Low gain or high gain, which way did he go?
Despite the last posts, the last 6 months or so I have had a set of EH tubes in my Express v1 v2 and v3. They were put in there to be left and forgotten about. I needed to stop fucking with gear and play. I did. I played and listened and learned and compared. I was playing clean mostly and honing my chops and ears.
Long story short, the EH tubes turned out to be way to low gain ( or bad ) and I needed a boost pedal to get some distortion and sustain. It didn't click for a long time that there might be something missing cause I was playing clean mostly. But none of the high gain players at the jam wanted to jam the little mesa anymore. The burn channel was just compressed mush. No sustain.
It became obvious there might be a problem when I got to where I could solo and needed the gain and sustain, but didn't have it. I knew it was there and blamed the guitar as too low output and used a boost. But there was still something missing.
So since I had been good and took the time to learn the amp with one setup, I thought, OK, let's see if you have learned to hear anything and swapped out v1, v2 and v3.
Like disco lemonade there she was! Gain, volume, swirl, sustain.
I have a mesa JJ in the Reverb v5 and a Sovtek LPS in the PI v4. I put a Tung-Sol in v2, a Sovtek in v1 and a JJ in v3. It sounded amazing.
But low and behold, with that much gain, I had the volume drop out like I had that started this thread eventually after playing a while. Switching the face plate channel switch from Ch1 to CH2 and back fixed it this time. It was dramatic and obvious that there was a drop out and then a return of full volume.
The only thing in common with then and now was the amp and that one JJ tube. So out it came and in went a penta labs Chinese. The amp still sounds awesome, but let's see if this volume drop issue was a tube or the amp. If it's a tube, the problem is gone. I hope it was that JJ tube. The whole batch was crap it seems. I hope it's not a heat issue because of using the front end completely because mesa couldn't duplicate it when they had the amp. The tube being the issue makes more sense in light of that.
Thanks for reading.
