[Harp-L] Thank you!

[Chris Hofstader]

> 
> Thanks Richard! That is advice that I would never find in an owner's manual.
> By the way, I also credit you for my purchase of my Vox mini 5. I had researched many amps and was going to go with the Roland microcube…


cdh: I have a Roland MicroCube in my Florida home and use it when I am playing outdoors because it runs on batteries, sounds good enough, because it has no digital display and all settings including amp model and effects are handled with hardware controls - an essential for a blind person to drive. I’ve been doing some busking in San Francisco with a buddy who plays guitar and we want to start playing some electric amplified tunes as well but I don’t want to haul the little amp with me everywhere I travel so I’ll just pick up another amp and leave it in my SF place.

My question about the Vox Mini 5 (I use a Vox AC4 when playing near an outlet) is whether or not one can choose effects and set their level without looking or being able to see? On the little Roland, I only get six effects, tone, gain, model and volume but I can change anything I care to without being able to see some LCD/LED display.

I’d appreciate it if someone could tell me what the controls on the Mini 5 look like and how one makes changes. This is the great frustration of being blind in the age of digital music; once upon a time it was a stereotype that all blind people are musicians and most of the most famous blind people are indeed involved in music. At the same time, the equipment one needs to use to play music and do stuff in the studio has become increasingly more visual to use. A recent example for me was getting a Tascam Portastudio (one of the new digital versions), learning that I could do most things because it has a lot of physical knobs and such but it was impossible for me to use because one needs to go through the menus to create a new project which proved impossible for me. Other devices I’ve looked at use the kinds of knobs that one can turn around without a start or stop point that adjust settings relative to the current setting and not absolutely based on a pointer on the knob (some have physical pointers, others I put a little plastic dot onto the knob for where the pointer would be pointing) and the infinite knobs are also hard to impossible for me.

The AC4 has about the perfect set of knobs for my taste and all are physical with pointers. The Roland MicroCube has individual click stops for models, four locations for different effects, the reverb/echo knob and so on all with nice hardware controls.

Does the Vox Mini 5 have knobs I can use and does it have a display I won’t be able to read?

Thanks and Happy Hacking,
cdh