New Amp: EVH 5150 III 50w Head

I came across this one at my local Sam Ash music store. The amount of gain and how thick and full it sounded really surprised me so I worked out a deal and took it home.

It’s a great compliment to my Marshall TSL, which has a dryer tone with more upper mids and less bass. The EVH can be dialed in conservatively for classic rock tones but the fun to me is going all out on the red channel, which is as saturated as the 5150/6505 it is based on but with more hollow sounding mids and more complexity, making it sound a little more clear and articulate.

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New Amp: ADA MP-1

I’ve heard great things about these and spotted one at the same Musicgoround I purchased the TSL head from. While staying over at a friend’s place in Atlanta one weekend, I went and picked this up. It has some really killer tones, and I’ve been playing it run into the FX return of my TSL head. Dialing in tones is a little tedious but they can be saved to any of 128 user presets, and can be recalled with a few taps of the front panel arrows or with a MIDI footswitch.

This is definitely more classic sounding than my TSL, and a lot darker. My only complaint is it is also noisier, especially at high gain settings.

(This is the earliest picture I can find of it)

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New Amp: Marshall JCM2000 Triple Super Lead

I have been searching for a real tube amp to replace my VOX AD30VT practice amp for a long time now. I’m loving the sounds I get testing out a Mesa Dual Rectifier in a local shop, but after playing a Marshall JCM800 2205 in a Guitar Center I’m thinking that a Marshall amp of some kind might be closer to the classic metal tones I’m after than the rectifier. I also really liked the Blackstar HT-100 head, as well as the HT-60 combo, but missed the “crunch” channel on the HT-20 and HT-40 models. Either way, all of these seem to be a little less clear sounding than the Marshalls.

Enter the TSL - Marshall’s previous flagship amp (prior to the JVM) and featuring three channels, covering ground all the way from clean up to high gain. I never played one before, but watched plenty of youtube videos and listened to clips so it was on my want list.

I found a used one at a Musicgoround in Lilburn, GA, not the easiest drive but I could justify stopping there on my drive home from Atlanta. I stopped by with my Vox AD30VT, as well as a high quality crash to trade on it. After playing it for some time, I was really loving the sounds, but the footswitch was not fully working. The shop manager was great and helped work out a deal with me, so I could either try to repair the footswitch or buy a new one if needed.

Once I bought it, I had to sit with it in my girlfriend’s apartment and no guitar or speaker for a whole weekend - it was torture!