Anyone tweaked the Nomad 100 watt Channel One?

[Pillsbury Dough Boy]

Hiya All,

Has anyone tweaked the inside of their Nomad 100?...and before anyone starts...yes, I am well aware that it would cancel any warranty claim......I am losing the will to live with the horrendous channel one, compressed dead or bright sounding channel. I can live with channel two....but can no longer handle life with this amp! Wondering if anyone has had a go at "tweaking" a bit of life back into this! Randall, what did I do to deserve this?...I have owned a couple of Caliber 50's and a Mark 3A Simul class Combo and all three had a nice sparkly Fender warmth to the clean channel ( although the EV speaker could rip you in half at the right angle! ). The clean sound on channel one of the Nomad is neither....it's either brittle and harsh or compressed and spongy....it has no warmth to it....hard to explain in detail. It's a shame.... apart from the fact the 2 x12 Combo weighs about the same as a small town, it has been pretty well put together and could make a decent gigging tool....but I can't handle it anymore...no one wants to buy it, I can't gig with it as it's too heavy.....so might as well chop it up into firewood!.......

Help me please!

Best Wishes
PDB

 

[bgh]

Don't have a 100, I have a 45 1x12. My channel 1 is decent. It sounds better with my SG than it does my LP, but my guitars are like that. The Nomad preamp is unique in the sense that v1 uses both sides of the preamp tube as parallel input. I put a TAD 12ax7 in the v1 slot and the cleans became a lot richer.

The other thing is (and you are probably already aware of it) the tone controls are very interactive. The more you turn up the treble, the less impact the mids and bass have.

If I am playing something where I am the only instrument, I will set treble to taste, then bass (to get some bottom), and then set mids. I then go back an tweak the treble just a little each way to see how the mix of the three sit together.

If I am playing others, I still set treble first. But I swap the order of setting the mids and bass.

One thing that I did to help me learn just how interactive they are is this:
(1) Turn the bass to 0
(2) Max out the mids and treble
(3) Play a little (don't worry about the tone being good or bad)
(4) Turn the treble down a little, play some, and compare it to what you had before. Each time you turn it down, the mids should become more prominent in the mix.
(5) Rinse and repeat for the bass.

Doing something like that may sound kind of dumb, but it sure helped me get a grip on how the controls work together.

Plus, think of them like this: The treble does two things:
(1) It controls the amount of treble.
(2) It controls the amount of mids and bass in the mix.

One final thought, the manual for the Nomad is excellent (as are all of Mesa's manuals). It shows a lot of sample settings. They work out to be pretty good for starting points.

I hope this helps.
Thanks for reading.

 

[Pillsbury Dough Boy]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, nothing that I have never tried before. This is my 4th Boogie and I am aware how tricky these amps are to dial in. I couldn''t handle it anymore, and after working all day trying to sort a sound out I gave up, and and have now washed my hands of it. Bought a TA30 Combo yesterday which is exactly the tone and versatility the heavy weight Nomad combo isn't....to me anyway.

Rock on!
BR
A