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Both are important.
Unless you pile on silly amounts of gain a Strat will not sound like a Les Paul as @Impmann says - or a Tele or 335 for that matter.
At the same time, beyond a certain point the amp and effects are more important than the guitar. If I have a decent Squier Tele, it will still sound great through a Lazy J. Purely on sound, I bet most of us would struggle to pick it out from a Custom Shop Tele in a blind test. If I put a Custom Shop Tele through a Valve Junior with its poxy little 8" speaker, it will sound a lot worse than the Squier through a Lazy J.
Those same Teles will also sound very different through a Deluxe Reverb or a Marshall Stack than they do through the Lazy J.
Both are important, but if I had a limited budget, I'd go for a Mexican Fender or a PRS SE through a good amp rather than a high end US guitar through a mediocre amp.
What amp you choose will of course depend on what type of voice you require - A hi-gain Boogie customer is generally a different customer to that who requires a clean Fender Twin
Many players will have 2 or more guitars to choose from for live work, be it down the Black Horse or at Wembley Stadium - But many will still only choose one amp for the set
I'd rather have a selection of guitars and one amp, as against less guitars and more amps
Personally I find that with an amp, that if I like the base tone,, coupled with a couple of pedals, then I'm happy and prefer to utilise different guitars, as required, for how they feel and sound, along with a different character that they produce - But if I'm not happy about how they play, then I'll never get a good sound that I'm content with
Ultimately it is about the relationship of all the components that are in the chain, but me and the guitar are the important starting point - garbage in garbage out might be a valid final point
The Hot Rod Deluxe is nearly £800 these days though. It's not a cheap amp.
HRD is actually a very good amp with a decent speaker. (The stock Eminence in the older ones does not count as decent). With something like a Weber 12F150, it sounds better than a lot of "boutique" amps. I only sold mine because it was too loud for my needs. Once you get to that kind of level it is a matter of taste though.
It's the guys who are putting a £2k guitar through a £200 amp who are missing out. If I had £1500 to spend, I'd go for a Mexican Fender through an HRD over a US Fender with a poxy little amp any day.
If you pushed me though, I'd probably still take a Classic Series Mexican Fender through a Lazy J than a Custom Shop Fender through an HRD.
Though thinking about it neither really matters when I think about some of the guitarists I’ve met who talk about “finding their tone” all of the time yet can’t play the entire way through a single song just a bunch of half learned out of tune riffs.
So now I'm just trying to decide between a Katana 50 and 100. I've tried one of them in the local guitar shop when previewing a couple of guitars, and I've watched hundreds of demos, and I just need to decide between the two. I've asked a couple of members for their experience with them.
That's me and roughly half the forum, you leave us alone... : )
For performans and feeling ofcourse guitar more important.
No sense at all in destroying the sound of the guitar/amp by using an excessive number of FX pedals. If you need a lot of FX pedals, there is something wrong with your core sound. Get that part right first. IMHO.
Nil Satis Nisi Optimum
I can totally see why someone would want a fuzz, low gain od, high gain distortion and at least 1 boost if not 2 for before and after your drives. It all depends what type of band you’re playing in.
In the last originals band I was in, that was the case. Any half-decent guitar and any half-decent amp would have been fine - in fact I quite regularly used provided backline - but some of the trademark sounds for some of the songs were in the pedals, and the music would have sounded very different without them, compared to with a different guitar or amp.
In general I think the guitar is more important than the amp too, assuming the amp has at least a usable solid clean tone. I like to get a crunch sound from the amp too, but it's not essential.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein