"For electric, my trusty Mesa/Boogie Studio .22+ I've had for 30+ years"
View attachment 28299
I've been a fan of the Studio 22+ since they came out, other than the hissy preamp which bothered me in the studio. I had one, the 5 band EQ version, but it was stolen from me, and I miss it to this day. As a live amp it killed, I toured for 5 years with it, and it never failed to give up the goods. It also sounded great as a head through a Marshall 4x10 bottom. I went through a bunch of smaller Mesa amps to try and replace it, but everything came up short, until I found a magic DC-2 that did the trick, especially when I replaced the stock speaker with a Weber 125A.
But a little more than a month ago, I bought a Mesa Fillmore 50, and it surpasses every Mesa amp that I've owned. It is a phenomenal amp with two identical channels. And for me, not being able to dial in a good lead tone that worked with my slightly crunchy rhythm tone, had always been the achilles heel with every Mesa that I'd owned. The lead tones were always too mid-focused for what I wanted.
But on the Fillmore, the lead channel distortion tone is very tweed like, open and balanced across the frequency spectrum, which is what I love, and I can dial either a slightly pushed tweed-like tone or a clean blackface-like tone on the rhythm channel. The reverb is out of this world, it is so deep that I hardly bring it past two on the dial! And any guitar that I plug into it sounds great. It also has the best tone stack I've ever used on a Mesa, making it very easy to dial in the tones, unlike most every other Mesa amp. And it's a reasonable weight for a Mesa (under 50 pounds).
For "my kind of tone" it's the best single amp Mesa has ever made, and yes, I've tried them all. I have a bunch of great amps (Vintage Fender, Marshall, Victoria, Clark, Tophat, etc), and the Mesa is my favorite. It's so good, it's the only amp that I keep in my house now, and that's where I write most of my songs and do most of my demos for those songs! The only thing I wished it had was a tremolo circuit.
View attachment 28354
