Lovin' the Rockman

As I've mentioned, I'm slowly working my way back into music. Until recently, for any guitar playing I was using an old classical guitar I have lying around. However, a couple of weeks ago, my old bandmate Wayner let me borrow one of his Jackson guitars and his Marshall cab to play around with.

This has been great! I had forgotten how nice an electric feels - and reacquainting myself with a little distortion has been nice. The kids and I are having a blast. However, with the kids around, I haven't had a chance to crank it up and get that old feeling of a blastingly loud G chord as it rattles your teeth and ruffles your pant legs. Enter the Rockman...

For those uninitiated, the Rockman is a headphone guitar amp that was originally designed/built by Tom Scholz of the band Boston (he was also an MIT trained engineer).

I remembered that I still had Wayne's Rockman from way back (1989 or so) sitting in a box in the closet, so I decided to bring it out and give it a try.  Well, let me tell you... I forgot how great this thing sounds!  Throw on some headphones, crank it up and suddenly you have the _exact_ chorus/echo guitar sound of Boston.

Loud, kickin, rockin, nice.

The cool thing about the Rockman is how well designed/thought out/built these things were.  Little things like having an aux input (so you could play along with other input like a tape/cd player) and multiple headphone outputs.  Also, it had such a clean signal you can even use it for recording.  Just a great design.