I just bought a Mesa and learned some stuff.
If yours is like mine, you'll need to learn a new way of thinking about tone controls. Try turning them all to "zero." If your sound goes away, even though the volumes are turned up, then they are like the ones on my amp. If this is the case, try much lower settings than you would on another amp. Maybe turn the treble to 10 0clock, and the mid and bass much lower.
As an aside, I also had to put a compressor in front of the amp and turn the output up very high, slamming the front end of the amp, before mine really woke up. I love it now!! If you don't own one, borrow one from a friend and try it out... I bet you'll like it!
Peace!
~Shawn
Mesa's are known for taking time to tweak as the controls just behave and react differently then most amps. It's hard to explain. Suffice to say there can be a big difference in tone between 11:30 and 12:00 on any of the nobs.
A few months back I had saved up enough money to get a new amp and was looking at a Mesa Recto-verb.
I went into Guitar Center and the closest thing they had was a Roadster.
I plugged in and absolutely hated it. It sounded like fuzzy flabby garbage. I was stunned that this was the amp I heard such great things about, especially since it was a much higher end model then the one I was looking at buying.
So I went to the Mesa Board and posted there asking how I could setup and Roadster to get a sound close to Recto-verb. I also expressed how poorly I thought the amp sounded.
The guys there gave me some settings to try and suggested possibly throwing an overdrive in front of it.
I didn't bring an overdrive but went back to GC with the settings they had given me and it made a world of difference.
1. My biggest problem was setting the gain at about 2:30-3:00. Recto's (or any other Mesa from what I have heard) are pure tube overdrive. No clipping diodes. The plus side is that you get beautiful natural sounding distortion. The down side is that there is enough play in the gain knob that you can easily push it into flubby garbage, where as clipping doides would turn into pure fizz. Now I run my gain no higher the 12:30.
2. I had the channel preamp volumes to high. I had pushed them to about 4:00 thinking this would give me a better preamp overdrive, but just as the gain gave you enough rope to hang yourself, so did the channel volume.
These first two by themselves had the amp singing. Real tight bass metal sound. I found more stuff though.
3. The higher gain mode I switched it, the more I needed to back off the treble. Conversely, the lower gain modes required a boost in the treble.
4. At bedroom volumes it sounds very good, but there is a little fizz to the distortion. This fizz disappears when you crank it. Very thumping quick attack. Mesa's are biased very cold and are built to come into there own at about drummer level. You will find Marshall's also don't sound there best until cranked as well.
In the end I lucked out and found a killer deal on a Mesa Roadking combo which is the big brother to the Roadster.
My current setup I plug straight into the amp and run boss GE7 eq into the effects loop.
That is it. No pedal to boost it. I tried but I felt it colored my tone and took awar from the fire breathing recto sound.
I have since gone back to GC and played on that Roadster and had one of the GC employees ask me not to change the settings I set it up with. He said it was the best he ever heard that amp sound.
Obviously these guys were clueless setting up an amp (as was I originally setting up the Roadster), but I still like GC. You can walk in and let them know right off the bat you have no intention of buying, and they will still pull out the ladder and grab you a 3000$ Les Paul to screw around with.
Sorry for the rant. I just love talking amps
