I used to really like Tube amps because everyone says they’re “the best,” but in my experience this depends on a lot. What style of music are you playing? What’s that sound in your head that you’re looking for?
I have a Marshall DSL head and Cab and a Boss Katana 50EX mk3, and genuinely prefer the Boss over the Marshall. Both take pedals well, and my honest recommendation would be to get something with a lot of headroom for cleans and make a platform out of that. I am personally using the clean channel 100% of the time and letting pedals do the rest.
Below is my usual setup, used for P90 Revstar Professional and a dirt cheap but very adequate HB 8 string, top row is what I am using regularly:
@ZulXeroth for me i manly play rock and metal so a more thick beefy sound id go for. I tried a tube amp with my guitar teacher once and they kick ass but not for my style. I tried out a couple spiders at the music center and i might bite
@Evilmuddywizard666 if you like a spider, hoghly recommend you try a katana. The katana sounds better to my ears and has a better preset list I think that you don’t have to get so fiddly with, but I also play more than Metal, so maybe I like the options on it.
Just get something with a 12” speaker or two and a lot of headroom and throw a wampler pantheon dual at it. That will give you everything you need from crunch to a fully saturated gain sound, and it’s a great pedal because you can feed the channels into each other in series (1->2 or 2->1) or use them independently (or even stereo), it has selectable gain levels for each side of the pedal (crunch/just over the dge of breakup, medium, and high gain), as well as clip voicing (soft which is more tube like with a very mild fuzziness at high gain levels, mixed, and hard clipping).
Couple of recommendations for adding some meat if you have pedal money would be to get either or both an octaver and a chorus. I know they can both be easily overdone, but if you use them subtly instead of doing wonky shit with them, they can add a lot of weight to your sound. A suboctave with mostly dry mix will do a lot here especially.
For cleans, I would highly recommend a boost compression/sustainer, these work on a very similar principle to overdrive/distortion pedals but with a whole lot less signal clipping, you cqn think of some of these as a clean boost. Drybell Unit67 is a good choice with it’s onboard EQ and sustain/dry section, takes a lot of the fussing with other conpressors away and tbh, I use it always (with and without overdrive) because it just makes everything sound better and is a good additional layer of EQ.
@ZulXeroth sweet man i used to have a boss katana but i had to pawn it. For pedals i got a diamond head distortion + booster a pigatronex SERIES/PARALLEL DISNORTION a flanger that ive been using. Stack em together and it sounds fucking great
