VintageKustom.com: Comment Board » VIntage Kustom vs. Newer Kustom

Re: VIntage Kustom vs. Newer Kustom [message #4877 is a reply to message #4876]

Tue, 21 September 2004 10:30

edforgothispassword is currently offline

edforgothispassword
Messages: 202
Registered: July 2004

Senior Member

not entering the tube vs SS battle here..just reminding all that Bud's intentions were to make a new product...us old guys were tired of busting tubes everytime we dropped our amps too hard...waiting for them to warm up..wondering what those strange noises were when a preamp AX7 tube went microphonic on us midweek at the lounge...solid state was new...it was stable...(once Bud got his designs squared away)..it came on instantly and sounded the same all night long..and even when my Dad fell down the front porch stairs and broke his leg carrying my 200 bass head out for a job...the kustom head that went flying out of his arms and bouncing on the sidewalk...still...still to this day 32 years later...is playing without a single failure... for bass...straight in...they did have a tone of their own...and a nice one..no complaints...for guitar..yeah..pretty bland compared to the complicated freqs that come from a tube amp....in fact it wasn't until years later that I learned the real value of the kustom design...when I started experimenting with pedals and found that I liked my pedals better through my kustoms than through my fender or marshalls...and the variety available to me by adding a couple stompers was more fun than that one trick tone I could get from a marshall at volume...so I returned to my kustoms after about a decade of leaving them home most of the time...that was in the late 80s..and I've never turned back.
For those of you who are knew.. I'll tell you that I own a backline company so we have a large inventory of best effort amps that we rent out to nationals...so I do have fenders, marshalls, mesas, etc available to me and Ido enjoy most of them..so its not for lack of having another brand or being jealous over a rig I can't have that has me standing by my kustoms...it really is my love for them...first and foremost the look...but also, the transparent yet bold way they deliver whatever I put into them..and yes, with a simple $100 stomp box I can nail a mesa or marshall overdrive...consistently and at any volume...and that's worth a lot! as for the china reissue kustoms...its a sad story...late production run, double the original estimated cost, poor construction and cheaper materials made for a rig that in the words of Bud Ross himself as he stood at the NAMM in front of the booth the first year they came out..."They are crap"...but more importantly the attitude of the kustom staff at that time was all corporate and business..there was no love for the market and it was the combination of all of this that cost them and us our loving tuck n roll return. I am waiting to see now what the hiring of their new amp tech designer from Peavey will bring to the table. If they don't get back to their roots I swear in 2 years I will set up a shop and start building my own tuck n roll rigs..and the first thing out the door will be a trio of 3x12 tall cabs in white sparkle (silver) with a solid state head with optional channel switch to a tube preamp channel with the proper plate voltage to light it up and a parametric eq design on board....then I'm gonna get a job touring with Jo Cocker and all will be right with the world...ok..maybe its just midlife....hard to tell these days... ya'll Play Loud! ET

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