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Most popular guitar gear in the 80's?


genesis3

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Quote Originally Posted by Randy G View Post
Actually it was Marshalls, Fenders and Gibsons for the pros. Same as it's always been. Now among the locals, Peavey Renown was the pre-eminent amp. Only the regular giggers owned a Marshall. People who owned Laneys or the like were those with money to waste, which were few.

Kramer and Hondo guitars were used the most. And 99.9999% of the players only owned ONE guitar. Only the regular giggers owned two electrics. If you owned three guitars, you were considered rich. Most popular pedals were the Boss, with MXR's 70s share dying off. Most players owned only two at most, a distortion and a chorus.

Gear was relatively expensive back then. I paid a hard earned $250 for a piece of crap Memphis P-bass in 1985.

IIRC, my "rig" during the early 80s (80-81) was a Fender tele through a pignose or a Fender Princeton. I went on hiatus for quite a while, and I got back into it (~ 1987, if memory serves) with a Squier II strat, a Peavey Rage 108 and a Korg G3....
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During the 80s, I only briefly owned two guitars... I actually managed to get one without trading the other in towards it, but the old one was sold within a couple months.

In the 80s, I had a Japanese H/S/S strat, a Kramer Beretta, a Jackson Soloist, a Peavey Vandenberg and a Kramer Stagemaster and went through a couple Peavey SS amps, a Special 150 and a Renown. Couple pedals, a strap and that was it and I did MUCH more with my playing in any one year during the 80s than I have in the entirety of the 90s and 2000s.

idn_smilie.gif

For the record, I didn't know anyone that had a Rockman in the 80s but literally everyone I knew that had a rack had an MP-1.

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Quote Originally Posted by cratz2 View Post
During the 80s, I only briefly owned two guitars... I actually managed to get one without trading the other in towards it, but the old one was sold within a couple months.

In the 80s, I had a Japanese H/S/S strat, a Kramer Beretta, a Jackson Soloist, a Peavey Vandenberg and a Kramer Stagemaster and went through a couple Peavey SS amps, a Special 150 and a Renown. Couple pedals, a strap and that was it and I did MUCH more with my playing in any one year during the 80s than I have in the entirety of the 90s and 2000s.

idn_smilie.gif

For the record, I didn't know anyone that had a Rockman in the 80s but literally everyone I knew that had a rack had an MP-1.
the ADA MP-1 was EVERYWHERE. that's what i remember, gearwise, about the 80s.
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Kramer, BC Rich, Jackson, and Ibanez (more near the end of the decade) were the fashionable brands. Even Fender started trying to glam up the stratocaster with the HM Strat.

Amp-wise, the ADA MP-1 was everywhere. Michael Wagener produced albums by White Lion, Winger, Skid Row, and Extreme and, therefore, his hot-rodded MP-1 was ubiquitous in the hard rock/glam metal scene. Marshalls remained popular as always, especially because Eddie Van Halen was famously using a modded one. Urban legends abounded and some guys made a ton of money promising to hot rod your JCM or Super Lead.

It was also a decade of technical innovation. Mostly thanks to Eddie Van Halen, it seemed like everyone wanted their own tremolo unit. There was the Floyd Rose, but there was also the Kahler (which many a Les Paul owner accommodated with a nasty route), and the Steinberger Trans-Trem.

It was also the decade of the rack unit. When the cost of rack gear came out of the stratosphere (it went from studio gear to gear for wealthy musicians), guitarists started swapping out pedals for rack stuff. Delay, Compression, and Reverb were especially popular. Eventide 969s and H3000s (favored by Vai and Van Halen), Yamaha SPX90s (Everyone, but especially Andy Summers of the Police), Roland SDE-3000s (Vai and Marillion), and Korg SDD-3000s (The Edge) were the cream of the crop.

Active pickups became popular in the 80s. Thanks to Kirk Hammett, Vito Bratta, Reb Beach, and David Gilmour, EMGs became quite popular. I guess pickup swapping got huge in the 80s in general. After Eddie Van Halen showed the world a strat with a humbucker in it, the race was on. Nearly everyone, it seemed, played a super-strat by the end of the 1980s.

In general, it was a decade where people got interested in electronic music and synthesizers. That seemed to result in the preference for synthetic and metallic sounds in general--you'll hear a ton of compressor, noise gating (especially on snare drums), and chorus (the Boss chorus pedal was still king).

If you could play a Kramer Baretta with EMG pickups into an ADA MP-1 with a towering rack full of Eventide, Roland, and Korg gear, you'd be pretty much the most righteous dude this side of Vandenberg.

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Since I was there, giging in the early 80's I can add something to this. My main amp was a used 50w Tube Marshall JCM combo. I had a Washburn A10 (new), 63 Fender Strat (trade), and a '76 Ibanez Les Paul (new Christmas from mom and dad). I used the above mentioned Rockman and a Tubescreamer (I had mine since ~1980). Not rich by a long shot. Played in 3 bands and worked a job while in College to own this stuff.

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When I got a record deal back in 1984 I owned this '79 strat and the early '70's SG. With the money I got from RCA I bought a Marshall JCM 800 half stack and the G&L Superhawk below. I definitely used a Tom Scholz Rockman in Electric Lady studio's when we recorded, it belonged to the studio so it was probably the same one Steve Steven's used with Billy Idol, they did an album in that studio right before we started.

1979Strat.jpg

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People really have to understand that gear was expensive back then. I think I got one mail order catalog near the end of the 80's, something like PME or something that isn't around anymore, but you usually went to a local mom and pop or medium sized store and paid what amounted to 10%-20% off of list price IF something was on SALE! Now, GC, Musicians Friend, AMS, etc... all offer gear at about 50% or more off of list price. So, you didn't stock up on a bunch of stuff- imagine that. For comparison, A TS-9 lists at $169...you would be paying about 152.00 plus tax for it. A Fender American standard lists at what, $1300? You would be paying $1105 plus tax. That was the way things were, and that was IF your local stores carried Fender or Ibanez or whatever you were looking for.

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Quote Originally Posted by genesis3 View Post
Had to be....

250pxamplifier5.jpg


pop, rock...seems everbody used it a time or two....these are sheer guesses by the way, I have no way of knowing they actually used any of the Rockman devices in the videos below, but it sure sounds like it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlnegZzNZAs







http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW_jfplZ8Bc
well it was very popular but only for a certain genre. Same with ADA. But meat/potatoes Fender/Marshall/Gibson was in most of the genre; country, jazz, punk, pop, rock, metal, funk.
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Quote Originally Posted by taxerman View Post
Come on, folks, have you forgotten that those old-fashioned acoustic guitars were out and Ovations were required gear in the '80s? I hated that overproduced MTV '80s music, but even I bought myself an Ovation.

fenders001b-1.jpg
Ovation was already very popular in the 70s.
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Quote Originally Posted by tlbonehead

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I've never seen one on the Grand Ole Opry.

 

Most people weren't listening to country back then. In the 80's I never saw anyone using a Les Paul until GnR came out. I'm sure they used them in the studio but live it was superstrat with some sort of locking tremolo. Amp wise it was in ADA MP-1 and Marshall but some including EVH were using Soldano.
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Quote Originally Posted by sammyreynolds01

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Most people weren't listening to country back then. In the 80's I never saw anyone using a Les Paul until GnR came out. I'm sure they used them in the studio but live it was superstrat with some sort of locking tremolo. Amp wise it was in ADA MP-1 and Marshall but some including EVH were using Soldano.

 

Why was country so popular in the 80s then if no one listened to it? Or pop for that matte? Or punk for that matter? And if you didn't see anyone using Les Pauls in the 80s until Slash, you missed out on a ton of music/musicians!!! Obviously Marshall was popular, but Fender was easily more popular than ADA in the 80s overall. Golly!!!
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Quote Originally Posted by BryanMichael View Post
People really have to understand that gear was expensive back then. I think I got one mail order catalog near the end of the 80's, something like PME or something that isn't around anymore, but you usually went to a local mom and pop or medium sized store and paid what amounted to 10%-20% off of list price IF something was on SALE! Now, GC, Musicians Friend, AMS, etc... all offer gear at about 50% or more off of list price. So, you didn't stock up on a bunch of stuff- imagine that. For comparison, A TS-9 lists at $169...you would be paying about 152.00 plus tax for it. A Fender American standard lists at what, $1300? You would be paying $1105 plus tax. That was the way things were, and that was IF your local stores carried Fender or Ibanez or whatever you were looking for.
Around here in Europe some music shops seemed to have their own currency change rates. A friend of mine bought an 50th American Series Strat for 2250$ in 2004.
The general use of eBay and forums has made it harder for shop keepers to bullshit people about import prices. Besides, the whole market seems to have gone down about 30% down street-pricewise in recent years.

From what I hear, entry-level guitars have gotten much better since the 80s too.
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