ShortScale.org

I know these don't get too much love on here, but are they any good? what's the sound like. some of the old heads and combos look pretty cool.

i was looking through reverb, some of these look metal as fuck, but some of em look pretty nice.

this one looked real nice, as opposed to some of the more "moderny" ones.

mesa boogies are great. I'd have a mark IV, if they werent so expensive...

I like the old Mark, Caliber and Rocket amps.
The Rectifiers' gain sounds like shit to me, but a lot of people (especially Guitar Center) thought of them as the best amp money could buy in the '90s which is why all the nu-metal guys automatically bought one with a PRS or Ibanez RG when they got signed. Really I think this is why any sort of "eh, who cares" stigma might surround the brand name now (that and the fact that major label metal died a slow, painful death).

yeah i was never impressed with mesa gain, and even as a naive youngster never got into the whole ibanez/prs+mesa thing. but i learned on some girls keef was using a mesa, and it had a rather nice clean sound (i think he was using an mrx phaser with it). really like the look of some of the mesas and i'm starting to gain interest. just not sure of what the advantage of one of those is to a silverface fender or reissue fender.

also never have had the pleasure of playing through one of those nice looking mesas, only the uggo metal ones at GC, and i wasn't impressed.

They are expensive, thats why people dont buy them. If youre in a big band, but why throw money away when your playing in a room.

They are very loud and very heavy. The early mark series amps are nice though. I really liked the ones I tried.

I dunno about the Mark series - the MkIV I tried in a shop ten or so years ago sounded really nice, but I was too inexperienced to appreciate a good amp back then. I've never been interested in Rectos because the cleans got mixed reviews and I don't like 'modern'-sounding gain.

I can definitely vouch for the F series though. Very hard to find on this side of the pond (they've been replaced by the Express series iirc) but I love the sound of my F50. The high gain channel's a bit Recto-ish but the clean channel is bloody great. I believe they were the 'budget' amps of the Boogie line and very few people seem to even know they exist, but mine feels solidly made and I've never had reliability issues with it. Did I mention the clean channel is effing lush?

I always had the Boogie sound down as a 'hot-rodded Fender'. Also: there's no bias adjustment for the output tubes. You just swap 'em like-for-like and you're good to go apparently.

I really enjoyed my f-50, I would love an early mark amp with less of the knobs/sliders than the iv or v. One thing I find anoint mesas is that they are almost TOO tweakable, I enjoy simplicity and they don't really have that.

It's worth checking out Rivera amps too. I was looking at mk1s and 2s but I ended up going with a Rivera chubster 55. It's a cool amp, it runs on el34s but has an amazing clean tone and a really cool overdrive. I preferred it tonally to the mesas and it's a bit lighter.

i had a nomad 55. terrible amp, terrible resale

George wrote:i had a nomad 55. terrible amp, terrible resale

I second this. I tried everything I could to get a good sound out of it and it fucking sucked.

Used a Triple Rec on a metal project and couldn't get it to do what I wanted. Supposedly the Dual Recs are more regarded as far as getting a usable tone goes.

I do own a Mesa standard 4x12 that sounds great. It's a keeper.

I can only comment on the clean tone because I play clean in almost all situations.

I borrowed a friend's vintage Mark something-er-other and it was meh. Not horrible, but completely lacked a sense of warmth. Like the glassiest clean tone ever IMO. Sounded a bit hollow and soulless.

The lead channel on the Mk III is like the nastiest metal tone ever.

In this case 'souless' would be a compliment.

I don't really have amp gas any more, but I'm looking at boogie themed pedals to mess about with. argh.

I play through a subway rocket and i love it..

I find it does everything well..cleans, od, dirty, heavy..etc

I like it with any guitar in any tuning

It's loud as fuck