Galaxy 10?

Haha, I don't have a creative mind but a small wallet, kinda forces me to make the most of not-very-much. Another idea would be to use both amps simultanously. Get a splitter cable/box set the amps with roughly the same volume but different sounds and plug the guitar into them both. This way you could keep the Galaxy somewhat clean (it's best at those settings IMHO) and use a bit more gain on the Vox, the combination will give you many new sounds. A third option is to use them to go stereo. Many effect pedals/multi-effects are stereo and feature two outputs. Have one side go to the Vox and the other to the Epi, will give tons of depth to effects like delay and modulation effects like chorus and flanger.

Oh, if you can make modifications yourself it will save tons of money and time. Wish I had those skills...

Arjen's idea is good. If the Vox has a "line out" you can run that into the Galaxy 10. Then you would have all the Vox sounds through a tube amp.

To answer slejhamer, the Galaxy 10 is a simple one channel amp. It is like the amps of the 50's and 60's. When you push an amp like this into saturation, it does not sound like modern distortions at all. I think this confuses many people. It will get an overdrive,which is a rubbery type breakup. I wouldn't call it crunch. It is more like you hear many Blues players use. Think early Who records.

However, if you run a good overdrive or distortion pedal into an amp like this pushed to saturation, it will take off. The amp will almost sound like it is going to blow up. This is not bad, this is good. Then you can get incredible sustain and feedback. Think Hendrix. It is pretty wild. When your amp sounds like this it almost plays itself. You actually have to control the sound.

Maybe Arjen is familiar with this amp. Perhaps the speaker cannot handle too much low end. I would say get a EQ like the Danelectro Fish and Chips. It is cheap ($30) but very effective. Then you would be able to dial in the precise amount of low end to get a tight sound.

I still think this is a great buy. If I had the spare cash, I'd pick one up. These little tube amps sound good. Great for playing around the house, and small and light enough to haul to a practice or Open Mic easily.

Vink, when it comes, make sure to write a detailed review.

Wes: this is about the only tube amp I can afford so I played it plenty in store. :D It's a bit of a rough diamond. For $129 you are not going to get the ultimate in instant-tube sound and none should expect it. On its own it is either clean or mildly overdriven so it ain't versatile either. I didn't get it at that time and I still stand behind that decision. It wasnt what I needed at that moment.

However it is not a useless piece of garbage by any means and I'm looking at a few Epi tube amps at the moment, to be honest. All the flaws can be fixed by modding or using external devices and that still leaves you with a friendly price-tag. Stock it is a nice clean/bluesy practice amp and I can see it having some serious potential with a bit of time invested.

Just like Wes I believe it is a great purchase for you. Will open the world of stereo effects and amp-mixing, allows you to find new sounds in the Vox and gives you a chance to play around with tubes and what happens when you put different things into it. All for a super low price. Just don't expect that the tubes hiding in there will give you instantly the various tube sounds on whatever records you dig.

I'll agree the Galaxy 10 dosen't even come close to sounding anything like the tube amps from the past. If thats the sound your looking for you'll need to look into other options. It will give you sounds similar and allow you to saturate the output section. The 10" speaker that come stock in that amp works well when the amp is stock. In order for myself to get the tone I'm use to from a tube amp I had to make a few mods and use another speaker. Which with experimenting with a few different speakers I settled on a 25 watt 12" greenback.

There are plenty of options in the world today its a matter of experimenting to find what works for you.

Joe

I am pleased about my decision so far, based on all the feedback I am seeing here. Looks like it has lots of potential!

I really like the idea of a bluesy sound with some breakup. I already have a Fish'n Chips equalizer. And for distortion, I have just the thing -- a Zoom 707 MFX pedal I picked up couple of months ago on ebay. I really didn't like it all that much with the VOX. It had to too much of a harsh distortion through the VOX, and the other effects (like reverb) were little better on the VOX. Now, I think I can hook this up to the Galaxy 10 when I get it, and hopefully I will get a better, warmer, distortion.

Wes, I'll be sure to write a review once I get it.

Joe, since you have the amp and an external 12" speaker, do you think the original cabinet has enough room for a 12" speaker if I decide to try that in the future?

(PS. Arjen, I think that adding a couple of jacks to feed the speaker line out and back in should not take too many skills..just some soldering, and that's not that hard. I'm sure you will be able to do it. You just have to try it on some junk wires and stuff first to make sure you get the hang of it..)

I left the 10" speaker in the amp. That way it could used either way. There is nothing wrong with the 10" celestion that comes with the amp. It works and does the trick just fine. I'm a 12" celestion boy, since I have lots of them laying around both in and out of cabinets. Example a couple weeks ago I picked up 4 brand new celestions for 100.00 from someone cause he ordered the wrong ones 16 Ohms instead of 8 Ohms and couldn't take them back.

Being there is times I'm hard on equipment (that an under statement) and sometimes things can get damaged from my experimenting, having a few extra units around is always helpful. I've been known to drive speakers at different Ohm ratings than they should be and things can get crazy..Oh but they sound so good just before bite the dust. even after if you really like fuzz distortion.

I put the speaker jack on the bottom of the amp instead of the back. That way it was out of sight and wouldn't be sticking out the back if I had to use a straight 1/4" speaker cab instead of a 90. Then I can lean the amp back against the wall and set the attenuator behind it.

Joe

Ok, the Galaxy 10 arrived this afternoon, and I've had about 20 minutes of playing time with it :D

Here are some quick first impressions.

The amp looks really solidly built, from a first inspection. Much better than I expected actually. I thought it would be more "plasticky". Although it is some synthetic material, it seems very solid. The color is a dark blue, which is nice. I was worried it might look like too much "pastel" :-)

I plugged it, and started playing with volume at about 6 and gain at 3. Sounds very nice; warm, somewhat bell like tones. Nice "bedroom" level volume. Turned up the volume all the way, and gain to about half way. Very nice tone, still not much breakup. Now, it is pretty loud, but I can still play it without bothering the neighbors. The tone is very warm, mids are good, a little high on treble, but I could control that with just the equalizer on the amp. The base is not soft and silky like say the AC30 or Fender Bassman type models on the VOX, but the mids and the highs are warm. Then I tried cranking up the gain all the way .. boy, it was loud and little noisy. I think it did show some breakup, but it is not a volume I can play in my house. If I want to play at those settings, I think I have to go the attenuator/speaker line out/back in type of method. I still need to try high gain, lower volume, to saturate the pre-amp but not the power amp.

Then, I plugged in the Zoom 707, and put on one of the distortion oriented presents ("Power"). Of course, I lowered the volume to about half and gain to about 4. Boy, it has nice sustain. I can get a lot of volume, but I can control that with the pedal and also with the volume knob on the guitar.
It looks very nice for playing lead. I still need to plug in the Fish'n Chips equalizer and see what I can do with that. I am tempted to get a simple distortion pedal like the Fab-1, given it's only $15, but for now I will keep using the Zoom. Overall, I felt that the pedal sounded fuller through it than through the VOX, but I have to test it a bit more.

Oh, an the back is little more than half open. Should be pretty easy to add some jacks there hidden out of the way, next to the power input if I get around to doing that kind of a mod.

Overall, I am pleased; I think it's a keeper. I will post some pics.

Glad you like it!

Vink

Yes, thanks for the review.

Play it for a few more days, put it through it's paces and then tell us how you like it.

I think you will like distortions through a tube amp versus solid state. It is thicker and warmer IMHO.

Sounds like this little amp gets loud too. :twisted:

Play it for a few more days, put it through it's paces and then tell us how you like it.

Will do!

I bought this one for my daughter a year ago and can pull some pretty good tone from it. It was a worthy investment for the price I payed for it. She won't let me use it much cause she says I'm to hard on equipment and I might break it...lol

Joe

I've had this amp for about 8 months now. It's the amp I play every day for getting the blues out.
Here's some things I've learned (note: these will vary somewhat with different picups, etc.):

Clean rhythm: everything set at 3. You can turn the volume up, but everything else will start to add some distortion or make the high-mids and highs harsh during full churds. Keeping the guitar volume down can help get a cleaner clean (I'll often use 4 on my SG, the neck pickup on the Tele is usually sufficient to keep it clean.)
With the original tubes, the high and mid controls need to be used to tame the amp depending on the voice of your guitar. This was greatly relieved with a JJ 6L6GC and ECC83S. A JJ ECC803S can be used to smooth things out even more; this works nicely with a bright guitar like my Standard Tele but was too smooth for "my" sound from humbuckers. With the tube swap, the high EQ became more useful for adding highs instead of just for taming them. The tubes vary the nature of the bass as well, but it's all sufficient for me, I haven't pinned down the details of the bass because I usually turn the bass down to stay out of the Bass guitar territory.
The 10" speaker isn't the greatest, but it's okay now that I've learned to work with it better. Lots of mids for those of you who realize how important mids really are for lead. Too much mid for clean rhythm, perhaps, without a little fine tuning.

Simulated Tube overdrive at lower volumes: So, this amp is freaking loud if you don't need it clean. Overdriving the power tubes is not something you're going to be doing much in your living room without hearing protection or an attenuator. You start to get a smooth overdrive from the preamp with the gain set from 5.5 (my SG) to 7 (my Tele) depending on how hot your pickups are then adjusting the volume to taste. You can use this to get a nice bluesey sound for practicing those "Blues You Can Use" songs. You get a nice "just on the verge of breakup" sound around here, pick lightly on single notes and its almost clean (blues clean), pick more aggresively or hit a double stop and there's that grit.

Crunch: Turn the gain up to 7-8 or so and I get all kinds of crunch out of this little guy. I'm no metel head, so my idea of crunch might be lighter than yours, but I get some pretty solid rock power chords around here. Great for a blues/rock boogie rhythm in E.

Distortion: I like the distortion with the new tubes much more than the original set, which was a bit grainy. One thing to note is that the distortion sound changes dramatically with the volume. At low volume it tends to be grainy or rattley, but as the volume knob goes up it gets much richer, fuller, and more complex. This would probably be helped by an attenuator.

I have a Bad Monkey (Tube Screamer clone) pedal that makes this little amp howl (in a good way), almost into SRV territory. I think you might be able to get Brian May out of this combination if you wanted.

...Oh, and a Weber Mini Mass Attenuator would be $75 for this sucker. It could be moved to any other low power amp you get in the future, and you'll always need one, so don't look at it adding much cost to this amp. For connecting the attenuator, you don't need to be sending this out for sevice or getting a jack or loop or anything else installed, all you would need, I believe, is the wiring harness for Peavey amps which would connect a jack to the existing speaker spade connectors. You might want to add a female-female 1/4" connector for when you want to take the attenuator out of line. This would cost $15. I haven't tried this yet, maybe Ted Weber could tell you for sure, but at worst you would have to solder different sized spades onto the wires.

Slothrob,

Thanks a lot for the info. I recently read a bunch of reviews on Harmony Central which suggested the tube swap, so I went and ordered the JJ tubes you mention from Eurotubes on Wed, which arrived yesterday. They do make the amp a lot warmer, and LOT less shrill. I really love the tone from the amp now. I felt it was a very well spent $31. (The bass is also much better, but still not silky -- that may be partly the speakers and the half-open back as well.)

The wiring harness and attenuator looks really interesting. I may get them, it would be nice to play the amp with the gain and volume driven hard, which I absolutely cannot do now in my house! That harness seems really great for this purpose. If I crank the gain up to say 8 or 9, I have to turn the volume down to about 2. But, I will probably play it for while as is before putting some more money into it.

Glad to hear you liked the tubes. I played the heck out of this amp over the weekend and got some great tones and some compliments on the sound. You can do fine with this amp on a small budget without any more investment.
I can't call it the most versatile of amps, but I get a decent low volume clean, a pretty sweet round blues sound, a gritty low-fi mountain blues sound, and a useful crunch (depending on what you call crunch). All from a few small adjustments. All in a lightweight package I can carry in one trip that fits in the trunk of my Mini (including guitar in a gig bag and a gear bag!) ...and that's a pretty compact trunk, but it's out of sight of people looking for a 10 finger discount and not a bank-breaking loss if it does get stolen.
It also seems to cut through and yet mix pretty well in a jam situation, while my friends little 30 watt ss Marshall practice amp seems to get lost when he plays a lead.

Slothrob

That was an excellent post on the Galaxy 10 and the various tones you can coax from it.

That Peavey harness looks perfect. No need to cut wires, solder, etc.....

Vink

I just wanted to say that an attenuator makes a very SUBTLE difference. Yes, it allows you to push the power tubes to full saturation. The tone will be richer, fuller, and rubbery for want of a better term. You will notice longer sustain. You can get great crunch, especially on power chords. And you will be able to play at very low volumes that will not disturb anyone.

But you will still not get Metal type distortion without a pedal. No, you will get more of a Blues overdrive. Think of maybe Stevie Ray Vaughn. Or the very early Who like the song I'm Free.

So an attenuator is great. But it is very subtle. I just didn't want you to spend your money and be disappointed. I am not disappointed with mine, because I like the extra push it gives your tone. It is that little extra edge. But someone expecting a BIG difference might be.