I lived with my mom since I was a kid, and for a couple brief periods as an adult. My mom has always been one of my biggest supporters of my music. She still asks me what piece of gear I'm wanting whenever Christmas or my birthday rolls around. She's always liked my music and loved some of it but she's never been a fan of high gain tones so she was usually covering her ears whenever I wanted to show her a new riff or something that was heavy. She was very happy when I bought my Pro Reverb and was far less enthusiastic when I was playing through the Laney LH50R and the GH50L.
Anyway, last night I had her listen to some riffs, chord progressions, and solo/melodies through all of the channels of the VH100R. I run this amp through a 2x12 with WGS BL-80's at home, and I learned with the GH50L that those speakers really help to tame harshness in distortion without making the tone weak or sterile, so I was confident that she wasn't going to be covering her ears. I was right. She commented that this is the biggest sound she's heard from me and that even though it's also some of the heaviest and most aggressive sound I've had that it isn't harsh or "whompey and fuzzy". She's a big Gary Moore fan so when I was playing sustaining singing melodies she thought is was beautiful. Even when I was playing some nastier riffs she was just sitting there and listening without a particular look of pain that I'm used to seeing on her face when I've been excited to share some cool heavy riffs in the past.
So this is cool for me. It's always made me a little sad that my mommy would be a bit repelled by my tone in the past and that I couldn't really get her to listen to cool riffs because it was too harsh on her ears. It's also cool because she's like a gauge for tolerable tone. We're all guitarists here and we're all very used to and accustomed to nasty brutal rockin' tone, but the average listener is not. This tells me that I've honed in on sound that can be shared with a wider demographic.... even if it stays in my living room with only my mommy in the crowd
<--anderton
