impressed with formula

[nnajar]

I'm very impressed with the formula preamp. my only gripe is that it's slightly noisy. not unmanageable, but it could have a lower noise floor.

The clean is impeccable. lead 1 gives a nice mark series lead sound- good for santana-ish stuff. neck pickup and roll off the tone and you're there. you can also get a nice stratty blues breakup thing here. lead 2 works very well for a standard rock sound. there's no modern sounds in here, but it does have a good amount of gain- it's just voiced more along the regular rock side of things. all this versatility in one rackspace is a huge plus. I'm running it with a mesa 5050 stereo poweramp and a pair of CAA 1x12 cubes. I have the formula and 5050 in a 3space shock rack so I can just take that as a head if I want.

I also have an 8space effect rack that I can hook up to the "head"rack. It has my wireless, an interface for connecting everything, an RJM effect gizmo, a pedal tray with a tuner, phase 90, compressor and chorus (and pedal power 2 and rjm line mixer), lexicon mpx1 for reverb and delay, and a tech21 rpm preamp for my acoustic. it's all controlled with a pedalboard that has an rjm mastermind midi pedal, teese picture wah and visual sound volume pedal, and a breakout box that sends power, midi and audio from the rack interface. it's a pretty streamlined rig with a good bit of versatility, and it can be setup in less than 3 minutes!

 

[daveyboogie]

Nice rig! I enjoyed owning my Formula too. As you say, the cleans are something special. I was stupid to sell it really.

Do you know if yours has had the 'Andrew mod'?

 

[talltxguy]

Glad to hear that. I've always been interested in picking one up but have heard that the distorted channels sound cheesy. I've never heard one or played through one.

As I recall, it does NOT have any op amps or diodes...correct?

 

[nnajar]

Nice rig! I enjoyed owning my Formula too. As you say, the cleans are something special. I was stupid to sell it really.

Do you know if yours has had the 'Andrew mod'?

I don't know. I bought it on ebay and it was not advertised as having any mods.

I had heard/read that the gain sounds sucked, so I was surprised when I hooked it up. the thing is though, it is NOT a rectifier. but it has plenty of gain. I think when people dog these, it's because they were expecting something else. and the other thing is, with a component system, the power amp makes a HUGE difference in your final sound. you have to have a decent poweramp or your preamp is going to sound like ***. and the formula is not an expensive pre. especially these days. so I would be willing to bet that many of the people who gave it terrible reviews were using cheap, shitty power amps and wondering why it sounds like ***.

I use mark iv's on the road and honestly this thing to me sounds better and definitely more versatile than the mark iv.

 

[daveyboogie]

I modded my Formula just to see what would happen and overall, I think I prefered it with the mod... It doesn't really alter the tone as such but I found that the mod made the EQ more usable with higher gain settings on the Lead channel. I could dial in more bass without things sounding muddy and high/mids were less scratchy and brittle.
http://forum.grailtone.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=11262&p=78316&hilit=+andrew+mod#p78316
Another thing often overlooked is that the Formula is actually not a 'bad' recording preamp. I found it was great if I wanted to DI guitar straight into the desk when recording drums or something so guitar from my cab wouldn't bleed into the drum mikes. Then later on, if I wanted to, I could play the DI guitar track back into my power amp and re-record using a mike infront of the cab to get the power amp / speaker tones. Strnge thing hearing your rig playing its self!
I agree with you though- I think the Formula is given some bad press simply because it doesn't cost $1000... For an entry level pre you could do a hell of a lot worse.