Mesa Blue Angel 1×12
Another used purchase. I believe highly in used equipment, but you’ve gotta be careful. Turned out this amp had been modded, but I didn’t find out until it crapped out about a year and a half after I bought it. Some poorly placed part shifted and shorted something else out. Luckily Dave from Dave’s Sound in Whippany (awesome guy) was able to restore order and put everything back to stock. Turns out the mod had almost no affect on the sound anyway.
That done, this amp has stayed my main gigging amp for quite a while now. The Blue Angel represents a change from my usual swiss-army approach to musical equipment. It’s a one trick pony. No channel switching here. It does have a unique poweramp switching section that switches it from running 2-6V6 at 18 watts to 4-EL84 tubes at 30 watts, or it will combine them running the complete set at 38 watts. It’s not a footswitchable thing though, not that you’d want to do that.
This is a very un-Mesa sounding amp. A lot of people like to lump brands of amps in a specific box, especially Fender, Marshall and Mesa. There’s good reason for that, but only to a degree. This amp is part of the Rectifier series, but it doesn’t at all sound like what people think of as the Rectifier sound. This is a very (very) Vox AC-30 type of sound. With some variation available.
Strats love this amp. They sound great together. The Les Paul loves this amp too. The Carvin did’t sound as good through this amp. This amp is wonderful at that clean to slightly overdriven sound – it really “sings”. One of the real awakenings for me is that I’ve discovered that passages that I used to play distorted or overdriven often sound so much better with no outboard distortion. Just using the guitar and a heavier attack usually produces the right amount of bite for a crunchy rhythm part, or cutting lead.
I think that’s part of why the Strat works so well with this amp. I find that the Strat’s volume is much more sensitive in the 8-10 range than my other guitars. With the Carvin or Les Paul there is an increase in saturation and crunch, but not a lot of volume difference. With the Strat there’s a definite jump going from 8 to 10, and that is more than enough for a lead boost. You can keep it on 7 or 8 and dig in more to add more bite to chords or notes – very nice.
I still use a Fulltone Fulldrive II additional overdrive, and I add either a second over drive or a Fulltone distortion pedal for more grind.
With this amp I was able to get (for the first time) a lot of the lead sounds of Ritchie Blackmore. I’ve seen him live a number of times and his loud, clean, sustaining sound is one of my favorite live lead tones. He’s always had at least a couple of Marshall stacks (purportedly 200 watt Marshall Majors) behind him, so replicating that with a 1×12 seemed near impossible. I’ve since heard stories of him using a JTM45 and a Vox AC30, so who knows. All I know is that with some settings the Blue Angel and the Strat on the neck pup get really close and sounds real nice.
Two things I don’t like so much about the Blue Angel 1) like many Mesa’s the “Mid” control acts as a gain control in addition to a mid EQ. I’m used to mid being mid. I’ve gotten used to it, but I’d still prefer it to be a more typical mid control. 2) the amp is complicated by the whole multi-power amp section thing. I use it primarily in the combined 38 watt mode because I get the most clean headroom that way for playing out. Sometimes in the basement I use the 6V6 mode because it overdrives at a lower volume and sounds so sweet. I would prefer a simpler arrangement since my theory is the more features and things there are, the more things there are that can (and will) break.