Turn the Music Man amp "bad OD" good

[AristoTele]

Sometimes in discussions an argument against Music Man hybrid amps is, that although their clean side sounds cool, solid state preamp driven with high gain produces very ugly distortion. My point is that the distortion is good, but takes some effort to find it.

If you want the create similar warm but strong overdrive sound what is typical for all-tube amps or amps with tube pre-amp, forget Music Man and buy a stomp box or an amp that suits your needs.

Music Man amps are kind of odd fellows of amp community, not real vintage tube stuff and far away from the modern sound world, but clean sounds are warm and wide and there are some "sweet spots" in the high gain settings too.

I have a Music Man Sixty-five RD 112, which is a 1 channel hybrid amp with MM-typical solid state pre/tube end combination.

I first had Ibanez Artist from 80's with quite dark sound typical for humbuckers and moderate output and could sometimes find nice tones with high gain also.

Then I bought a Mexican Tele with a little harsh single-coils and could not even keep the volume knob on full due to the obvious transistor mess MM gave.

Last I bought an American Strat and really started examining the distortion issue.

I noticed that when gain rose (with full volume on guitar of course) close to 5 or 6, moving the middle-eq closer to zero the ugly transistor distortion did not show up and the high gain sound just before the sound starts to transform to real fuzz rocked right to my ear. A nice, strong, present rock'n roll guitar sound.

So basically gain:6, volume:4, middle:less than 2 setup worked all right.

Adding gain from that made the sound worse.

But there is another "sweet spot" in Music Man distortion world. That spot was when gain got close to 9. Again mid-range should be cut down, but simply taking the volume down below the level of 3 (which seems to be the point where the tubes "wake up" and actually start blowing, but in this case going to that "super-low" master volume area sort of softened the sound just the right way) and I did not have play with eq more. This is kind a "fuzz" sound which sounds quite natural, strong and beatiful, and can possibly be difficult to reproduce as such with any stompbox .

It is also possible that the distortion sounds great when the amp is very loud, but these bastards are REALLY noisy and I have no chance to test this hypothesis.

I also use the in-built phaser effect with very low level and it gives character and thickness to the sound. With the glue neck Gibraltar bridge Ibanez I noticed that when the rate is very fast, the pulse mixes with the fuzz vibration and with Strat tremolo bridge a very slow rate gives liveliness to the sound but the texture is natural and not plastic or artificial.

When changing the pickup and to the chords I turn the phaser down and get it back in solos, if it sounds right. So the phaser does not sound cheesy to my ears like someone suggested.

So does Music Man sound like Fender Twin? Not at all, but why it should ?
And is distortion option useless in Music Man? Well, it may not be versatile and it is quite tricky to cook it just right, but it is there and it sounds great.

[bozzy369]

first of all,i have a 100 rd,when i got it i noticed the clean was amazing ,the overdrive was really dark and muddy,what i did was against musicman purist rules.I changed the tubes to kt88,changed the tone pots to better values ,fender values actually.this improved this amp amazingly .also i use carvin bs12's for speakers ,these have huge baskets,sound really close to celestrians,better in my opinion.the amp now sounds way more like a marshall then a fender,kinda like a mesa.and i found with this amp that effects sound amazing though it,thats something i could never say before,well hope some of this might help.