I love my modelling amp. But by way of background, I played electric guitar around 40 years ago and had a big Marshall tube amp. I had limited pedals and while I had a great sound I was limited.

I recently started playing again. I just play at home and I went to buy a new electric. The guy convinced me to buy a Line 6 Spider v 30 amp even though I didn't really know what a modelling amp was.

Fast forward 18 months and I can get almost any sound I want out of my amp. I can choose from around 40 different amps, matched with differnet cabs and even mics and a whole bunch of pedals and effects. I have a compressor and a noise gate and I can set them all up in whatever order I want. I can go from clean to surfing with the aliens. Beach Boys to AC DC. Whenever a GT song lesson has a particular set up, I can match the settings and get much the same sound. It matches the amps including the various controls they have.

While it comes with a range of presets, I have set up a lot of my own and learnt so much in the process. Recently, I have been practising seven nation army from Mikes lesson and discovered that I have a whammy pedal and I have been able to set it so that it plays one octave lower to effectively give me a bass. How cool is that.

With my presets I bought a footswitch for about $50 that simply moves you from one preset to another. So I often have different pre sets for differnet parts of the songs and I can move between them using the foot switch.

The amp is USB to my computer and I can set it up on there with a good visual on the screen.

My one proviso is that early on I did not like the sound direct from my amp but it was great through my headphones. I realised it was the speaker. So I bought a small 3 channel mixer and some nice powered monitor speakers and I can play backing tracks from my computer mixed with the line out from my amp and the sound is great.

So I am really using my amp as a multi effects unit. But for a couple of hundred dollars I have access to such a broad range of sounds.