Got a new Mesa Lonestar Special today

[Tadpui]

I ordered it from Sweetwater last week after months and months of waffling over buying a new amp. It's a 1x12 2-channel combo with channel-assignable power of 30/15/5 watts. It uses a tube rectifier on the 5/15 watt settings and a solid-state rectifier on the 30 watt setting.

I've only spent an hour or two with it so far and I'm still figuring it out. Mesa's gain, EQ, and master controls are pretty different in how they affect the overall tone and I'm slowly honing in on what I want this amp to do. EL84 tubes are new to me as well, since my other tube combo uses 6L6 tubes. They have a very distinct breakup and they really chime compared to the 6L6s.

So far I'm really liking the 5-watt setting for the ability to drive the shit out of the amp and not wake up the whole neighborhood. This thing can get some incredibly gnarly over-the-top overdrive, and I'm still trying to dial it in for a good sweet spot that is clean when I play soft but breaks up when I really push it. There's just so much dynamic range in it that I'm struggling to get the amp to do my bidding like I'm used to with my Traynor.

After I get to know the amp a little better, I'll come back with some more informed opinions and (if I can dust off my recording equipment) some sound samples.

 

[JCH]

I'm anxious to hear your opinion. Congratulations on your purchase.

 

[Tadpui]

Well so far I've probably spent 3 or 4 hours playing through it over the past day. Those first few hours were spent amazed, but still a little disappointed that all of the tones I was getting were super-overdriven, especially on the low frequencies.

So I opened the owner's manual to the example settings and started dialing in some of the suggested settings. Holy freaking cow! I've never played through an all-tube amp that can attain such beautiful breakup at such low master volume settings. The reason all of my previous attempts sounded so fuzzed-out was because I just assumed that I needed to crank the master to drive the power section into breakup. This amp can get sweet, singing breakup at about 30% power, even in the highest wattage power setting (30W). This amazes me to no end.

The main challenge to overcome next is to really figure out the gain staging. On my Traynor, the crunch channel has a gain, a channel volume, and then there's the master volume. It took me a long time to figure out where I liked those to be, and even longer to experiment with the different saturations that occur with each of those dials in different locations. It's like a combination lock.

With the Mesa, it has a similar structure but the dials behave much differently. There is still a channel gain on each channel. But the FX loop is switchable (cool) and if the FX loop is enabled, the channel master acts as an FX send level and the amp's master becomes the FX return level. So I'm going to have to go to school on how these all interact because in my fiddling I've found that these have an even more complex interrelationship than the gain staging on my Traynor. The suggested presets got me in some nice tonal territory but I have no idea how!

More to come, I'm sure...

 

[Supercreep]

That amp has the best clean sound of any amp I've ever heard in my life, hands down.

 

[kidkage]

So, is it true that they're isn't a bad tone to be found on a Mesa?

I only dream of them. Not enough cash to buy one and not enough resources to try one out.

 

[Tadpui]

Well, I think that the Lone Star Special is going back. Now that I've spent a couple of weeks with it, I don't think that it offers what I've come to realize I want.

This is a terrific amp, and for blues/country/rock, I have never heard anything quite like it. There are some really sweet clean and overdriven tones in the amp. But the things that it offers me that I truly love, my current amp already does pretty well. I think what I'm truly wanting is an amp that's more modern and aggressive sounding, since my Traynor already does the blues/rock/country thing pretty well. Plus I'm coming to find out that I like 6L6 tubes better than EL84s.

The one thing that I can't seem to overcome with the LSS is the low-frequency breakup. It could be my environment, which tends to promote low frequency standing waves. But hell, even with the bass knob at 9:00, this thing is still pretty boomy. But boominess aside, its more that the low freqencies tend to overdrive the power section way before the mids or highs, so there's a very distinctive overdrive that it produces. And it's not really an attribute that I like. Kind of like a fuzz pedal.

I like the amp, but I don't really love it. And for what it cost me, I'd damn well better end up with an amp that I LOVE, not one that I like.

I don't like to make a habit of buying amps sight unseen, but there aren't a lot of places around here to really get to know the amps that I'm considering buying. For instance, I couldn't have gotten to know this amp in an afternoon at Guitar Center amid all of the kids playing Squiers thru Line 6 amps in the showroom. Plus I'm a little shy about cranking a tube amp in a store because I'd be pissed if I was a staffer and had to endure that every day.

Even if I spent an hour with it in the vault, I don't think that such a short amount of time would have taught me as much about the amp as a couple of weeks in my basement. So maybe any restocking/shipping fees involved in returning it to Sweetwater will basically be my "home trial fee".

 

[Tadpui]

So, is it true that they're isn't a bad tone to be found on a Mesa?

I only dream of them. Not enough cash to buy one and not enough resources to try one out.

There are certainly bad tones in there, but it's mainly because the controls are so responsive and have such a wide range of travel. If you turn any one control knob up all the way, or down all the way, I'd almost bet that it would result in some akward tone (or in some cases, nearly set the amp on fire). If you turn every knob all the way up, I'd bet that the amp would blast off and end up 2 zip codes away. And this is just a 30-watter, I can't imagine what their ridiculously overpowered 120W or 150W amps would do!

 

[Tadpui]

That amp has the best clean sound of any amp I've ever heard in my life, hands down.

I agree, it's got a nice and versatile clean channel. But unfortunately I rarely, if ever, play on a clean channel. I like to keep it dialed in where the crunch channel sounds clean until I really dig in or click on an overdrive or compressor.

But holy hell, this amp does NOT like my TS9 Tube Screamer. Honestly it doesn't like the bridge pickup on my LP Classic either. So my favorite parts of my guitar and effects make some pretty awful tones with the LSS. I'm a lot more attached to my guitar than I am the new amp, so I guess that makes my decision on what has to go.

I'm willing to give it a little more time and experimentation because I WANT to love the amp. I've heard some flashes of brilliance from it. It's dynamic range is out of this world. I can play soft and gentle and then wake up the neighborhood by hitting it hard, all without even touching my guitar's volume knob. But I can't find a go-to tone to set and forget. I have to tweak it for every little thing I want to do.