generation zero Posted December 10, 2008 Share Posted December 10, 2008 I was considering tossing together a Frankenstein rig, and thought I'd run my idea by you guys for thoughts on how it might sound before I waste any money. Right now, I have a Mesa Dual Rec Roadster and 2 Mesa Recto 4x12 cabs. On my pedalboard, I run, in this order, an Ernie Ball Volume pedal, a Morley Bad Horsie 2 wah, a Boss tuner, and a BBE Sonic Stomp sonic maximizer. For the few clean parts I play, I generally just rock back the volume pedal. (I play mainly modern hard rock, not looking for a "metal" tone per se. The tone I'm after is somewhere between Breaking Benjamin, Chevelle, and Thornley.) What I was considering, since I run the cabinets side by side, was to get 2 Valve Jr. heads and place one on either side of the Mesa head. I want to split my signal into all 3 heads simultaneously, and as the cabinets can be split to run in stereo, I want to hook the valve juniors into the outside 2 speakers of each cab, and run the mesa through the 4 inside speakers. Obviously, I'll either have to get that George Lynch triple amp a/b/c/y(w?) pedal, or just spiderweb a bunch of y cables together to get the signal to all 3 heads. I tested a Valve Jr head through a Mesa 4x12 the other day at Guitar Center, and it definitely has the power to push the cab... I'm just wondering if the tones would compliment each other enough to make it worth it? My other option was to save up and buy either an old Marshall head, or a Mesa Stiletto for the second cab. Not that the Roadster sounds bad in the slightest way by itself through both cabs, I just thought I might like to try expanding my tone a bit. Thoughts? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m-theory Posted December 10, 2008 Share Posted December 10, 2008 Isn't that Mesa a 4 channel amp, and wouldn't 4 channels give you some tonal flexibility? I believe that's also a 100 watt amp, correct? I could see it being rather overpowering next to a pair of 5 watters. I don't want to be one to talk you off this ledge...after all, a tonequest is nothing without some interesting turns here and there, and we really don't learn by not trying new things, so if it's something that you think would be cool, you should try it. Personally, I'm in the "less is more" club. I've gigged for a lot of years now, and can tell you from personal experience that, especially in the context of having a reliable rig to plug into every night, nothing beats "simple." And, one of the simple facts that I've learned over the years is that the more pieces you have in your signal chain, the more likely something will fail at the worst possible time. Now, as for actually hooking something like this up, you're going to need buffered, isolated inputs...not sure if that George Lynch pedal is what you'd want or not, because I'm not familiar with it, but you want to be able to isolate the grounds on all three signals and buffer the signal so that it doesn't get diluted in being split. Multiple y-cords isn't going to be sufficient. It'll work, but it'll suck tone considerably. You may also need to get isolated AC for each amp, depending upon whether or not you experience a ground loop when you hook it all up. From what I've heard of the tone that you're describing, I would have to think that the amp that you've got would get you there. It seems to be a fairly standard, "alternative rock" tone that pretty much all bands in that genre rely upon exclusively. There's not a lot of uniqueness to the sound imo, so I would think that a 4 channel amp like yours would be able to produce it reasonably well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
generation zero Posted December 10, 2008 Author Share Posted December 10, 2008 Yeah, the roadster by itself is pretty close to what I want, but a friend of mine in another band has turned me on to the idea of a multi-amp rig. He's running an old 70's marshall (with a Soldano hot mod) next to an original 5150, each into a marshall 4x12. The tone he gets from blending the two is huge... I want to steal his idea and make it better with the Mesa, it'll just be a while before I can afford another 1000 to 2000 dollar head. The roadster does have a tuner out, which I can use to send a clean signal to another head, but I would still need to split it from there to go into to 2 valve Jr heads. I guess I need to talk the guys at guitar center into letting me hook 2 of them up to a 4x12 and run them next to a roadster and see if it sounds better than just the Mesa pushing both cabs. Or, I guess for just checking the tone, I could just run through a roadster combo and a vjr combo for a close approximation of what it would sound like. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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