Trying to find out more info on two little blasts from the past, one I used to have and one I only heard about...or think I did. The first was the Guitar Buddy. This was a little plastic box with a clock-radio speaker that ran on C-cells. My memory is that it actually had a nice nasty fuzztone when dimed. I wouldn't mind picking one up for nostalgia. It was my first amp. I can find zero about this on the web, as though nobody else ever had one or they all vanished. Any of you folks have one too? The other is the gas can amp. A solid state amp housed in a plastic jerrycan. I think St Louis Music made these before they came out with the original Crate amp. Or could I have seen a picture of somebody's homebrew one-off and mixed up my stories?
"THE CAN' was manufactured here in St. Louis at our Crate factory in the early 1980's. We built about 10,000 total but I very rarely get inquiries about them. One thing that came up about 10 years ago was that Curt Kobain mentioned in an article that he used one to get a unique sound on one of his recordings. Thanks, Chuck Phillips"
The Can was a pretty good sounding amp actually, quite good actually considering it was solid state and in a plastic housing...
I own "The Can"... but I'm not really a guitar player... I bought it from a small guitar shop in eastern Idaho around 1995 or so. I was a truck driver and needed a portable amp to mess around with while playing a cheapish Kmart guitar I had just bought. No lessons, no idea about what I was doing, just wanted something to mess around with. Now I'm a big huge rock star god and "The Can" started it all, the rest is history... errr ok, after all this time I still don't play really, I mean I can roughly hack out the simplist of songs in the easy books. I wasn't a truck driver for long, so I wasn't out and about all the time anymore, almost never touched the guitar, and used a plug-in amp if I did. So "The Can" remained unused for many many years. Since that time I've really been into synths and computer recording and all of that. As I've advanced I've become more interested in the idea of using guitar amps to run my keyboards or whatever else through, and remicing them for some extra character to the tracks. About a year ago I took the can off the storage shelf, cleaned it up, found me an adapter for it (it didn't come with one when I bought it second hand), and messed around with it a little. It works perfect as far as I can tell. Recently I have been using it a little more, I don't think I really understood the whole guitar amp thing too well, and had a Pod 2.0, J-station, and amp plug ins, so always thought of "The Can", as just some little cheesy (but yet very cool and fun at the same time), solid-state, severely outdated portable amp, that probably every guitarist out there would laugh at. But as I've learned things over the years, know what to listen for, and understand things much much better, it's actually a sweet little amp that has a much different sound then the simulators (although with enough tweaking you might get close) and I'm looking forward to put it through it's paces in the future. I might not use it in a traditional manner, but it's working in a way that I find very cool. That being said, I may sell it one day if the price is right, but I doubt it. It's sentimental to me now, reminds me of how far I've come, it's got fun styling, and now I'm even reading where Kurt Cobain was using it, and here I was thinking it was just some sort of Chinese joke for so many years. I'm really just discovering it for the first time, and it feels like I've got something new. Cheers
Just saw this while researching a recent yard sale find. I picked up one of these at a local yard sale. It was bundled with a low end electric, another amp and some misc accessories. When I asked the owner for a price she told me there are 2 amp there--I had not even realized it as an amp. I thought it was a gas can. It also had the original AC adapter and cord. Anyway they are definitely real but pretty rare apparently
Her is the new iteration! the old one, Here is the thread at MLP, http://www.mylespaul.com/forums/squawk-box/245329-strange-amplifiers-youve-used.html
