Reply To: Amplification for Melodicas
Lowboy, you are absolutely right about clean or dirty, and those old tube amps are great for guitars, they will give you both clean and dirty but for the melodica you don’t have the harmonics or sustain for the griddy sound. For the melodica they are wonderful for warm and clean, add a little reverb and delay and you have one fat full sounding melodica. I agree with you that solid state is clean but I just can’t get the depth I like, and yes maybe a cornbread tube pedal would probably work well. I have mentioned in past post that I have a Traynor K4 keyboard amp that works fantastic, this is a solid state amplifier with a tube preamp designed for keyboard (full range) so your melodica sounds great at the top end and bottom end. Unfortunately it’s heavy, I guess thats nthe trade off. I have been interested in a Fender Princeton Reverb 65 Re-issue for a while now. Small, warm, loud and clean. There is a guitar shop “The Fret House” not to far away that will allow me to take my pedal board and melodicas and hook up any and all amplifiers if I want, so I am looking to do this in the next few weeks.
Melodica-Me