[Harp-L] Seeking Advice

[Chris Hofstader]

Hi,

It’s approaching the time of year when we drive from our Florida home to our summer residence in Cambridge, MA. When I had only played acoustically, I only needed to bring a case of harps with me; now, that I’ve been splitting my practice between acoustic and amplified, I find that I need to cart a whole lot more gear with me and, while the Prius station wagon has plenty of cargo space, we’re hauling a pile of other crap that we’ll need for the summer, including three dogs and their stuff.

Here, I’ve a little Vox AC4 amp that I really like. More often than not, I practice with its line out playing into a little mixer (I use the mixer to add recorded background tracks) and then listen with closed back Sennheiser headphones so as to not frighten my wife or the dogs with my often awful playing.

I’m looking for a small practice amp or, even better, an amp head as I don’t need a speaker. I’d like for it to be as close to the Vox AC sound as possible but, as this is purely for practicing, it needn’t be an expensive tube set. I don’t care much if it has any added effects as, aside from my Lone Wolf reverb pedal, I don’t use any. 

So, whether tubes, solid state or DSP, I think portability is priority one but I do hope for something that isn’t a noisy little toy. The one added feature which probably eliminates all of the DSP types is that I’m blind and all of the controls on the device need to be hardware knobs as I’ve no way of seeing a digital based set of menus.

Thanks,
cdh