Amp selection help

[Death Aflame]

I plan on buying a decent amp, and my budget is around $500(Canadian) what are some of the best choices out there for someone who enjoys playing extreme metal with touches of melody?

Also my current guitar is a Godin Freeway Classic, it works well enough(I love the feel of it) but I might consider changing the pickups in the future... Any tips would be a great help.

 

[Warheart666]

Well I don't have too much experience with a multitude of amps, but I have a Vox AD50VT 50 watt combo, bought it for $369 (USD) It's an excellent amp. It's a tube/solid state hybrid, and it's also a modeling amp. The tone is absolutely amazing, and you can dial in almost any sound, by tweaking around with the 11 amp models given. It's got a huge range of sounds, from buttery clean, to an extreme and tight distortion. Makes my relatively low line guitar (Ibanez RG170) really sound great. It's got a good number of tweakable effects too. Don't mean to sound like a salesman, but I really love the thing. Whatever you choose, don't go for the Marshall MG series, I have an MG15 (15 watt) combo, and it's the shittiest piece of shit I've ever played through.

 

[Death Aflame]

Hmm, I have heard that VOX aren't too good for metal but I went and read some reviews claiming it is much better than the Line 6 Spider II line which is similar. Are there any other brands/models I should be looking into?

 

[Warheart666]

Hmm, I have heard that VOX aren't too good for metal but I went and read some reviews claiming it is much better than the Line 6 Spider II line which is similar. Are there any other brands/models I should be looking into?

I dont know why, maybe the older models werent, but this Vox can definitely handle metal, and it is better than the Line 6, which I feel sounds too digitalish. Other models to look into could be the Peavey XXX combo. It's all tube, so it sounds amazing. I don't know if it'll come under your budget though.

 

[DreamWorker]

You should think about Line 6 amps. The spider II amps are great. FOr 500bucks you could buy for example the spider II 212 with 2x75 WATT. I have this amp and its fucking good. the sound is great and it looks pretty cool. just check out their homepage and listen to some examples. But its sounds much better in real life, so better go to a music store.
But if you need an amp to play some gigs, 500$ is not enough...