My Electra Dyne arrived yesterday. Signature required and I was not home. My wife was driving home and saw the UPS truck driving out of the neighborhood and chased him down. Sure enough, there it was. That’s why I married her. So you know where I’m coming from, I’ve been in the same classic rock band for 28 years (that’s not a typo). Drummers and keyboardists have come and gone every 5-10 years like they always do, but the main group has stayed together. I like a Brit sound akin to AC/DC, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Bad Co., but with an edge. That’s usually what I’m looking for in an amp. This is my third Mesa amp (have owned Dual Rec, and Ace). I haven’t played anything extensively in the $2k+ boutique amp lineage so can’t really compare to super high end amps.
It was a big box, all 57.9 lbs of it. I thought I had traded my rabid dog (Stiletto) for a pure bred lab. What I saw in the box was a pitbull. It was a big, black, menacing looking monster. Elegant and mean all at the same time. They should ship this with a black leather collar with silver spikes on it. I’ll try and not do the “I own it so I’m going to love it regardless” type of review. Anything in italics is taken from the Electra Dyne manual. So I grabbed a vodka and Grape Crush (don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it), and put ED on top of my 2-12 Roadster cab…..
Mesa says it was a prime directive for design to be straightforward and simple. This is 3 different amplifiers on one platform, not 3 different settings on one amplifier. Clean, vintage low is a brit medium gain (classic Brit chunk meets the sophistication and cultured poise of Simul-Class), and vintage hi gain (like a leather-wrapped baseball bat or a velvet hammer). Or as they say in the manual, the Vintage Hi connects your hands to a pressure-squeezed firehose of liquid, molten gain. It’s a “Boogie-ized Brit gain”.
Clean: the manual says inspired by “black face era” and built off the architecture of Mark I/IV, and the Mesa rep says it’s like Lone Star. I don’t know because I’ve never owned any of those, but this is the nicest clean I’ve ever heard. With volume (gain) up until noon, it’s thin, clear, and sparkly. Noon-3:00 brings in bass and mids for a full yet still beautiful balanced sparkle/low, and past 3:00 it begins to clip. 45W clips even better. Nice highs, breathy lows, nothing harsh going on here. I’m not a clean afficionado but I can’t really imagine a better clean channel. It sounded good with my humbuckers, but my Strat never sounded so good. Really gorgeous, clear, full. Reverb sounded great, I really missed that in my Stiletto. I still like it with a slight compressor on it (Tone Press) to even things out, but you could live without it because it’s pretty smooth as is.
Vintage Lo: in the lower volume (gain) regions, it’s a darker bluesier type of thing. Not exactly my cup of tea but I could see useful for some styles. It’s when you pass the noon/1:00 mark that this mode not only increases in gain, but the whole palette changes into a brighter, fuller, somewhat more dimensional punch you in the gut mode. At first I liked Hi Gain for the brighter & fuller characteristic, but I discovered Lo Gain gets that character too, it just has to be set a little higher. Mesa may call this med Brit crunch, but it sounds to me this middle realm of lo gain is like Angus stepped on his overdrive. Mesa’s jaded idea of mid crunch is someone else’s idea of high gain. Cranked the gain on this is as much as I’d ever use in a lifetime for rhythm work. Once past 1:00-2:00, it’s like a blistering huge distortion, like you just plopped your hand on a burning stove and you’re getting ready to scream.
Vintage Hi: your blistering hand just starting oozing pus now. Searing, big *** distortion. Now remember, this is coming from a classic rock mind so my idea of distortion may not be yours. Outside of thrash metal I can’t imagine what you would do with this gain except for soloing. I think for now I’m going to like Lo Gain for rhythm, and hit Hi Gain for solo or when I need to take it up another 20% to the classic rock edge. There seems to be a slight volume gain here too from lo gain, or it’s an illusion because the sound just go so much bigger and perhaps “harmonic”.
Channel Switching: here’s the issue. For the first 30 minutes I was seriously thinking I was going to send this amp back. I tried to find my crunch mode, which is gain in the 10-noon range. But when you switch to clean, the volume drop is noticeable. I’d be playing a clean passage and step into Lo Gain and it was like holy crap, that’s loud and huge. I tried everything: only using my Tone Press on clean with the level set higher to compensate for volume loss, hitting a boost when in clean mode, using Lo Gain and backing off the volume on my guitar for clean (which is a very useable clean by the way – nice with just a touch of fur). But I don’t want to do all of that fussing, I just want to hit a switch and be there. How could Mesa put a product out that did this? So I said to myself, “self, this is an RTFM issue” (Read The Fuc!#*ng Manual). I love Mesa manuals. I put them right up there with a Carl Hiaasen novel or the articles in Playboy. Well sure enough, the manual clearly states this amp is about compromises and makes no excuses for it. If settings are crafted with priority in mind, a surprisingly low level of compromise is experienced even while great footswitching performance attained. There may always be some small level of compromise between the sounds, but given the simplicity of navigation and the quality of Tone achieved, the Electra Dyne wins hands down in the most Tone for the least Tweak arena. So as it turns out, with volume (gain) in the 1-2:00 region, the modes are pretty balanced. The problem is, you go from clean to a pretty searing gain in Lo Gain, and lose the middle ground. It may turn out ok, I haven’t done this in a band setting yet. But it’s a potential issue if you’re looking for the plexi type of crunch in between modes. 90W mode seems to help keep the big sound and back off the distortion a bit. I can however get an ultimate crunch in this amp going by diming the volume in clean mode, or backing the volume way down in Hi Gain mode, but there goes the channel switching options. I wouldn’t be able to effectively maintain clean without some boost pedal, or using the volume pot on my guitar, etc. There is still some room here to work with – I can still play with the volume (gain) and probably find the right balance. As for now I’m clean, Xotic AC to give clean a little hair, Lo Gain and Hi Gain with the volume around 1:00. This will take a touch of work because it seems the volume/master controls are very sensitive so there are a lot of options to work with.
EQ: sharing the eq stack is not a problem. It’s like Mesa reconfigured how the eq knobs work in each of the 3 modes. Mid in clean does not behave like mid in hi gain for example. So settings in the 11-1:00 range seem to be optimal for all modes, if that makes any sense. The eq’s are more subtle than Stiletto. The range of lo/mid/high isn’t so drastic, which I like. And treble is not just treble. Increasing treble increases treble while reducing bass/mid, and reducing treble reduces treble but also seems to increase bass/mid. This is easy to work with and I don’t mind not having to tweak eq across modes for optimum performance. Less is more in my mind, as long as the "less" is "more" that is.
Tubes: shipped with Mesa’s preferred 6L6. Big, lush, sparkly, and thick and brutal at the same time. I like it much more than other 6L6’s I’ve tried in other amps. I put in some EL34’s and it gave a much simpler, straightforward, tighter type of tone which I liked. Maybe it just felt more like home coming off Stiletto, and I’ve liked Marshall tones quite a bit in the past. It’s going to be fun swapping these out, and thanks to Mesa for making it as simple as flipping a switch on the back.
Overall: really great tone, punchy, from beautiful shimmery clean to rip your face off distortion. Mesa optimized it for the master in the 9:30-10:30 range which is loud. I didn’t get it past 9:00 because I was trying to remain remotely respectful of both the family and the structural integrity of the house. I don’t think I could be happier with the tone. This is certainly in the 9+ scale out of 10 for my style of music, and I’m nitpicking numbers between 9 and 10 thus far. I could spend 8 hours a day for a week finding tone in this by swapping pedals, guitars, adjusting gain/eq within each mode, etc. Probably nothing this cannot do. However, I am a simple man. I want clean/lo/high gain with a foot stomp, and I don’t want to tweak my amp during a performance. This is exactly what Mesa was trying to create on a single platform – so it is a touch limiting. Makes me realize how versatile Stiletto is. But as Mesa says, the compromise is worth it because the tone reward is so high. It’s only my first day, but they may be right. This thing could be an ingenious idea. Is it the end-all search for tone, probably not, it never is. When I stop searching for better tone I’ll be taking a dirt nap.
It was a big box, all 57.9 lbs of it. I thought I had traded my rabid dog (Stiletto) for a pure bred lab. What I saw in the box was a pitbull. It was a big, black, menacing looking monster. Elegant and mean all at the same time. They should ship this with a black leather collar with silver spikes on it. I’ll try and not do the “I own it so I’m going to love it regardless” type of review. Anything in italics is taken from the Electra Dyne manual. So I grabbed a vodka and Grape Crush (don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it), and put ED on top of my 2-12 Roadster cab…..
Mesa says it was a prime directive for design to be straightforward and simple. This is 3 different amplifiers on one platform, not 3 different settings on one amplifier. Clean, vintage low is a brit medium gain (classic Brit chunk meets the sophistication and cultured poise of Simul-Class), and vintage hi gain (like a leather-wrapped baseball bat or a velvet hammer). Or as they say in the manual, the Vintage Hi connects your hands to a pressure-squeezed firehose of liquid, molten gain. It’s a “Boogie-ized Brit gain”.
Clean: the manual says inspired by “black face era” and built off the architecture of Mark I/IV, and the Mesa rep says it’s like Lone Star. I don’t know because I’ve never owned any of those, but this is the nicest clean I’ve ever heard. With volume (gain) up until noon, it’s thin, clear, and sparkly. Noon-3:00 brings in bass and mids for a full yet still beautiful balanced sparkle/low, and past 3:00 it begins to clip. 45W clips even better. Nice highs, breathy lows, nothing harsh going on here. I’m not a clean afficionado but I can’t really imagine a better clean channel. It sounded good with my humbuckers, but my Strat never sounded so good. Really gorgeous, clear, full. Reverb sounded great, I really missed that in my Stiletto. I still like it with a slight compressor on it (Tone Press) to even things out, but you could live without it because it’s pretty smooth as is.
Vintage Lo: in the lower volume (gain) regions, it’s a darker bluesier type of thing. Not exactly my cup of tea but I could see useful for some styles. It’s when you pass the noon/1:00 mark that this mode not only increases in gain, but the whole palette changes into a brighter, fuller, somewhat more dimensional punch you in the gut mode. At first I liked Hi Gain for the brighter & fuller characteristic, but I discovered Lo Gain gets that character too, it just has to be set a little higher. Mesa may call this med Brit crunch, but it sounds to me this middle realm of lo gain is like Angus stepped on his overdrive. Mesa’s jaded idea of mid crunch is someone else’s idea of high gain. Cranked the gain on this is as much as I’d ever use in a lifetime for rhythm work. Once past 1:00-2:00, it’s like a blistering huge distortion, like you just plopped your hand on a burning stove and you’re getting ready to scream.
Vintage Hi: your blistering hand just starting oozing pus now. Searing, big *** distortion. Now remember, this is coming from a classic rock mind so my idea of distortion may not be yours. Outside of thrash metal I can’t imagine what you would do with this gain except for soloing. I think for now I’m going to like Lo Gain for rhythm, and hit Hi Gain for solo or when I need to take it up another 20% to the classic rock edge. There seems to be a slight volume gain here too from lo gain, or it’s an illusion because the sound just go so much bigger and perhaps “harmonic”.
Channel Switching: here’s the issue. For the first 30 minutes I was seriously thinking I was going to send this amp back. I tried to find my crunch mode, which is gain in the 10-noon range. But when you switch to clean, the volume drop is noticeable. I’d be playing a clean passage and step into Lo Gain and it was like holy crap, that’s loud and huge. I tried everything: only using my Tone Press on clean with the level set higher to compensate for volume loss, hitting a boost when in clean mode, using Lo Gain and backing off the volume on my guitar for clean (which is a very useable clean by the way – nice with just a touch of fur). But I don’t want to do all of that fussing, I just want to hit a switch and be there. How could Mesa put a product out that did this? So I said to myself, “self, this is an RTFM issue” (Read The Fuc!#*ng Manual). I love Mesa manuals. I put them right up there with a Carl Hiaasen novel or the articles in Playboy. Well sure enough, the manual clearly states this amp is about compromises and makes no excuses for it. If settings are crafted with priority in mind, a surprisingly low level of compromise is experienced even while great footswitching performance attained. There may always be some small level of compromise between the sounds, but given the simplicity of navigation and the quality of Tone achieved, the Electra Dyne wins hands down in the most Tone for the least Tweak arena. So as it turns out, with volume (gain) in the 1-2:00 region, the modes are pretty balanced. The problem is, you go from clean to a pretty searing gain in Lo Gain, and lose the middle ground. It may turn out ok, I haven’t done this in a band setting yet. But it’s a potential issue if you’re looking for the plexi type of crunch in between modes. 90W mode seems to help keep the big sound and back off the distortion a bit. I can however get an ultimate crunch in this amp going by diming the volume in clean mode, or backing the volume way down in Hi Gain mode, but there goes the channel switching options. I wouldn’t be able to effectively maintain clean without some boost pedal, or using the volume pot on my guitar, etc. There is still some room here to work with – I can still play with the volume (gain) and probably find the right balance. As for now I’m clean, Xotic AC to give clean a little hair, Lo Gain and Hi Gain with the volume around 1:00. This will take a touch of work because it seems the volume/master controls are very sensitive so there are a lot of options to work with.
EQ: sharing the eq stack is not a problem. It’s like Mesa reconfigured how the eq knobs work in each of the 3 modes. Mid in clean does not behave like mid in hi gain for example. So settings in the 11-1:00 range seem to be optimal for all modes, if that makes any sense. The eq’s are more subtle than Stiletto. The range of lo/mid/high isn’t so drastic, which I like. And treble is not just treble. Increasing treble increases treble while reducing bass/mid, and reducing treble reduces treble but also seems to increase bass/mid. This is easy to work with and I don’t mind not having to tweak eq across modes for optimum performance. Less is more in my mind, as long as the "less" is "more" that is.
Tubes: shipped with Mesa’s preferred 6L6. Big, lush, sparkly, and thick and brutal at the same time. I like it much more than other 6L6’s I’ve tried in other amps. I put in some EL34’s and it gave a much simpler, straightforward, tighter type of tone which I liked. Maybe it just felt more like home coming off Stiletto, and I’ve liked Marshall tones quite a bit in the past. It’s going to be fun swapping these out, and thanks to Mesa for making it as simple as flipping a switch on the back.
Overall: really great tone, punchy, from beautiful shimmery clean to rip your face off distortion. Mesa optimized it for the master in the 9:30-10:30 range which is loud. I didn’t get it past 9:00 because I was trying to remain remotely respectful of both the family and the structural integrity of the house. I don’t think I could be happier with the tone. This is certainly in the 9+ scale out of 10 for my style of music, and I’m nitpicking numbers between 9 and 10 thus far. I could spend 8 hours a day for a week finding tone in this by swapping pedals, guitars, adjusting gain/eq within each mode, etc. Probably nothing this cannot do. However, I am a simple man. I want clean/lo/high gain with a foot stomp, and I don’t want to tweak my amp during a performance. This is exactly what Mesa was trying to create on a single platform – so it is a touch limiting. Makes me realize how versatile Stiletto is. But as Mesa says, the compromise is worth it because the tone reward is so high. It’s only my first day, but they may be right. This thing could be an ingenious idea. Is it the end-all search for tone, probably not, it never is. When I stop searching for better tone I’ll be taking a dirt nap.
