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Amp for gigging
For me tube amps are still the best amps for gigging and I can’t recommend the Morgan MVP23 enough.
It has a beautiful clean sound, responds very well to pedals and is small and light.
Maybe best of all, it has a power dial which allows power scaling from 1/4W to a very loud 23W. In other words, you can decrease the power flowing to the speaker without affecting the gain and volume settings. So your tone remains the same even if you need to be at low volume.
Very highly recommended.
Practice amp
No fancy amp modelling or novelty noises here. But if you want a simple amp suitable for the home, then I recommend this one from Peavey.
The clean and crunch channels are good and there’s more than enough gain for rock soloing. It has built-in reverb and two inputs, so you can plug two guitars into it; very useful for teaching:
Pedaltrain 2
I highly recommend this pedalboard to any gigging guitarist. It’s built like a tank and big enough for about 12 pedals.
It comes with plenty of heavy duty Velcro, and has space for a power supply underneath the rails, as well as space for all your patch cables. Highly recommended:
Xotic EP booster
This fabulous pedal changes a nice clean sound into a beautiful one!
It’s officially a boost pedal but the sparkle it introduces is so gorgeous that my advice is to leave it on all the time with gain set to minimum.
If I had to recommend one guitar pedal from the ones on this page, this would be it. A beautiful sound in a very small package:
Xotic SP compressor
If you’re looking for a compressor to add to your guitar set-up I recommend this the SP. I’ve tried several compressors over the years, and found this one to the best. It’s versatile and takes up very little room on your pedalboard.
I have this first in my effects chain and it’s on all the time set quite low, giving me a more even clean sound than I would otherwise have:
Xotic Polytune tuner
If you’re looking for a great guitar tuner, I can’t recommend the Polytune enough.
It’s small but with a very clear display; it responds very quickly and can show tuning for all 6 strings at the same time:
Xotic RC booster
This is the pedal I use as my Booster when I need to poke my head up above the rest of the band.
You can get some lovely sounds from it; both with and without introducing drive. The EQ dials sound great all the way from minimum to maximum:
Friedman BE-OD overdrive pedal
The moment I tried this pedal I knew it was what I had been looking for. It’s the prefect high-gain sound you get from a super-cranked amp but all packed into a very controllable pedal.
If you like to take full-on rock solos from time to time, this is the pedal for you.
Boss SD-1 overdrive
Yes really! Guitar gear doesn’t have to be expensive. The SD-1 has much less gain than the Friedman, but it’s also considerably cheaper. So if you want drive without going nuts, consider this great little pedal.
TC Electronic Hall of Fame 2 reverb pedal
Surely the industry standard in reverb pedals. It sounds great and is very flexible.
TC Electronic Flashback 2 delay pedal
The counterpart to the Hall of Fame, the Flashback is a fabulous delay pedal with tons of features.
MXR MC404 wah
This fabulous wah from Custom Audio Electronics both sounds and feels great!
It has two different sounds – I prefer the brighter one – and it has a built in boost control:
