Broke Bands.com

After owning this for a while now I thought I would post a review and clip. This is from the Divinity album, re-amped by Mark at Audiohammer through a Mesa cab with V30s, 57 and 201 mics blended. No EQ or post processing here, just two tracks panned left and right.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2183128/5150III_Clip.mp3

One of the best amps I’ve ever owned for sure. The amp to me sounds like the perfect blend of the original 5150 saturated roar with a bit more smoothness and tightness along the lines of a Mark series Mesa. This is perfect for me and my style as somewhat of a meeting between Prog and Death Metal.

The amp is very versatile; the clean channel is really nice if you dial it right. You have to run the gain VERY low and use the volume to compensate. A little compression and reverb and it’s beautiful.

Channel 2 is hugely versatile on its own; it can go from Marshally crunch up to pretty serious high gain. More middy and vintage then channel 3.

Channel 3 is of course the br00tz channel and the marquee sound of the amp for me. Super easy to dial in a sick sick rhythm sound for Metal and great for leads with some tweaking or external EQ as well.

Loop works great and channel switching is very quick. Occasionally makes a small pop but nothing you could hear in a live situation and I’d rather have that then a drop-out.

I haven’t owned the amp long enough yet to comment on reliability, taking it on tour though so we’ll see. No problems yet anyway, other than a bad preamp tube in V1 which I swapped for a Chinese HG+.

I’ll tell you how I came to own since it was kinda unexpected, we used it for the album but at the time I was using an ENGL SE live. Then I planned to use an Axe-FX+VHT rig live, but we had a show and I hadn’t got it all together yet, so I rented the EVH. Plugged it in and BOOM it fucking slayed, and became my rig.

Here is a little clip from the bass sessions for the new album:

Nick used his MTD bass, and we went into the MW-1 for DI and split to the Axe-FX for a supporting distortion track. Once in Cubase, the distorted track is hi passed and the DI track is low passed so each track fills out it’s respective space in the mix.

The distorted track chain in the Axe-FX is the Ampeg SVT bass amp model, 8×10 cab and 421 mic, with a Rat pedal in front for the grind as well as a compressor.

The DI track in Cubase goes into a couple of compressors in series first, a UAD LA-2A and an 1176. I found this worked well for evening out the very dynamic fingerstyle playing without too many artifacts and still maintaining some attack. I then run the DI into the Ampeg SVX plugin for some additional fattening, and run the Bass bus into a final EQ to tweak the frequency range a bit. In this case I’ve scooped out some midrange honk and filtered the sub lows a touch.

That’s it so far although I imagine the final bass track will change a bit, we will most likely be reamping through Nick’s massive Mesa rig down the road as well. Metal,

- Sacha