this weekend, my husband and i went to a new (to us) restaurant for lunch and decided to pop in our favourite local guitar shop just to poke around and get informed about amps for our at home performances and noodling. we have two old peavey's from who knows when that we've been longing to upgrade. our general options were solid state or tube amps... i had half a thought about solid state lighting, but fortunately it was only half a thought as i am on vacation from work! it does me almost no good whatsoever to read about the technology behind things like instruments or amplifiers or cameras or camera lenses... i need to experience them first. after about an hour of plugging in to a bunch of amps, we went with a vox 15W tube amp with suuuper badass distortion abilities and a really great warm sound on the clean channel. we came home and plugged in my SG and played for about an hour and at some point it occurred to me that you might be able to hear it from outside our house... so i went on the front porch and HOLY CRAP. it was SO LOUD. i hope our neighbors won't mind us shreddin' on weekend days but at least we know to keep it quiet at night. makes me long for the days of knowing that one guy with a padded basement or garage whose parents and neighbors were apparently totally cool with everybody making way too much noise...