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Today in my usual daily research into amp mods and what not I ran across a thread on thegearpage.com where somebody said that a guy can drive the poweramp section of a Mesa Recto by turning up the FX loop send level and tighten up the bottom end by turning the FX loop return level down.
So I figured, screw it, its worth a try. I plugged a jumper cable that you'd normally use in between stompboxes into the loop, cranked the send and turned the return all the way down. And HOLY **** it sounded good. I've never been able to stand turning that amp up enough to really get the power section cookin, but this did the trick.
The clean channel is useless for cleans in this configuration unless you roll off of the guitar volume quite a bit, but in pushed mode with those EL34s in the power section cooking, it reminded me a little bit of a Plexi, although the nuances in the tone were different. If you could imagine a Fender type preamp slamming into EL34s, that's the basic tone.
On the distortion channels, it just plain flat out sounded mean. Meaner that I've ever heard this amp sound. The bottom end tightened up to the point that I ended up turning up the bass knob on both channels, which yielded a sastifying low end thump at a lower frequency than usual. The mids tightened up too and gave me a really nice and chewy buzzsaw type of grind. Something I've never been able to get out of this amp either.
It makes me wish that this one was a Multi-Watt Recto so I could have the headroom on the clean channel and knock it down to 50 watts on the distortion channels.
So I figured, screw it, its worth a try. I plugged a jumper cable that you'd normally use in between stompboxes into the loop, cranked the send and turned the return all the way down. And HOLY **** it sounded good. I've never been able to stand turning that amp up enough to really get the power section cookin, but this did the trick.
The clean channel is useless for cleans in this configuration unless you roll off of the guitar volume quite a bit, but in pushed mode with those EL34s in the power section cooking, it reminded me a little bit of a Plexi, although the nuances in the tone were different. If you could imagine a Fender type preamp slamming into EL34s, that's the basic tone.
On the distortion channels, it just plain flat out sounded mean. Meaner that I've ever heard this amp sound. The bottom end tightened up to the point that I ended up turning up the bass knob on both channels, which yielded a sastifying low end thump at a lower frequency than usual. The mids tightened up too and gave me a really nice and chewy buzzsaw type of grind. Something I've never been able to get out of this amp either.
It makes me wish that this one was a Multi-Watt Recto so I could have the headroom on the clean channel and knock it down to 50 watts on the distortion channels.
thank you
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