noodles
Well-known member
Needless to say I'm pretty pumped. The full black plate looks even better than I planned.
I only had time for about 30-45min before it got too late to make noise, but I was absolutely blown away. Mesa has corrected every little niggle that I had with the Road King.
Channel 1 clean has less gain, so it stays clean a lot longer. I able to turn up the gain to a little less then half, roll the channel volume to just past half, and things stay surprisingly clear. Before, I had to have the gain on a quarter and the channel volume, and it still wasn't this clean. Mesa talked about the Lonestar cleans being on this amp, and boy is it there, spank and all. I just need my C90 cab to hear them.
Channel 2 has more gain! The Brit mode absolutely snarls at you, it's so rude and your face. It has a wonderful Marshall-like flavor, I could play in an AC/DC cover band with this thing. Just crank it all up and go. When I backed off the gain, cranked the gain on the tube screamer, and stepped on it, I was rewarded with in your face barking crunchy feedback. I had to take the gain down more on both the amp and the pedal, and do some eq tweaking. You could play 80's thrash like this! The feedback wants to rip the guitar out of your hands.
Channel 3 and 4 are the same as I remember them, but a bit tighter. Mike's Triple has that extremely tight rhythm tone on 4 and singing highs on 3 that I just envied. I won't say the rhythm is there, but it is closer in that direction. It's a less fizz and lot more of that bark/roar that is just perfect for chunking away in a band setting. The Triple will always be tighter, though--sixteenth note palm muting is where it shines out. The lead tone is almost completely there, it just screams out of the amp. With the bass turned past half, it starts getting really thick, perfect for fat leads--I turned the presence up higher when doing this, just to keep stuff from mudding out. Roll the bass back, start turning up the treble, and fast runs just punch out like a machine gun. Vintage mode sounds great, but **** does the modern mode just fucking smokes. Dare I say that channel four is closer to channel 2 of an old two channel Dual.
I couldn't be happier with my decision. I spent a lot of time sitting on the fence about this, because I was really happy with the Road King. What if the new amp got here, and it wasn't as good? The opposite is what happened, and I couldn't be happier.
