Cleans lost on Mark III Blue Stripe?

[bpm91]

Noticed this this past week or so.... seems I've lost the pristine/fenderish cleans I had. I've fiddled left and right with the eq'ing for the past couple of days... just feels like it lost the headroom and it overdrives faster at low volumes on R1.

As far as powertubes go, I replaced the outside tubes with Mesa's NOS Siemens EL34s a month or so ago and that didn't affect the cleans... could my remaining middle 6L6s be the problem?

 

[edward]

May be obvious (and dumb), but I have to ask anyway: did you inadvertantly flip the switch to Class A?

Edward

 

[bpm91]

May be obvious (and dumb), but I have to ask anyway: did you inadvertantly flip the switch to Class A?

Edward

Any question is valid...

I've switched everything... I made sure I was on Simul-class... I'm going to pop in some spare 6l6s when I get home from work.

 

[phyrexia]

Sure you're not in Deep or R2 or something? Or perhaps a footswitch problem? I built a footswitch for r1/lead and r1/r2 in the same box and it gave me problems similar to yours.

 

[bpm91]

I built a footswitch for r1/lead and r1/r2 in the same box and it gave me problems similar to yours.

Good point. I have a custom footswitch that controls r1/r2/r3/reverb, so I'll unplug that too. I had that footswitch before this issue, so we'll see.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Sidenote: Has anyone seen a Lonestar Classic head (similar to John Petrucci's) in any of the stores?

 

[Octavarius]

I built a footswitch for r1/lead and r1/r2 in the same box and it gave me problems similar to yours.

Good point. I have a custom footswitch that controls r1/r2/r3/reverb, so I'll unplug that too. I had that footswitch before this issue, so we'll see.

Any other suggestions are welcome.

Sidenote: Has anyone seen a Lonestar Classic head (similar to John Petrucci's) in any of the stores?

You mean a Lonestar short head like the one on the bottom right in the photo below? No, but I bet you can order one easily through a dealer.

 

[phyrexia]

As far as lonestars go, the combos are waaay more popular than the heads, so you'd be hard pressed to find a dealer who's ordered a head, except maybe in some of the very large markets (nyc/chi/la?).

 

[bpm91]

Sure you're not in Deep or R2 or something? Or perhaps a footswitch problem? I built a footswitch for r1/lead and r1/r2 in the same box and it gave me problems similar to yours.

This was the exact problem. Thanks much for sharing the experience... now can you tell me how you resolved this problem to make the footswitch usable again?

 

[phyrexia]

I believe the problem is that the r1/r2 and r/lead footswitches cannot share a ground. I built a two button footswitch and I used a send/return cable. It had a TRS (stereo) plug on one end and two mono 1/4 plugs on the other end. The TRS end plugged into the footswitch. Basically clicking one switch would change the sound in the other channel if you were playing there. Kinda hard to explain the sound difference - I think essentially the amp is running two channels at once.

I think the only way to remedy it is to use two separate cables.

 

[edward]

I had asked Mesa about this some time ago, and if that is, indeed, your problem, it is because the R1 and R2 have to use separate grounds ...separate cables is the solution I chose. This is what I had to do when making a footswitch work to switch between R1/R2 and Lead channels.

Edward