My favorite part of the Floor reunion, besides Floor reuniting, is guitarist Anthony Vialon’s rig. I swear Doctor Who nabbed it the moment the band broke up and carried it straight into the present day. Scratch that, it was transported from the band’s mid-’90s heyday. Seriously, a Crate XLP preamp? That’s a pager call from nostalgia that you’d better call back from the nearest pay phone.
Guitarist/vocalist Steve Brooks (also of Torche, for those of you not well-versed in the relation of the two bands) and drummer Henry Wilson have some legitimately nice gear, like that siiick Daney Carey signature Paiste snare, but dudes with Xs on their hands didn’t play $1000 snares in VFW halls 20 years ago, now did they?
bronson / August 22, 2014 1:18 pm
Ask Brian Patton or Scott Hull how they feel about the Ampeg SS-150/VH-140 heads. They’re crushers. Crate used those circuits in some of the better Crate amps of the period like the GT3500h which is essentially a 350w VH140. The XLP/TDP pre-amps might be the same circuit as those.
Scott Hull posted on a forum a while back about it:
“I only really recently discovered the wonderment of
the old Ampeg solid state guitar heads (ss-150, vh-140c) that bands like
Suffocation, Assuck, Eyehategod, Dying Fetus, Death, Misery Index, etc
etc have built their sound on and have scoured Ebay picking these things
up. Sparky from MI told me he had tracked down some folks at St. Louis
Music (the parent company for Crate, Ampeg) who told him they put the
same circuitry into a new Crate head. Low and behold, I finally tracked
down the only man that should be awarded a nobel prize (of metal) for
creating an amp, Thom Kieffer, who told me he put the guts of his VH/SS
series ampeg amps into the new Crate GTX3500H head (a 350 watt mother
fucker). Steve and Matt sent two right over and I only just used them
for our first gigs last weekend. They not only sounded WAY more amazing
than anything I’d ever used (I’ve had Triple Rec, Mesa MKIII, Marshall
TSL 100, Sunns), but they were even louder than the 1000 watt GK/Mesa
Triaxis configuration I have been using since PD started!”
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