems for about 10 years.

I learned of course that for someone who's going to play a lot, it's worth saving up for a small but decent tube amp. Probably not worth spending $300 on a solid state amp when - if you look around - for $400 you can get a decent small tube amp (e.g. a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe or Blues Junior), which will still be plenty loud enough for any band most folks are going to play in any time soon and will sound 6000% better. So I would say in retrospect that this is not the best purchase I've ever made. With that said, it did the job for me. And of course no one would buy an amp like this now, since this grade of amps has been almost completely replaced by modeling amps at this point.

I hope the asshole who stole the wheels for this amp from my car nine years ago also had a Fender Ultra Chorus, otherwise why the hell did he break into my car and steal my amp's wheels?

Sold this on Craig's List to someone just learning to play guitar; I'm sure he'll be as happy with it as I was.

I don't play bass a ton right now, but I didn't own a bass for a while and wanted a p-bass (or p-bass-esque bass) for recording. I would probably have been happy with a mexi p-bass, but this popped up on Craig's List for a great price.

I've been neither disappointed nor blown away. This bass sounds like exactly what it is: a quality p-bass that intonates well and sounds clear, but isn't quite as classic-rock-thump-y as an American p-bass. I'm always struggling a little to get the tone I want from it. I would say, actually, that this I notice a slightly more significant difference between this bass and an American p-bass than I do between a Highway One Strat (guitar) and an American Strat; in other words I believe (my opinion only) that the Highway One guitars are a slightly better value than the Highway One basses. (Although both are significantly better, in my opinion, given factory parts, than the Mexi ("standard") equivalents.)

I owned a 1x15 bass combo for a while (see the Workingman's 15, below), and felt like it was a little dark for me. I then owned a 4x10 half-stack for a while (see the Workingman's 4004, below), and felt like it was a little thin at bedroom volumes, and more importantly was frickin' huge. So I decided to look for an affordable, portable 2x10 combo.

Props to Carvin for putting so much in this package; for this price range they could have included a lot less. It has semi-parametric and graphic EQ's, a built-in compressor (which isn't bad), a direct out, and a tilt-back body that's really convenient. Also I've never seen a combo arranged diagonally like this; it makes it quite compact. Very clever.

Overall I'm quite happy with this, though having tried higher-end amps, there's no doubt that - especially at band volumes - the tone of this amp sounds just a little muddy in the low end compared to higher-end amps. But for the price, and the package, and the feature set, this is a great amp.

I also would use this as a keyboard amp if I needed one; I've run several line sources into it and it proved to be quite even across a full-range spectrum.

At some point I was playing in an acoustic group where I was being asked to play primarily bass, and I just can't stand the sound of an electric bass without drums. So I thought that might be the time to hit Craig's List for what I had previously viewed as a novelty instrument: an acoustic bass. I knew I wasn't going to use it that often, so I didn't want to spend a ton on it.

This guy, as it turns out, was a great find. It sounds authentically acoustic when plugged in, has really flexible on-board EQ, has an on-board tuner which I now also think is more than a novelty, and has an XLR direct output for straight-to-PA applications, which would be just about anywhere you'd use an acoustic bass. Of course, as with almost any acoustic (non-upright) bass, don't be fooled by the word "acoustic". This instrument is nearly useless without amplification. But for amplified acoustic jams, this guy is a great find. Recommended, and I'm likely never to upgrade, since really when is a "nice" acoustic bass going to get to the top of the gear-I-want list?

This is the second bass I have owned, after my Squier started. Still a fairly low-cost bass, which I bought used on Craig's List after trying it at Guitar Center and loving it. Interestingly, I was excited because it was something a little more modern, with more highs and a little more flexibility than my previous bass (or even a real P-Bass for that matter). And for the price, it's really delivered.

Now that I've played bass more, I realize that I don't want to slap or sound like Flea; I want a nice low thumpy bass that is neither modern nor flexible. So I never turn the bridge pickup on this bass past about 0.2, and I never turn the treble past half-way. Given that I'm trying to contort this bass into something it isn't, it's done really well, and I'd trust it on-stage any time. Completely reliable and it sounds clear and clean. And IMO, it looks really cool. In fact I constantly get comments about how nice it looks, which is a nice plus.

But because I really am a simple P-bass type, I sold this and am looking forward to getting a P-Bass someday, but I'd definitely recommend this bass to anyone who wants a good flexibility for a good price.

When my Workingman's 15 combo died, after a several-month battle with blown fuses, I was sad to see it go, because I had come to just love that fat SWR tone. So when I hit Craig's List for replacements, I was very happy to find this amp: an SWR Workingman's 4004 head with a matching SWR 4x10T cab. I love the sound of this head through 10's; less boomy and more clear than my 1x15 combo.

But in the end, since I'm not playing in a band, this was just too much amp to have taking up space, and it's a huge hassle to move around. So I sold it to down-size and will probably go back to a 1x15 or 2x12 combo.

When I started playing bass in bands and needed to go from a level-0 cheap amp to a level-1 affordable amp, I looked around for combos in the big-enough-to-play-a-bar range. I got this used, and I maintain now it's the best- sounding combo bass amp I've ever heard. It's not full of modern high-end, and it's not huge and boomy. But it's got this great rock-and-roll drive that's perfect for the way I like to play bass. The lows are a tiny bit muddy, at least without the optional extension cab, but the volume is there and the overall tone is great for rock. I recommend this whole-heartedly... which is useless to anyone reading this page, since they don't make it any more (I got it on eBay). But consider it a vote for the current SWR/Fender line.

Minor annoyance: no wheels, no side handles. Bulky to carry. See "hand truck" below.

This is also the only piece of equipment I've owned that truly died on me, but it had gotten up to over 15 years old and had been gigged with extensively, so I don't hold it against SWR. I had the power amp replaced and the amp was like new, but while it was in the shop I bought an SWR half-stack that I'm going to be using for a while, so I sold the revitalized combo on Craig's List.

When it comes to low-end basses, this is pretty much the cream of the crop. I would recommend this to anyone learning to play bass. For $150 new, you simply can't do better; it really captures the basic sound of a Fender P-bass.

Admittedly, it seems to have been assembled by blind monkeys. The ground wire running from the tone pot to the jack literally looked like a paper clip that had been placed loosely over both components and doused in solder. I had to re-solder it twice in the first five months I owned this bass. And while I love P-basses, even the real P-bass does not provide a huge range of sounds, and the Squier is similarly focused.

If you want a starter rock bass with good lows, good feel, clean sound (no noise), and an incredible price, there simply is nothing else out there that runs with this guy. I also strongly recommend animal stickers. It looks really hard-core and rock-and-roll to have cute puppies on your bass.

Sold this on Craig's List to someone just learning to play bass; I'm sure he'll be as happy with it as I was.

This was the first amp I bought when I started playing bass, along with my Squier bass. Like the Squier, I would absolutely recommend it to anyone learning to play bass. It's literally the cheapest amp you can buy that's loud enough to play with drums (just barely), and although it has a pretty weak low end and sounds like it's going to explode if you crank it to compete with a drum set, it totally does the job for a beginner.

Since I play in a cover band that does some harder-rock-ish stuff, and I don't have a big Marshall amp on which I can crank up the gain, I looked around for reasonably-priced pedals that have a "big amp gain" feel and can give me as close to a hard rock/metal rhythm sound as I could expect playing a Strat through a Fender amp.

This pedal cleaned up in this space; nothing else I tried came close. I love the way the gain kicks in on this pedal when I roll the volume up on my guitar, and I like the really responsive three-band EQ. The "top boost" feature is totally useless to me but points out the target audience of this pedal: metalheads doing Slayer covers who want to scream.

Anyway I'll more than likely always have a classic-rock-ish rig and will always have some need to play harder rock, and until I turn to a modeling solution (which BTW would probably handle this particular need very well, since modeling systems seem to do a great job for hard rock sounds), I will use this pedal.

I use this clean boost pedal at the very end of my pedal board to just kick up the volume without changing my tone when I solo. It's super-clean and super-simple. Sometimes I'll even use it when I'm playing fills during a rhythm part, to try to compensate for the only rhythm guitar dropping out for a second or two. A great pedal that I got on Craig's List basically unused.

Many folks prefer a volume pedal, but as I'm still a relatively inexperienced gigging guitarist, I prefer to have a little less to think about, and this is a real no-brainer on stage.

This is the classic wah sound; it defined the sound we expect from wah pedals and it delivers. I picked this one up used and cleaned it up a little to get a great pedal for a great price.

However, it turns out that (a) I don't use a wah pedal very often, and (b) the rumors about wah pedals sucking some treble away even when they're inactive are true. If I bought another wah, I would get one with true bypass. Wah pedals also inevitably suffer from wear and pot-crufting over time, which can be a hassle. So I eBay'd this guy.

When it comes to low-end musical equipment, Behringer has pretty much laid down the law across the board, from amps to PA's to effects. This pedal is no exception. For $50 and change, you get a low-end version of basically every effect you could ever need, which is great for playing around at home.

And although I bought it for the effects, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the amp modeling really improved the sound of my guitar and amp (which at the time were a Hamer strat knockoff and a Fender solid state amp); I put my amp on neutral EQ and turn off the speaker-modeling on the pedal, and suddenly I have a reasonable variety of nice distorted sounds.

I set up the first 10 presets to be just what I want, so it was easy for me to play around with a variety of sounds or play along with anything when I just felt like sitting down to play. It would be impractical to really use this in a band for regular playing, since an 'up' pedal and a 'down' pedal is simply an inadequate interface for controlling distortion, reverb, delay, wah, flange, chorus, etc. And of course the quality is what it is for the price. But it's great for messing around at home, it's great for playing through headphones (you can feel like you're rocking Cleveland without waking up your wife/neighbors), and it's great for experimenting with different styles and sounds.

At this point the need this pedal filled for me has been replaced by software modeling, and the pedal itself isn't enough for playing live, so I sold this on Craig's List.

I was looking for a delay pedal, and thought for some reason that having a tap tempo input would be really helpful. This was way cheaper than anything else with a tap input, and seemed to be well-reviewed. I bought it new (which I almost never do), and plugged it in as soon as it came...

Fortunately, I still consider every ill-advised purchase a learning experience. This pedal sounded awful; the ultra-digital delay was shrill and ugly, the dry channel was digitized too and it showed, and - worst and weirdest of all - the pedal buzzed like crazy only in tap tempo mode. I can't even begin to explain that, but it was pleasantly ironic. I returned this the day I bought it. No cost, no harm done, but man, I think I'm staying clear of DigiTech from now on. Ugh.

If you read my review of the DigiDelay above, you'll note how I feel about DigiTech. This pedal (which I owned for a couple days well before I tried the DigiDelay) was no exception. It sounded terrible, and in retrospect I don't have any idea why I thought I would ever want a bass effects pedal. I play classic rock and pop. Effects? What?

Anyway this pedal was actually very helpful in that I needed to learn for myself how awkward it would feel to play a bass through effects, and despite becoming something of a gearhead in the years that followed, I have never even once thought "man, should I get that awesome bass pedal that's up on Craig's List today?" A learning experience.

My studio is based around Cakewalk Sonar 8. It's hard to argue these days why one DAW package is better than another; it's a crowded space and standards (VST, ASIO) have finally emerged so that everyone supports everything. Sonar works for me and I know how to use it, so I keep using it, but honestly it's pretty much the same feature set as the other billion DAW packages out there. I have no gripes with Sonar; performance is good, the UI is as intuitive as a full-featured DAW could be, compatibility is excellent, and the user base is large enough that it's easy to find answers. The tools and FX that ship in the box are pretty impressive. The people at Cakewalk are nice. Sonar is still on the list of DAWs that gets reviews and "tips-n-tricks" in major magazines, which is helpful.

Honestly the only other DAW package I'd really consider as an alternative is Reaper, which is free but is approaching commercial DAW package in terms of functionality, performance, and usability.

This pre-amp is super-simple; it's a box iwth a 12AX7 tube in it and just the essential controls (drive, gain, phase, pad, phantom power, 80Hz low shelf). Metering is reliable and accurate. So far so good; I get a nice warm sound as an alternative to my solid-state preamp, and I got to learn about tube replacement (I replaced the stock tube with a Mullard clone, mostly so I could learn about tubes).

My only gripe with this pre-amp is a slight lack of headroom; definitely you need to be careful when setting levels. But it's not out of the normal range for pre-amps.

I think this little third-rack form factor that PreSonus uses is fantastic; it's just right for keeping on a desk.

I've really only used this for recording vocals and bass; I'm interested to try it out with my guitar for live use at some point. Would put my whole chain in a new light to have a 12AX7 up front (my 12AX7-based amp doesn't have an effects loop).

This is the perfect compressor for someone looking for a first taste of compression. Setup is super-simple, and you don't have to tweak a lot of knobs to get a reasonable compression. If you want to spend lots of time dialing in the perfect compressed sound, which requires a trained ear, this is not the box for you. The presets wrap up all of the compression settings (ratio, attack, release, knee), and all you get is "input" and "output". But if you just want to put on a little compression and get to something reasonable very quickly, this box is awesome. Being able to monitor both output-level and compression-level is really convenient, and one-touch bypass is nice, so you can see exactly what your compressor is doing.

Only annoyance: the lack of unbalanced inputs makes it a pain to use this for simple instrumental applications; it basically expects to sit behind a pre-amp.

Once again, I love this third-rack form factor that Presonus uses.

This is a very straightforward solid-state dual mic pre, with just the basic features you need: phantom power, phase inversion, and a pad switch. Tons of headroom, tons of gain, and perfect clarity. I've noticed no coloration (which also means no analog character); this does the job that a solid-state preamp should do. I got this used; it looks to me like they were a bit pricey for what they do (in the $250+ range), but modulo price, this is a good product.

This PA is an amateur-coffee-shop performer's dream; it costs about $300 used, it's big enough to carry any coffee shop or bar, and it folds up into a suitcase-sized package that you can carry with your guitar in one trip from the car.

You can tell as soon as you pick up the speakers that it's not going to sound like a $5000 PA; the speakers literally weigh nothing. Defying all quantum principles, they seem to have no mass at all. And they sound correspondingly mediocre; a little muddy and not much low-end punch. This is, after all, the cheaper edition of the PD-250, which itself is, after all, intended to be portable above all else.

With that said, a PA is the one thing that's so often missing from a casual jam, so it's great to have at home, and it was fine for playing small shows in grad school. Highly recommended; look for it on eBay (that's where I got mine).

Alesis has packed quite a lot of both features and quality into this package: four channels that can take balanced or unbalanced inputs, quality pre-amps, phantom power, simple and functional ASIO drivers, MIDI in/out, etc. All in all the best way to get a small handful of tracks into your computer; if I needed more tracks, I'd think hard about the IO/26, which has 8 inputs. Glad they went Firewire too; this was a replacement for a USB device that was having power issues on my USB-burdened machine.

And Alesis support has been incredibly responsive when I had questions... but now of course you want to know why I contacted support. Well, there is one very severe bug with this device that they seem somewhat uninterested in fixing, which I consider both a practical concern and a safety issue. For some reason - this was a serious design mistake, IMO - they decided to put a soft volume knob on the device. Yes, that's right, there is no hardware volume knob. This would be okay-but-not-great if their firmware drivers had rock-solid support for the soft volume knob, but - and they are 100% aware of this, and acknowledge the problem - the volume resets itself to 100% at unpredictablet times, and virtually always does this when your machine wakes up from standby. So if you're going right into powered monitors or a power amp, you can get some seriously disturbing volumes without any warning. Come on guys, can we get this fixed before someone's ears get hurt?

Fix that and I give this product an A+.

This little device is the modern (and more practical) equivalent of what the mini-disc recorder wanted to be a few years ago: a quick way of recording jams, practices, acoustic sessions, songwriting ideas, etc. The interface is fantastic, it records straight to mp3, it takes standard SD cards, the mics and pre-amps are surprisingly good for the price, and I really think they've gone above-and-beyond by putting four mics in for true surround recordings (though in practice you lose some of the quick convenience when you have to mix multiple .wav files together).

I use this right now for recording practices, but in the future hope to use it for offline jam sessions and songwriting "brainstorms".

A+ from me for this device.

This mixer doesn't waste any of your money on crappy digital effects, the way many mixers in this price range (less than $100) seem to. It has somewhere between four and twelve channels, depending on you count, but I count it as "enough for any acoustic show or quick recording". I also used it as a clean pre-amp when I was recording straight into a PC. Also it's really nice to have a physical set of dials for EQ and levels if you're recording a couple channels into a computer.

This guy is quite good for the value, and is probably plenty to mix a typical band into a PA, unless you're really serious. Most bands have giant mixers because they buy them with their giant amps, not because they use all those channels.

This is the cheapest useful mixer money can buy right now. I use it at home basically as the volume knob for my monitors and a way of routing a few other things (keyboards, ocasionally another line-level device) to my monitors. I recommended the same mixer to the keyboardist in my band as a way of mixing keyboards and a sampler together locally into one stereo feed that goes to the PA. Very few features, just a solid, simple mixer.

My one gripe - knowing that this mixer is intended for simple applications - is that the outputs aren't balanced. Clearly they knew that their audience cared enough to bother with balanced signals; the inputs are balanced. I would have liked balanced TRS outputs. But for $50 I can't complain.

I knew I wasn't a grad student any more when I even considered buying decent speakers, but it was worth it. These guys are still pretty cheap as studio monitors go, but they deliver clean highs and full lows that are way past what my computer speakers were doing before I had these. Especially since I do a lot of my at-home guitar playing through software amp modeling, it's been great to have decent speakers to jam through, and I recommend these to anyone looking for budget monitors.

For what it's worth, I do notice a slight bassiness - not quite muddiness, but almost - relative to more expensive monitors. It's okay, but I think I'll take a careful look at the EQ at some point and try to match them a little better to more expensive reference monitors.

For home recordings that are not-quite-professional-quality, this is an outstanding product. The interface is great, the modeling is great, and the sound quality is more than adequate (although not pro; there is some pre-amp noise that wouldn't be there if you spent $400 on a recording interface).

I bought this to have a recording interface and didn't expect to use their modeling software at all, but now I use it all the time. I couldn't have been more surprised at how good the amp modeling is, and something about the GearBox interface just makes it fun... I want to play with the presets, something I've never done with other similar packages.

My only significant criticism is that it's annoying that Line 6 charges you an additional $200-something dollars if you want to use it as a VST plugin. If I could use GearBox and this product for re-amping, it would be an even more versatile product and would start competing with more expensive software-only packages like Amplitube and Guitar Rig.

Also, one feature that would be really useful that it doesn't have is an expression-pedal input; I'd like to be able to control analog values (e.g. wah). The digital footswitch inputs are great, but having an analog in would be a really nice touch that would be pretty cheap for them.

Okay, one more thing that's a little frustrating... why would you build this device and not put a power supply input on it? I've had so many problems with the USB bus power; it gets really unhappy and starts crapping out if it has to share a bus with anyone else. Blame it on the motherboard if you want, blame it on my complex pile of USB devices, but a device that really needs 500mA - technically what USB ports are supposed to provide - should be externally-powered. This is the problem that eventually led to me selling this and going firewire.

With all that said, this is a highly-recommended product, and one of very few things I've ever bought new.

I bought this pedal for scenarios where I was mic'ing multiple instruments, figuring I would always be using my SM57 to mic my amp. In fact, this has completely replaced my 57 as my primary guitar mic. It has the clarity of a 57, but is slightly warmer to my ears. At exactly the same price point at the 57, it's nice to have some variety, and even better to have something I actually prefer to the SM57 (which is definitely the all-time classic amp mic).

Mics for live use are one spot where you could spend hundreds of dollars, but pro musicians and amateurs alike have found value in the same place: Shure dynamic mics. Shure really is the standard and isn't super-expensive, so these mics are highly recommended. You'll notice the difference right away if you've been using a $10 Radio Shack mic, which I was until I found the 58A. Now I use the Beta for a slightly warmer, fuller sound, and the SM for a slightly tighter sound, especially for harmony vocals. I also use the SM for mic'ing amps.

I picked this up used to add another dynamic vocal mic for jams at home, but ended up using it about half the time for vocals with a band. Compared to the Shure Beta 58a - a pretty standard vocal mic - this mic is clearer and more present, though less warm. Also cheaper. I like this for harmony, where I like a thinner, more compressed sound that stays out of the way a little more. If I were doing lead vox, I'd probably go with the Beta 58a (which I still do sometimes for sonic consistency with lead singers, depending on the room).

If you're a hobbyist musician who's been recording vocals with the same dynamic mic you use for playing live, think hard about investing in a condenser for recording vocals; the difference in clarity is totally night and day. Of course, condensers can quickly get very expensive, but this guy sits in the $100 range used and is well worth it. I'm no mic expert, so I've never A/B'd it against a more expensive mic, but I don't see myself replcing it any time soon. Highly recommended as an amateur mic that's a great first (and in my case, only) step into higher-quality vocal recording.

I bought these because as a nerdy engineer I thought the whole process and mystique of recording an acoustic guitar properly was fascinating, and I wanted to get a cheap matched pair of small-diaphragm condensers to experiment with the zillion possibilities for mic'ing a guitar. It turns out I never really got around to this, and also that these mics - although it's cool that I can afford a matched pair - don't sound nearly as good as the large-diaphragm condenser I usually use. Very bright, to the point of being weak in the mids and lows. So these are almost certainly next on my to-sell list, I'm just waiting until I get around to giving them one fair try and experimentig with mic placement for acoustic guitar recording, so I can learn what I wanted to learn.

I don't play piano a ton, but I really love the feel of sitting down at a piano and messing around. And it's not inconceivable that I'll play part-time keys in a band sometime, so I wanted to have something I could (a) afford and (b) fit in my house that felt more or less like a piano and sounded good enough for live use. This keyboard is one of the standard for gigging keyboardists, and has since been replaced by fancier keyboards with more memory, more buttons, and more digital blah-blah. So this was a great Craig's List pickup, and has totally filled the nice I wanted it to: I can sit down at home and feel like I'm playing piano.

I also did my due diligence and compared some new keyboards when I bought this, and even keyboards in the $1000-$1200 price range (a whole lot more than I spent on this) didn't sound as good to me. The new Yamahas are much brighter, and to me even a little harsh. This guy is warm and more subtle. And I love the simplicity of the interface; there are buttons labeled "organ", "piano", etc. Brilliant. You just press a button for the sound you want. Also largely lost in modern pianos. And in other good news, the key bed really hasn't changed as pianos have gotten fancier; this doesn't feel quite like a piano, but it's close enough for me, and as close as any electric piano I've ever touched. Even as an inexperienced keyboardist, the difference between this and some of the cheaper keybeds was obvious.

I run it through a MOTU MIDI to USB converter, and it works great to record piano parts too.

When I bought this (from a scratch-and-dent bin, although I still haven't found a scratch or a dent), I already had my Yamaha, so I was hesitant to buy a second keyboard, but bought this for a few reasons... it's really small, and I liked the idea of the possibility of the idea of the maybe-could-happen of having a convenient live keyboard rig. It also fits nicely on my desk next to my computer, so I can plunk out simple keyboard parts without reconfiguring my space, which I haven't figured out how to do with my 88-key keyboard.

But also, as someone with a personal and professional interest in both digital audio and user interfaces, I was really interested to see what was going on with all the configurable knobs and sliders appearing on keyboards these days, and how they're being used by hosts and soft-synths. I basically discovered that while software like Sonar has come a long way toward making it easy to map buttons to functions, a very hard user interface problem, it's still hard enough that it's rarely worth doing, and with a finite number of buttons, you're always almost able to create all the controls you'd like to have for controlling your whole recording setup, but not quite. And it's still expensive to buy the gazillion-buttons-in-a-box that you'd need to do that.

Anyway this is a good product, just like the other M-Audio MIDI controller I owned, and I have fun with it and love having it right next to my computer. Still dreaming of that opportunity to play in some band with a portable keyboard rig.

Being a computer nerd, I'm rarely more than 18 inches from a computer, so buying a MIDI controller instead of a full synth was definitely the value for me when I first wanted to play piano at home. This was, at the time, the cheapest set of 88 keys you could buy, the weighting isn't bad (better than a cheap Casio, not nearly as good as anything a manufacturer would call a "digital piano), and it' s literally exactly the size of 88 keys, with no wasted space, which was great for my small apartment.

I definitely recommend this to anyone else who is going to have their keyboard sitting near their computer anyway; you'll never get 88 weighted keys for this price anywhere else, and if you do it will have ginormous speakers and buttons and other crap all over it taking up space. And this will end up sounding better, since soft-synths already sound way better than cheap keyboards.

Sold this on Craig's List to someone in the same position; it lasted without issue for the whole time I owned it and looked and functioned like new when I sold it.

These are the pickups used in Fender's American Deluxe Strats, and there's a reason... they are astounding, and were a tremendous upgrade compared to the Fender Tex-Mex and Mighty-Mite pickups I had previously tried in my Strat. Quiet as a single-coil could possibly be, and super-clear. There are some nay-sayers out there who long for their beloved Alnico, but I'm sold on these, and if you keep your eye out, you can find them on eBay for about $100 for a set of three.

Of course they're true Strat pickups, so don't expect massive output, and don't expect them to sound like humbuckers. But if you want your Strat to sound like a better Strat, these are a great investment.

I see these as a combo package, and this pairing is indeed a popular configuration. I have a '59 at the neck and a JB at the bridge (the most common configuration for this pair) in my Schecter, and love it. Perfect for classic rock sounds at medium to high gain.

While I haven't compared directly to other pups in the same guitar, I am confident that these sound 1000x better than the Duncan-designed clones that ship with many medium-to-low-end dual-humbucker guitars, so I'd recommend these as a great upgrade to do right away if you come across a dual-duncan-designed-humbucker guitar. Keep an eye out for the two as a pair; they're sufficiently common that you can typically get them used as a combo pretty cheaply (much cheaper than the $200 the pair would cost you new).

When I first started playing in band with my strat, the Fender Tex-Mex pickups I bought it with started feeling a little dark and blues-ish for the cover-band variety I was trying to play. But I had no idea how to shop for pickups and didn't want to spend a lot on something I couldn't try; it's actually really frustrating trying to pick out pickups, since they're the one thing you can't just walk into Guitar Center and try. So I looked for something cheap and well-reviewed, and stumbled onto these Mighty Mites.

Turns out they're just what they advertised... maybe not the full, rich sound you'd get from a $100 pickup (these were $30 for a set of three), but pretty clear, very even, and on the bright side; perfect for pop-ish music and for being able to dial in a lot of variety downstream.

I recently upgraded to the Fender SCN pickups and definitely noticed a big improvement, but for $10 each, I would immediately put these Mighty Mites into a Mexican Strat.

These were the pickups that were in my Strat (neck and middle) when I bought it (used). They're one of Fender's "upgrade" pickups, but don't confuse them with the higher-end Texas Specials; these pickups are probably on par in quality with stock Strat pickups and would really only be an "upgrade" to a knockoff strat. Personally I found them too warm, to the point of being muddy, since my Strat seems to tend toward being darker anyway. I removed them in favor of much cheaper Mighty-Mites and will probably sell them.

This is the pickup that was installed at the bridge of my Strat when I bought it, and I'm way glad it was. It's a humbucker that fits easily into a body and pickguard set up for the normal Strat SSS configuration, and I probably wouldn't have bothered to put in a humbucker for a while had this not already been there.

Don't get me wrong; it still sounds a little like a Strat playing metal when I set it to the bridge spot and crank it up, but having a hot, pretty bright pickup adds amazing versatility to a Strat and really does a decent job with hard rock and higher-gain leads. I recommend this pickup enthusiastically.

With that said, when I stopped trying to depend on a Strat to be a reasonable high-gain guitar and decided I wanted it to sound more like a Strat, I did sell this guy. In practice the fairly intense mid-range is just a little too much for playing clean.

Now what the hell is a hand truck doing on my "gear page"? I swear to you, dear reader, that this is the best investment I've made in getting myself back into music after a few years away. Before I had this, carrying my amp(s) around was such a pain that playing regularly didn't seem worth it, especially since I lived on the 10th floor and often had to park some ways away from my building. I know I'm not the only musician who has ever gone through this.

One trip to Home Depot later, I was one easy trip up and one easy trip down away from practice. Don't underestimate the value of convenience in making time for music. Along the same lines, if you're not playing as much as you want to because you keep your guitar in its case and those 10 seconds it takes to open it up make all the difference, get yourself some guitar stands and put your guitar(s) out where you can just reach over and play. It's amazing how much more I play since I made it accessible.

After much bouncing around on what picks and strings i like, I've come to a stable conclusion on the basic points...

I like the tone and the feel of really heavy picks, and I like the grip on the Dunlop Tortex picks, so I almost always use the 1.1mm (purple) Dunlop Tortex picks. The one exception is when I play an acoustic guitar live, I'm really prone to dropping picks, especially if I'm standing up and singing, so I drop it down to whatever medium picks I can find, usually a slightly lighter Dunlop Tortex.

I string all my electrics with 10's; there is a rough consensus that you get a fuller tone from heavier strings, and in fact after playing with 10's for a while I find 9's a little awkward, like I'm sliding around a little too much. I've really never experimented with different varieties of electric strings, and I pretty much stick to the D'Addario XL's, although lately I've been trying out Ernie Ball Regular Slinky's and I really like them (I find that the 10-gauge "Super Slinky's" feel just like 9's to me, too light and easy to bend, but the Regular Slinky's are great).

And I'm no expert on acoustic tone, but I have definitely learned that strings can tremendously affect the tone of your acoustic guitar, and every guitar will sound better or worse with some strings than others. When I had "nice" acoustics (which I don't right now), I strung them with 13's, and experimented with various combinations of bronze and phosphor bronze strings, depending on the guitar. On my Alvarez, I found quickly that 13's sound awful, just too much for the guitar, so I use 12's, either Martin SP Marquis 80/20 bronze's (if I'm playing a lot), or (if I'm not playing as much) the same Elixir Custom Lights that shipped on this guitar, which don't sound as good to me but last forever.

And although I've been playing bass pretty actively for a couple years, it takes so long to wear out bass strings that I don't feel like I've really learned any reliable likes and dislikes. Again I stick with the D'Addario XL's, for lack of exploration, and I was pleased with the tone improvement when I went up from .045-.100 to .5-.105. But I also definitely noticed a big change in playability, and since I'm playing less now, the next time I re-string I'll probably go back down to .045's.

Okay I was pushing it with the hand truck... why is a random backpack on this page? To be clear, there is nothing special about this random backpack I got at Fred Meyer (it's like Wal-Mart).

But it turns out that - just like the hand truck - having a well-organized backpack with lots of pockets and lots of ziploc bags containing everything I might need when practicing or gigging makes a huge difference in my overall music-in-my-life experience. I just know I can grab it and go, and not only will I not have to worry about forgetting random stuff, I'll look prepared and organized to everyone else. Really, this is serious advice: pack a gig bag.

Here's some stuff that I keep in here; maybe this will help someone else prepare their own little gig bag: mics, mic clips, 1/4" cables, XLR cables, a tuner, two capos, tape, plyers, wire-cutters, a screwdriver, a ziploc bag full of audio adapters, a separate ziploc bag full of audio cables, antibacterial wipes (bars can be gross), band-aids, batteries, picks, strings, drumsticks (this has been a life-saver at least once when a drummer forgot his), demo CDs, one of those every-possible-adapter/multi-voltage DC power adapters from radio shack, a power strip, earplugs, a sharpie, and a pen.

It turns out I don't play drums at all, but picking up a cheap set of bongos for $20 was a great investment. They're totally addictive, they add to any acoustic jam, and they give me something to do in a spot that doesn't need another acoustic guitar. These cheap-o hand drums do the job, and were also the only ones I could find not made of leather (plastic heads on these). An awesome purchase.

When I outgrew my smaller board in terms of power and size, I looked around for alternatives, and found this to be much cheaper than anything from PedalPad or SKB - the two main manufacturers in that space - with apparently-identical functionality. I was not disappointed. Easy-in-easy-out configuration, quiet power, plenty of space, easy to carry, and I love that I can easily pop in another Gator power supply if I max out this one. Also I love that the power supply is hidden away below the board, and that there's just a slight upward tilt to the board that makes back-row pedals accessible without making the whole unit too thick to carry over your shoulder.

A+ for this unit so far.

I'm pretty sure that when you see a powered pedal board on eBay with no brand name that looks a lot like this picture, it's this guy. For the $25 you can find it for, it's a great deal. Simple power supply, no frills, not all that big. Personally I can't imagine not having something like this if you're using even two pedals. I eventually sold this as I outgrew it in terms of power and size, but for the price, it's perfect for a gigging guitarist with a small set of pedals.

This is another one of those things where you might be like "seriously, you put your amp stand on your gear page?" But there's a lesson here: this was one of the most efficient purchases I ever made for improving my live tone. As a poorly-informed and inexperienced guitarist playing in a band for the first time in forever, I did what any guitarist would do: I set up in my little corner and stood right next to my amp, all the while thinking "my amp sounds really muddy today". It turns out standing right on top of your amp and listening to a vague reflection of its actual tone will make you too bright (as you try to compensate for lost treble) and too loud (since you're way louder than you think). Every guitarist who doesn't know his tone inside-out and is playing through a small combo sitting on the floor should get an amp stand that tilts your amp up toward you; suddenly you'll find you can actually hear what your amp sounds like, so it will sound better to you and better overall. Good times.

I also really like this particular stand; it holds a ton of weight, is adjustable, and fits easily into my band-practice backpack.

I promised myself that "eventually" I would find an electronic drum set to add to my music room... but figuring that this was a $1000 investment and what with me not playing drums, I decided to put this off. Then this full 8-piece kit appeared on Craig's List for $175. Couldn't turn that down.

The SD5K (actually *D5K) is basically a generic kit that's being branded by a zillion different companies, and it is absolutely the best value in the universe for a starting drum kit. Kick, three cymbals (including hat), three toms, and a snare, plus a surprisingly functional core with a good interface, MIDI out, audio in, etc.

I don't play it a ton, but it make my house a functional place to jam, and it's so much fun once in a while to sit down and try to play along with mp3's. In case you've never touched a drum kit before, let me make this clear: you hit things with sticks and they make noise. A great investment if you can find one of these used.

Obviously the feel is not as good as even a "nicer" electronic kit, and the pads are a little loud if you're in a small apartment and want to hit them as hard as you can at 4am. Otherwise this kit is just right for the beginner or casual jammer.

Although it makes me feel old, the reality is that sometimes my ears hurt a little when I'm at practice. Since I hope to have many decades of rock ahead of me, I know I need to take care of my ears. So I tried standard 50-cent foam cylinders, but the world just seems so muddy with foam in my ears, and it's hard to play and adjust my guitar volume, much less sing.

But I'm also not ready to spend hundreds of dollars on custom-fit earplugs, so I tried these, which cost just a few dollars. Although the actual sound reduction is not quite what I might like, the world sounds much more natural than with foam earplugs, so I always keep these in my pocket now and put them in and out on-demand. A good investment for sure...

Note: A few months after writing this, I developed some tinnitus on one side, and decided these were no longer enough noise reduction. I use good-old-fashioned foam cylinders right now; the world becomes rather muddy, but they're the best noise reduction that money can buy (and five dollars buys a huge barrel of them).

Disclaimer: I got this free (complicated story), so my review should be interpreted with the knowledge that anything is awesome when it's free.

With that said... this worked great right out of the box, and I definitely love being able to move around with my guitar. As an intermediate-level guitarist, I still have a lot of trouble knowing what I sound like in the mix when I'm standing right on top of my amp, and this system is particularly useful for letting me hear the whole band - myself included - and learn how that translates to the sound in front of my amp.

But there is definitely a price paid in tone... it's not terrible, but a slight loss of both volume and treble are very evident even to my relatively naive ears. so it's good to have, really good for free, but I sold it in the end as it was not sufficiently transparent for using live.