I've found small combos are great for recording (yeah I know, it's pretty common knowledge but still worth mentioning).
One of my friends recently got a Peavy Classic 30...oh man. That thing is so easy to record. Everytime we're struggling with getting the right tone, we plug that thing in and it almost always does the trick. The great thing about small combo amps like that is the sort of natural compression they have. They can only put out so much output, so you get the amp cranking, dial in the gain on your mic pre, then go mess with the settings on the amp. You get the right sound on the amp and then go back to your pre to find that your at almost the exact same level. Everything above a certain point is just saturation/breakup/etc...
That's where the Classic 30 is really nice in my opinion. You've got 3 different gain controls. The "Normal" knob which is like the master volume, a "Pre" knob which I assume controls preamp gain, and a "Post" knob. Using different combinations of those 3 knobs give you a pretty wide variation of sounds.