thehornedone
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- Mar 30, 2010
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I've had my Rectoverb for about 2 years now, and I haven't noticed this until now, after having acquired a fender blues jr. After in depth knob tweaking, I noticed that pushing distortion pedals through the clean channel of the Rectoverb is very very moody. If I get anywhere even close to or above 12:00 on the treble or the gain of channel 1 the tone turns to mush, noise, becomes garbled, etc.
Is it just my amp? Another thing I've noticed is that, compared to the fender, the volume on my distortion pedals makes little difference to the volume coming from the amp. If I set any pedal to 12:00 the bypass tone is always louder than with the pedal on. I have to turn it up to about 4:00 to get it louder than the bypassed tone. With the fender, 12:00 is naturally much louder than the bypassed tone, and 3:00 is probably 2.5 times as loud. This could have to do with the input impedence of the recto. An overdrive pedal through the recto barely changes the volume, but on my fender can probably boost the volume to 3 times as loud. The recto has a ceiling where it just starts getting more distorted but the volume doesn't change.
Can someone else with a recto series head try this out and tell me if you get the same result? Take any distortion pedal, turn the volume up to about 2:00-4:00, and the distortion to about 3:00, then put the recto's clean and gain knobs to 11:00. A looper pedal helps here, but start playing and turn the treble up on the amp slowly and hear the tone turn to crap.
By the way, I have Mesa 6l6 tubes in, but this should make no difference to the interactions of the preamp. My preamp tubes are EHX, and are pretty new.
I think I'm just going to stick with my fender for distortion pedals, it sounds stunningly better and is not moody at all. any master, gain, and eq settings retain a great tone, while changing it drastically. The Mesa's preamp knobs do almost nothing but make it sound like crap if they aren't in the exact ideal settings. The bass past 10:30 makes it sound flubby as hell (as noted in the user guide), the presence just exacerbates the touchiness of the treble knob. Why would they design the treble knob to interact so much with the gain and not the EQ of the signal? Alright, sorry, done ranting.
I used to really love my Mesa, but this fender is making me discover my multitudes of pedals like never before.
Is it just my amp? Another thing I've noticed is that, compared to the fender, the volume on my distortion pedals makes little difference to the volume coming from the amp. If I set any pedal to 12:00 the bypass tone is always louder than with the pedal on. I have to turn it up to about 4:00 to get it louder than the bypassed tone. With the fender, 12:00 is naturally much louder than the bypassed tone, and 3:00 is probably 2.5 times as loud. This could have to do with the input impedence of the recto. An overdrive pedal through the recto barely changes the volume, but on my fender can probably boost the volume to 3 times as loud. The recto has a ceiling where it just starts getting more distorted but the volume doesn't change.
Can someone else with a recto series head try this out and tell me if you get the same result? Take any distortion pedal, turn the volume up to about 2:00-4:00, and the distortion to about 3:00, then put the recto's clean and gain knobs to 11:00. A looper pedal helps here, but start playing and turn the treble up on the amp slowly and hear the tone turn to crap.
By the way, I have Mesa 6l6 tubes in, but this should make no difference to the interactions of the preamp. My preamp tubes are EHX, and are pretty new.
I think I'm just going to stick with my fender for distortion pedals, it sounds stunningly better and is not moody at all. any master, gain, and eq settings retain a great tone, while changing it drastically. The Mesa's preamp knobs do almost nothing but make it sound like crap if they aren't in the exact ideal settings. The bass past 10:30 makes it sound flubby as hell (as noted in the user guide), the presence just exacerbates the touchiness of the treble knob. Why would they design the treble knob to interact so much with the gain and not the EQ of the signal? Alright, sorry, done ranting.
I used to really love my Mesa, but this fender is making me discover my multitudes of pedals like never before.