Incoming NMD

[GuitarBilly]

So a good friend of mine lost his brother recently. He was a guitar player, so my friend, who knows nothing about guitar, asked me to help him inventory his brother's gear so he could sell it to help his brother's family. For the last couple of days, he's been taking pictures of everything and sending it to me so I can give him a price estimate and help him with the specs etc.. We've been through maybe 20 guitars, 3 amps and a huge amount of pedals and accessories. It's nothing really high-end but a good $10k worth of gear when it was all said and done.

Today, he send me a tracking number and said that he is sending me one of his brother's pedals, the Atomic Amplifire 3 modeler as a "thank you" for all the work. I had mentioned I was considering buying that one from him so he decided to just give it to me. I told him he didn't have to do that and I'd be more than happy to pay for it, but he insisted. So I should be getting it within the next couple of days.

It's cool because I've been wanting one of these units, but I'm mostly sad for my buddy. He was really close to his brother. I met him a few times and he seemed to be a nice guy, we talked about guitar and gear etc... so this one is bittersweet, although I think it's cool I get to hold on to one of the pieces. I know it meant a lot to him that I helped him out so it's all good.

[JiveTurkey]

Mojo sent to your friend. That is a tough loss.

AA3 is great for the Marshall stuff. Love the Plexi, Hot Brit and the Freidman. The Deluxe is actually really nice as well, iirc?

[GuitarBilly]

Yeah I remember the 5150 model being good too.

[JiveTurkey]

^Yep. The Recto was great at the time, too? Mark was always weird because of baked in EQ iirc? The A/B switching was great as well.

[NinjaRaf]

Yeah, man, keeping gear like this I think helps people feel like that person is still living on in some ways. My aunt was really adamant about me taking and USING my cousin's guitar stuff. I was telling her about the songs we wrote on some of this gear and she was happy that this stuff will live on and keep his memory alive.

[GuitarBilly]

I got this today. It sounds great. For a test, I plugged my 5153 into my Suhr Reactive Load with a York IR.
Then I loaded the same IR in the Amplifire and pulled up the 5150 model and started to A/B both of them.
After some tweaking, I got them to sound nearly identical. So that's good.
Now that's through studio monitors and I already knew modelers can sound great in that type of environment. So whatever

I will take it to practice on Sunday and see how it sounds through our practice P.A., that would be an actual test.

At any rate I'm happy to have this since it belonged to my buddy's brother.

[ibenhad]

Sorry to hear about your friends loss. As for the AmpliFire I have been touting it here forever. It is $ for $ probably the best unit out there. Shame the company seems to be on the ropes.

[GuitarBilly]

Yeah I took it to practice on Sunday and tried it with the band. It actually sounded really good. Yes the digital artifacts were there, but not as much as some other modeling devices I've tried.
I'm not sure if I'd use it live, but for band practice or home playing it's great.

[Bonano]

You’re a good man, and it looks like everything happened in the best way they could happen after a loss. Bittersweet f’sure . . .