About vaughn4380

Features: I bought this amp new in 2003. Single channel and simple controls: Gain, bass, mid, treble, master volume and reverb controls. Two inputs, high and low, I always use the high input. Two ¿¿¿Vintage 30¿¿¿ Celestions and a very heavy wood cabinet. Guitar is an American Double Fat Strat with a Seymour Duncan ¿¿¿59¿¿¿ in the neck position and a Seymour Duncan ¿¿¿Pearly Gates¿¿¿ in the bridge position. The 59 can be split for a single coil sound and less gain. I originally bought this amp to play hard rock at gigs in a cover band (Live, Bush, Hootie and the Blowfish, etc.). It handled this job very well. For 30 watts it is very loud. It will easily keep up with a half stack and a heavy drummer without the need to be mic'ed. It does not sound good at bedroom practice volumes. I think the master volume at least needs to be at 35% to 40% to sound good. Less than that it sounds thin and loses bass and treble. I usually kept the gain at around 60% to 70% for a nice overdriven sound that cleared up when the volume was backed off on the guitar, although it was never a fender type of clean, it always retained a little bit of overdrive. Adjustments in picking style also play into the sound as well, light picking gets cleaner sounds and heavy picking causes more overdrive. EQ was kept at 50% for all three controls and reverb was at 0 for gigs. The reverb was a nice surprise, it is not like the fender "Surf's up" reverb but it did add a nice touch and some depth to the guitars I ran through it. The louder you turn the amp up the better it sounds, typical of tubes. I like that it doesn¿¿¿t need to be re-biased after a tube change, helps save money and makes tube changes easy for me to handle.

After I used this amp for a while I quit playing with the previously mentioned cover band and the amp sat in my room unused for two years. Last month I began to play with my church band for Sunday services. The Orange was the smallest tube amp I had so I brought it to church thinking I would use it temporarily until I bought a cleaner sounding ¿¿¿church¿¿¿ amp. I was very surprised how this amp sounded for worship music when the gain was turned down. I now keep the gain at about 35% and the master volume about the same. With this setting and my neck pickup in ¿¿¿single coil¿¿¿ setting I get great clean sounds with plenty of volume for a 5 piece church band. We do run the amp through the board with a Sure 57 mic, but that is more for control by the sound techs and not volume issues with the amp. I could, and have, turned the master up to 50% and the sound has remained clean with the single coil pickup setting. When I need a bit of crunch I switch to the full humbucker setting on my neck pickup and the amp just starts to break up (overdrive) without the need to change any settings on the amp, sounds great and is just the right amount of overdrive for the occasional light rock worship song. I give this category a 5 because it has met my needs on two seperate occassions, but it still does not have a lot of gizmos and seperate channels. Not a bad thing as this is what I wanted in an amp.