Hi everyone,

I'm new here and Nik's website was referred to me from a les paul forum. I am wondering if anyone could possibly give me a suggestion.. just for your info, I'm leaning towards an 18watt 

I mostly play hard rock and metal, but I am looking for a versatile amp, where I can use both amp effects itself plus my pedals, send/return (fx loop), etc...

I know the JCM 800 comes to mind when I say metal, but I do not need a 100 watt amp.. I will mainly be playing in my house and the occasional small bar gig.

I am curious as to which amp you would suggest based on the following:
-works well with BOSS sd-1, Tube Screamer, GE-7, metal master, rp 350 (just the pedals I have so far hehe)
-fx loop (mainly for the rp350 and whatever other funky sounds I wanna try out)
-something that will let me play all types of music, but with a focus on the harder stuff like hard rock and metal.

I hope this is the right forum for me to be asking, if not, I'm sorry.

Oh, and my guitar is an epi les paul goth studio with the zakk wylde set up (emg 81/85).

I appreciate any input

One commercial amp I was looking at is the tiny terror (only 15w though and no fx loop) and the peavey classic 50 tube combo.

I don't mind combos, but I'd prefer a head/cab set up.. the cab would be a 2x12 v30s or celestion golds.

Hi, I got a Plexi clone from ceriatone a few months ago. With any amp you can always ask Nik to install a master volume which will help in getting the right tube saturation without excessive volume, improving the versatility of the amp by a LOT. There are 50 watt version of the JCM800 as well, and 100/50 watt isn't really much different in terms of volume, in fact a 60 watt amp is as loud as a 100 watt amp. The only difference with a 100 watt amp is bigger power supply, more tubes (therefore more maintainence issues) with probably 3db volume gain.

The plexi 50 sounds like any hard rock sound when overdriven (Think guns n roses, Helloween, or any other classic metal) but to get the really hard distorted sound modern death metal is known for you will probably want to use a pedal. I think most bands (like as in professional) that does death metal doesn't even use tube amp but uses TONS of effects or perhaps a pedal in front of a Mesa Boogie or something.

My advise is go with any 50 watt amp (probably Marshall type) and ask Nik to install a master volume (get the external bias too, it makes biasing easy without killing yourself). With the master volume the control will go where the pilot light normally goes and you just control the amount of gain with the "volume" control and dial in the amount of volume needed with the master volume. Keep in mind that it won't sound the same as no master volume (as in master turned all the way up) but it will sound better than your normal volume on .5 just to get it to not wake anyone up.