Over 30 years ago I bought my first guitar pedal. The year was 1993 and after weeks of research and months of saving I decided to take a leap of faith with this new pedal from SansAmp called the GT2. I needed something to give me better grungy distortion tones than my little practice Traynor amp could spit out.
The funny thing is that it turned out to be a brilliant purchase! 30 years ago my band played our first gigs and recorded some gnarly tones using the GT2. Yes, back in the early 90’s, my first gigs were ampless… before ampless was cool! This was more a move of necessity rather than choice – we just had to use what we had, and I did not have a real gigging amp at that time.
At the time I was a big fan of the crunchy grunge tones I could get with the California or Tweed Amp selections on the Hot Wired setting. Plenty of gain and wooly wall of sound. Here are some examples from the early 90’s in my band Grinnin’ Wildebeest:
Later on I bought an Ultra Chorus and then upgraded to a Twin, but the GT2 got me started.
Fast forward 30 years later. It’s my 50th birthday coming up and I decided to play a few crowd-pleasers with the hired band after 15 or more years without performing. Things had changed a bit since then… no longer was my amp welcome on the stage! The band said they prefer everything to be ampless and my Vibrolux would be too loud on stage.
The good news is that after all these years I had held on to that trusty GT2 and it turns out, it gave me the exact tones I was looking for. This time around I wasn’t trying to find a buzzy wall of sound, but I was going to be covering a few songs by The Cure, Tom Petty, and Oasis, so I needed some versatile sounds. After some application of DeoxIT to clean out the pots and purchasing a 9v converter cable the GT2 did not disappoint!
This time around I set the SansAmp to the Tweed Amp, Clean Mod, and Classic Mic settings. Drive around 10:00 with Highs and Lows rolled back a tad gave me a perfect pedal platform for the rest of my signal chain. I ended up using a gain-staging setup as follows:
Boss TU-2 Tuner -> Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer -> Boss BD-2 Blues Driver -> Boss DD-5 Digital Delay -> Boss CE-2w Chorus -> SansAmp GT2
The Tube Screamer and Blues Driver were set up with minimal gain and enough level out to push the next stage a bit. This gave me a few good options:
- Edge of breakup with just the SansAmp
- Two styles of crunch with either the Tube Screamer or Blues Driver engaged
- Lead tone with decent sustain with both the Tube Screamer and Blues Driver engaged
I was really impressed with the sound – especially when I plugged into the board during sound check and I could hear it LOUD!
Hear the tones yourself!
Great tones without breaking the back – that’s definitely a bonus when you’re 50 years young! How do you think the vintage GT2 tones stack up to modern digital modelers?