heartbreaker tones

[pennman]

Im very new to this forum, i bought my first boogie a year ago; a heartbreaker. i am crazy about this amp but dont see much talk on this forum about them. i know they were not produced for long, but theres got to be some other folks out there who own these and i just thought it would nice if you could share some of your favorite settings with me. with all the options this thing has to offer, i havent fully explored her yet. on a side note, ive tried el-34s and 6l6s with it, but have yet to plug in some 6v6s. anyone out there give this a shot? how did it sound?

 

[MrBear]

Hey there, welcome to the forum! I'm not sure if you're still checking this post or even still have the Heartbreaker, but for what it's worth I've tried EL-34, 6L6 and 6V6 tubes in my Heartbreaker and stuck with the 6V6's. I feel that the 6V6 tubes kind of deliver a good Fender-ish vibe to the amp, but still can be driven to some pretty decent rock and hard rock tones when you spend some time playing with the controls and adding an external fuzz/overdrive/distortion pedal. I will say that I liked EL-34's a lot better with my Gibson SG and 6L6's for my PRS Custom 24, but my Fender AVRI '62 Strat responds best to the 6V6's. You will NOT get a metal tone without mods to the amp or a pedal (I use a Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive).

It is a challenging amp in that every single control seems to have a strong effect on your sound, and the amp is inherently bassy to start with. The only drawback that I see to 6V6's in this amp is that some say you should only use the Tweed Variac option when running these tubes. I don't fully understand the reasoning behind this (I'm not very technical-minded) but there are those on this forum that know the Heartbreaker very well and could help you out with those kind of specs. Monsta Tone is a big Heartbreaker fan and offers some pretty cool mods out of his repair shop for it, so he'd be someone to contact with questions or repair/mod work.

 

[RR]

Shoot, if I saw Heartbreaker that's affordable, I'd jump on it. It gots my Mark II tone and much more like dual channel independent tone controls, rectifier switchable, tweed switch ...

I think you have to lower the internal voltage to use 6V6s that's why the "tweed" setting is recommended.

There's plenty of discountinued MESAs that still sought after like:

Mark IIC+, Trem-o-Verb, Blue Angel, Maverick ... just to name a few.

 

[jonamojo]

Love my heartbreaker will never let it go, reverb sucks but thats why I have a 74 twin. I modded channel 2 to marshall specs but ended up going back to original specs, just use the tone controls.

 

[Monsta-Tone]

I really miss my DC-10 for seriously sick overdrive tones, but my Heartbreaker is one of the finest amps I've ever owned!

:lol: Of course, it's had a few upgrades! :lol: