Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami Dyce Kimura here. I’m a full time guitar instructor and performer, and I’m doing an in-depth review today, and a tutorial of the Peavey Vypyr. This is the VIP one, the 20 watt. I work as a guitar teacher and I teach all kinds of levels. This is the main amp that I usually tell my beginners to go buy. And so I just wanted to do a review on it, just to explain how to use this amp. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m going to show you how to turn it on and then how to set it up. And I always set up these amps for my students to make it really user friendly. So let’s just get into it.

I’m going to turn this amp on. It’s in the back. Let me turn it on. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m going to flip it on, you hear that speaker pop. And it just kind of does this light dance thing. And one time I thought it was broken and I realize it does that unless you plug it in. Once you plug it in it kind of normalizes. So, I guess that’s just telling you it’s ready to go. By the way, I’ve owned like six of these, and I had the older model too so I’m very comfortable with this amp and I highly recommend it, if you’re a beginner or even advanced or intermediate. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. If you’re a beginner, this is the best bang for your bucks, for your money in my opinion. You have so much versatile sound, with acoustic, with electric. I usually prescribe this for electric but it also facilitates acoustic now and even bass, which I will be able to demo to you before we’re done here.

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I also really strongly suggest this to people who are living in an apartment or living in a situation where you have to be very low in your volume because this amp sounds great at low volume. Not all amps sound great at low volume. There are a lot of amps that sound great at high volume and that’s actually relatively easy to do. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. But to sound good at low volume remains to be the challenge. So this amp is really good, clarity and bass and options with distortion and various effects. So this is actually a really complex amp. And I’m going to do a very basic review and overview of how to use this amp practically right when you get it out of the box. This amp is right out of the box and I’m going to show you how I like to set it up and you can go from there. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami.

Right here, this knob is the master volume. I’m just going to turn it up. Put it up to about there. That’s about point five. So right now I’m playing on a Fender Strat which a lot of my beginners buy the Strat so I’m playing on a Strat. I’ll also show you some tones and a Les Paul. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Those are the two guitars I will be using for this review. This amp sounds great with both single and humbucker with both Strat and Les Paul. I’m just going to stick with those two brands as far as guitars go because, I think that covers all that most beginners are playing through. Most of my beginners are playing through like Fender Squiers or Epiphones or something and then it’s plugged into this amp.

Basically I’m going to go down a list of how to use these buttons. You’ve got A, B, C and D which are your patches. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. If you were in A right now, and see it’s lit up to A and it’s red. If I push B it can also go to B, and if I push C, here’s C and if I push D, here’s D. So A, B, C and D are patches. Inside of each patch you have options. You have red, orange, yellow and green. Every single color is a different preset that you can store. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So, I like to just make four sounds for my beginners. I’m going to teach you how to make those four sounds. I’m going to give you a very basic clean sound. I’m going to give you clean with some modulations, like with some chorus and delay and reverb. And then we are going to have some crunch sound, and then a high gain lead sound. Those are your four sounds. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. That’s all we are going to do. And then you can just toggle through them, through this selector, and that’s going to make it really simple. This amp is actually very complex or it has complex capacities in terms of syncing with your computer and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. But I will be honest with you. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Most beginners don’t need all of that all stuff, and people that are on the level that know how to do that stuff usually don’t use this amp because, this is an entry level or entry priced amp at $129, is the going rate right now. So I just want to give you a very practical review on how to use the amp.

I’m going to color code this. I’m going to make green my clean. I’m going to make yellow my clean with modulation, orange is going to be my crunch and red is going to be my high gain. Notice that when you turn the amp on, it automatically gives you red and then it goes down the other way towards orange and then yellow and then green. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. But let’s work our way this way. So what do these mean? I already explained this column. BY the way these first two selections of A and B are also the electric option of patch bass, and then the C is acoustic and the D is bass. So if you don’t play acoustic and you just bought an electric guitar with an amp, then C and D don’t even pertain to you. Don’t even worry about it. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. You’re just dealing with A and B. If you’re in A and B and you just want four options, then you stick with A and hit the button four times, and you’re done. I’m just trying to make this simpler for you because there are so many options, that it can be confusing for beginners. So we’re in A in the green. I want to make this clean sound. These are my pedal options. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. These are my amp options. Over here is my gain options. And then I have delay and reverb. And then I push this knob, and these guys change. But I will explain that in a second. This is a bypass, that’s probably what you want. You see it at the top. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. If you turn this knob to about the left it rotates, and then it has varying degrees. So it’s at green and if I turn to the left, it’s turning red and then it moves. And then I turn to the left one notch and it didn’t move but then it got more intense in that direction. You really have to fiddle with this. There are so many minute ways of tweaking this thing. It could drive you crazy. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. But if you get used to it, it’s actually pretty cool. So let’s just go with bypass. Go ahead and light up the bypass which is right there. Then I’m moving to this knob and because we are going to go clean, I’m going to select this one that say’s twin. Notice I just pushed this button and it can turn from green to orange to red. So in general, we are going to make green the most gentle sound and then orange gets more intense with the distortion and red is like the really angry lead guitar sound. So we’re going to go with the green. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. And we are going to bypass this side and we’re in A with the green. Hopefully you are on the same page.

Adjust your master volume to like one or a little less than one. Roll up your guitar volume to see what it sounds like. There you go. It should be nice and clean. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. If you don’t know what just happened, I’m going to reboot this amp and do it again. And if you do know what happened, bear with me, it will take me two seconds.  Also see a blog I recently wrote about advanced guitar lessons here.

The amp reboots. I’m going to go to green here. This is selected at bypass. This is selected at twin and then we are going to push to green. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Let’s see what it sounds like. There it is. Very simple. I hear a little delay on there. I’m going to just leave that delay. I like it. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m done. That’s it. I’m going to push this button (this A), I going to push it and hold it. You see how it flashes? And now it’s flashing. I’m going to push it and hold it again, it continues to flash and then it stops flashing, and then now it’s saved. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. That’s the saved preset of a nice, clean sound. There is a little bit of reverb and delay. It doesn’t really bother me, so I’m just going to leave it on. And this is very low volume. Like I said, I really do, suggest this amp because, it’s great for bedroom volume, for beginners and for apartment living. Now, I showed you how to preset this A to be this clean sound. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Let’s see if it really worked. So I’m going to turn off the amp. The amp is off people. I’m going to turn it back on, and now what comes up? Automatically that red boot, so I’m going to toggle this over to the green and let’s see if the preset is saved. It sure did. We’re good. That’s it. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. It’s that simple.

Listen, there is a lot more that this amp can do but I’m showing you the basics. I just want to get you rocking right away. So this is A. For this whole tutorial, I’m going to stay in A. And I’m just going to hit this button and toggle between these colors. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is all you need to do to get this amp rocking for you. The next option. I’m going to go to the orange. Let’s just hear what it sounds like. Okay, that’s some pretty serious gain. It’s crazy loud. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. It’s really loud and harsh sounding. So let’s mellow this thing out. What I’m going to do with this selector is, I’m going to go and put it on comp/clean. Do you see it right there? Right there, comp/clean. And I’m going to select it until it turns green. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So it’s red, and then it’s green. So what does green do? That’s fine with me, so now we are going to move on over here. By the way, notice you can either do green, or red. So I’m there and I’m going to turn it one time and it went to red, and then I turn it to green. And I think that’s toggling between compression and chorus. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I want the chorus so I want the green. If you don’t know what compression and chorus is, don’t worry about it. Just put it on green and you will be fine.

Next, we are going back to this twin sound. So let’s go back to the twin, there. Now we are back at twin. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami.

So now, you are asking what these knobs do. Well pre-gain is your sensitivity. I’m going to leave that there. We’re going to address that on the next one. This is your EQ, it sound’s good to me. These presets actually sound darn good, so if it’s not broken don’t fix. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is your post-gain which is like your channel output. Which by the way, you want to match all your output levels for all four presets to be the same. Actually going to bring it down a little bit. That way, if you want to bring up the master you can. Notice I am only at one. By the way this amp sounds really good up to about three, and then there’s nothing going on past three. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. If you turn it all the way up, it just breaks up and distorts and it doesn’t actually increase. So the only increment of play here is between zero and three. I just want you to be aware of that. One thing you don’t want to do is blow this speaker. I’ve blown many speakers, because I think I said it in the beginning of the video that I’ve had this amp. I’ve bought like six of them, and the reason I keep replacing is because the electronics never failed. The speaker always blew. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I used to teach full time on these amps in an apartment. I’m in a house now. I used to live in an apartment and teach. And one would be my amp, and one would be the student amp. And I would play eight hours a day very loud on these amps. And I would play it as a professional, and I would blow the speaker within six months. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. The reason I said as a professional is because most beginners and intermediate students, they’re just not going to play in an aggressive kind of way that’s going to put a serious demand on the frequency of these speakers to really blow the speaker. A professional will. That may not make much sense to you so let me give an example. Your mom, let’s say drive a Toyota Tercel car and she drove it fine, and needed to change the tiers every two-three years, and gets the alignment done once a year and it’s fine. One day she loans her car to let’s say a professional race car driver like Mario Andretti, and by the time he drove the car for like two, three hours at full speed in a race, you need all new tiers, and shocks, and shock absorbers, the tiers were completely worn out and peeled out and melted. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. You can imagine. So the amount of wear and tear a pro will put on something is going to be greatly way more than a beginner.

So I would play these amps 8 hours a day, five or six days a week and after about six months of that kind of abuse I would start to feel the speaker start to go a little bit in the low end. You just barely hear the magnets separate from the bass. That’s not going to be the case for most beginners. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. You can usually use this amp for a couple of years and it will be fine. Anyway, I just wanted to be upfront with why I bought so many of these amps, but the electronics never failed me. And they are cheap. Usually I could just buy a new one. And I feel like I’ve got my money’s worth out of it.

So we are here. Beginner Electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is all fine. I’m going to push this button, and notice the lights changed. I’m going to do it again. I’m going to push it, and the lights change. That’s your usual setting, and bam. The lights change. Now what happens is, these knobs at the top are pre-gain, EQ, low mid high and then post-gain. But the bottom is modulation which is going to correlate to this knob. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. The degree to which you dial this in. And then these two knobs are delay. Delay time, and delay level and then this is reverb. So you can toggle between here, which basically involves volume and EQ and then this one which is going to be your modulation, which is a fancy way of saying the degree to which you dial your effect. Here is your delay and here is your reverb. If you don’t understand what I just said, don’t worry about it. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. It’s fine. You can just leave it alone.

That looks good. You can lessen the amount of chorus. There is obviously chorus in there, I can put a little more depth in. Let me just show you what I’m talking about. If I turn this way up, let’s say, you’re noticing how it has a very intense whirly sound now. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. And if I bring it all the way down, it’s practically non-existent. And if I bring one side up and leave the other side down, that’s really non-existent either but as I slowly dial in this other side, you hear that whirliness which is kind of cool actually. I like that. I actually kind of like this so I’m going to just let that go and get out of there. So I’m just going to push that button and I’m out of there. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is too much distortion for me. So I’m going to push this button, see how it’s on red, I push it and now it’s on green. And now this is actually too clean for me. So I’m going to push this and it went to orange. That’s actually perfect. So I’m going to take this opportunity here to teach you something about this knob. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. You can either select this to be green, orange or red. Just like this is green, orange, red and yellow, this is green orange and red. Green is the most docile setting. Orange is more intense, and red will rip your face off.

We already did green on this earlier setting being green. Now we are on orange so let’s make this also orange. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. That’s just a coincidence by the way. You don’t have to make everything color coded. That’s kind of cool. By the way, this is my student’s amp and I’m in the process of setting it up for my student. So I’m kind of keeping him in mind, he’s a beginner. I want to give him some nice fun sounds to play on but nothing that’s going to cripple or cramp his style. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So this looks all good. I like it. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to save it like I showed you. I’m just going to hold it down. You see that light strobe, and it is strobing, and I hit it again, it strobes and it stops. Let’s see if it took. Let’s turn it off and back on again. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. See now we are back on to where we were with the red. It’s just beating, and flashing and it’s done. So now, we are going to go to that orange and let’s see what we have. By the way, if you are color blind, this might be a little annoying. But it’s there. It’s the yellow. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So what do we have so far?

We have this nice green sound. Notice how dry and simple that is. And then we are going to have this nice yellow, which is a little more complex. There we go. So now we are going to get a nice crunch sound like an ACDC kind of deal. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So we want orange. See, that’s orange. Let’s hear it. Okay, that just sounds terrible. I can tell you what the problem is. It’s right here. So they have this preset to be some kind of acoustic deal thing which is really not working for me right now. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to put this on bypass, so come on up to bypass. See that? By the way just because this is here doesn’t mean you have to use it. This is allowing you to both select the instrument and also select the stomp box. But if you do a good job in setting up your amp, your gain, your modulation, you may not need any kind of stomp box. So I just want to be clear about that. Because you don’t want to be over kill. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami.

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So we are not getting a whole lot of signal here. What I’m going to do is move to a nice ACDC sound. Let’s try this 605. These are all names like head nods to different types of amps. The 605 is a Marshall Plexi. That’s a nice big sound actually. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m going to take this opportunity to switch guitars, and I’m going to get my Les Paul. If you don’t have a Les Paul, don’t worry about it. This amp sounds great with everything. But this is just going to let me give you a more thorough kind of sound here. That sounds great. We’re at orange now. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is bypass. We’re at the 6505. You can hear the heavy delay. You hear that? That’s some heavy delay. What if you wanted to edit that? You are going to hit tis button here and notice these two changed. Why is this one dark and off, is because this one is on bypass, but if you turn this on to something, see this one just lit up there. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. But I’m going to keep that on bypass, because I don’t want that. It’s still lighting up. Let me just check here. Okay, then I need to push here, and now it’s off. This amp is tricky. It confuses even me sometimes. Here’s the delay if I roll this completely off, it gone. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is reverb so if I put this up it gives me a bathtub kind of sound. That’s not always good. Especially in rock, you don’t want to always have too much reverb. It will kind of kill your thunder.

I suppose that’s okay. The delay, depending on what you’re doing could actually bother me. And if that’s the case I just need to go in my settings and just roll it down or make another preset. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. But for the sake of this video, I’m just going to leave that delay on there. Usually it’s fine. It’s kind of cool. It makes you sound fuller. The highs are a little harsh. I’m going to hit this button here, and look at where the highs are. Notice the lows are all the way up and the mids are way back. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. What if I roll those highs back a hair? Okay, that’s a little better. These presets they have your guitar pickup in mind. My Les Paul has been modified so highs are extremely bright. So that could have been why there are too bright and I had to adjust the amp but if that’s not the case with you then its fine so if it doesn’t bother you don’t feel the need to go change something. So I like it. I going to push this, its strobing. I’ll push it again and it done. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So let’s take a look at the sound. Let’s just double check it. I’m going to turn it off, turn it back on. You feel the speaker pop when it comes on. I’m going to go to that orange. Make sure its orange. That’s it. Sounds pretty bad to the bone if you ask me. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Okay lets go for the high gain which is always fun. Going for that red so I’m just going to see what’s in stock here. That’s really loud. Probably overloading the speaker, so what I’m going to do is bring down the master volume. So I believe it’s this thing post gain. I’m going to roll this down. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. By the way you always want all four of these settings to be congruent, the volume to be the same. You don’t want a drastic drop or a drastic spike when you switch channels. You want them to be congruent. Let’s say you’re playing kind of quietly and you don’t want to wake up the neighbors, then you hit a button and then everything jumps you start feeding back and the dogs barking and the cats meowing and the neighbors are pounding on the walls and stuff, so you want to be in control of your instrument and your amp and the volume it’s going to put out. So be aware of what these presets are doing volume wise. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami.

So here is what we got. Notice I rolled that down to post gain. That’s fine. I’ll leave it there for now until I finalize. Let’s listen to Triple X. Really bright. How about sixty five thirty four that’s a lot better. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is so mean and angry. How about this budda? Sounds like Ted Nugent. I kind of like the budda. Strong mids there. Let’s listen to classics for a second. British. That’s a little harsh. I kind of like this budda. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Maybe I’ll tweak that. Lots of mids as you can see it.

All these settings they are just dialed in from here. You can turn this into anything by the way so I’m actually going to roll back the mids right here. I like that we can get a little more lows and we’ll leave the highs. This is really mean and angry. Sometimes you feel like you need to do that. This is definitely probably going to lead playing so I don’t mind a lot of delay. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So I’m going to push this button and I’m going to roll up that delay, and let’s hear it. And it’s most certainly lead. I’m going to give me some reverb too. A little more. Yeah, that’s kind of got a red house sound to it. So I like it, I’ll take it, it’s that simple. I’m going to save it, and again, and that’s it. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. Let me double check it. Turn it off, pop it back on and it’s going to come up red which is my lead sound. That sounds great man. I see students that buy this amp and they bring it to my class and their eyes are just wide with wonder when they hear what this amp can do. It sounds amazing. I mean you can get all kinds of awesome sounds just with one patch folks. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m going to show you a little bit of options here.

So now we’re going to have a little fun. Going back to the green this should be a nice clean. And if we roll this knob to the right, that’s your clean chorus. I’m going to go another click and that’s tremolo. I can put that on and let’s say I’m just having fun with it and I decide I don’t want to keep that setting. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I messed around and I don’t want to keep it. I can just toggle out of it and I go back there and I’m back where I used to be and I can mess this thing up again. This is kind of fun actually, if I show you something. Let’s say that I had my fun with that setting and I’m done. Just turn it off and put it back on and click this back to green and that’s it. I’m back to clean. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I didn’t have to turn the amp off. I could have just toggled the switch but I’m showing you, if you’re desperate that’s all you have to do. Just turn the amp off and it’ll reset the way you wanted it to. For some of you I’m going to show you this acoustic setting. By the way before I do watch this. I’m still in the green. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I’m still in the clean sound right. Let’s just say I want this sound, that’s really nice. I just want it to be more aggressive. Watch I’m just going to push this and it’s green. I’m going to light it up to orange. How about red? Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I really like that. You may not even need to move from there you could just toggle this button and that’s all you need to do on this amp ever. Because you could be clean, and then you could be crunch, and then you could be like a high gain. Then you’re done. That’s how you use the amp. There’s more things that this thing can do but it gets really overwhelming for beginners and I have the heart of a teacher. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I don’t want you to focus on that because I’d rather you focus on playing guitar.

There’s something I really do want to show you though and this is the auxiliary input. This is awesome. Watch this. What you’re going to do is you’re going to plug and auxiliary three and a half millimeter cable (3.5mm) to stereo. It’s called a pin jack or a stereo pin jack and it’s also called the three point five millimeter (3.5mm) jack. You are going to put it in the AUX in and I hook this into my computer out and I’m going to play a track and I’m going to play it through these speakers. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So now I’m playing a backing track off YouTube and I’m playing it to the speakers. Then I can play lead guitar to the track or anything you want, but watch this. Now you can plug this side into anything. You could plug it into an iPhone, you could plug it into a mp3 player, an iPod and you just run it into there and you’re done. And let’s say at the same time your mom or your wife or your roommate, let’s say they are like turn it down and you want to crank, well you can plug in some headphones and you just put these suckers in. You just plug them in. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is also a stereo pin jack. I put it in the phones and boom there it is. And they’re in the head phones I don’t know if you can hear that but there you go. They’re in there. Now I warn you with the headphones you got to make a lot of adjustments. I brought down the volume, you may have to change the EQ. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is all dialed in to match this eight inch speaker but once you get in headphones it’s a way smaller speaker. You may have to redial your sound. So that’s a few of the options.

I have something else I want to show you that you can plug in your acoustic. Let me do that real quickly for you. I’m going to plug in my Taylor 814 and if you have an electric acoustic you can plug it in like so and I’m going to actually hit this C patch which is acoustic, and it’s already pre-set. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. This is just straight out the box folks. Now I’m bringing the volume up a lot. Let’s see if I hit this button, no I’m not going to hit any buttons. I’m going to roll this up and there you go that’s what I need to happen. And then I just save it and then save it again. Now you have a nice acoustic sound. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. So like I said the real trick to this you can just keep pushing this button on all the presets. And you can have a great time.

One last thing I want to show you. You can hold these two knobs down together and that let you tune. I’m tuning. That’s in tune because it’s green. The green lit up. See that one is a little flat. I’m going to bring it up. There it is. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. And see over here the light says G, see the note it says G so it’s a G note and it’s just a hair sharp. That’s how you tune and then you hit them both again and it’s fine. So that’s how it works, that’s the Peavey Vypyr VIP 1. I don’t recommend getting a bigger Vypyr. If you need more volume you should probably get a tube amp. But this is great for bedroom volume, for beginners. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I myself I’m an advanced player but I have been using it for lessons and for my amp and for student amps as well. It’s so much fun. Make sure to subscribe, like the video if you liked, it or appreciated it. I want to hear your comments. If you have questions leave them in the comments section. I will answer them. Beginner electric guitar teacher in Miami. I read all my comments and I appreciate them. I hope this helps you out, and I will see you on the next video.