Here’s a fun little bit of Guild history from the 1982 Guild Accessories Catalog: The Guild Tweedy Bird MM500 Micro Mini Amp, and yes, that’s the name, though it depends on where you look as to whether it’s the Tweedy Bird, MM500, or Micro Mini Amp. What are the features? What do all the controls do? How’s it sound? Can you use it as a recording interface? Does it take micro-SD cards? Is it USB-C compatible? Some of these questions might actually be answered in this riveting review, so let’s take a look at this tiny transistor amp from the early 1980s. (more…)
Category: Amplifiers
Guild G600 Aspen Acoustic Amplifier
Since I wrote an article about the Timberline series of Guild acoustic amplifiers, and another about the G300 Tamerack, when the opportunity arose to buy a G600 Aspen acoustic amplifier, I simply couldn’t resist.
Read along while I go over every detail of this cool acoustic amp from 1993 or maybe 1994 as well as why I can’t seem to pin that date down.
Guild Model Four Amp
Todays journey into lunacy is my detailed review of this 
craptastic little import amplifier from 1980. Now, I don’t want to seem biased, but this little import transistor radio amplifier is about as far apart from the quality I’ve come to love and respect from Guild as listening to 128k MP3s through a pair of dollar store ear buds are from listening to Mozart on a Merrill-Williams turntable through a pair of Sennheiser HD800s delivered through a McIntosh MHA150. Actually, that’s ridiculous; this is worse.
Tag along while this Guild-loving reviewer lists all the reasons why you should never buy one of these adorable little wastes of money. (more…)
GAD’s Guitar Review Standards
Having written a fair number of guitar reviews, I figured I would document my steps in case anyone out there was curious. Additionally, I figured having a fair bit of transparency into the process would somehow had credibility to the entire affair. Really, though, I felt like writing this so I did. The end. Well, not really. I discovered that I was writing things like “The Beesly Book” and figured that I should specify what stuff like that means instead of writing an explanation in each review.
If you’re at all interested, here’s what its like for me to write a guitar review.
Guild G300 Tamarack Acoustic Amplifier
I scored this little amp from a new shop in Nazareth, PA which allowed me to drive there and save not only the Paypal fees, but shipping as well. I kind of went in blind having never played a Guild acoustic amp before, but he let me try it and all the knobs appeared to work so I walked out with a good deal on this circa 1993 Guild G300 Tamarack acoustic amplifier.
I tore it apart, gave it a look, fixed the fiddly bits, cleaned up the enclosure and put it through the review process. Let’s see what I was able to learn about this cool little acoustic amp from Guild.
Guild Timberline Acoustic Amplifiers
Around 1992 or so, Guild introduced the Timberline series of acoustic guitar amplifiers and only made them for a couple of years. Named after various trees and all but one made out of luxurious solid oak, these amps are quite eye-catching in the same way that hardwood encased cane-grill Mesa Boogies are. These are very classy looking amps and comments on various guitar forums often include statements like “this is the prettiest amp I’ve ever seen.” Well, maybe that’s not often said about the footstool shaped G1000 shown, but the rest get a lot of cosmetic praise.
Sadly, there is very little information about these amps out there and almost every forum post I see about them contains people looking for more information, so I took what I’ve learned and put it together into this article. (more…)