In the interest of sharing I thought I would post an update now that I've done a handful of gigs with my MB212.
The most recent was last night, I played with my 5 piece blues band in a 185 person capacity club (I know because they have a little plaque on the wall with the number)
This place can be hard to get good tone in, it's very lively. One entire wall is mirrors, and most of the room has hardwood floors. Stage is good sized, elevated, and hollow.
I set the amp with everything at 12:00 to start, ended up with the Gain at 10, Master Volume at 2, and a tiny boost in the low mids, say 1 o'clock. I was playing a Fender Jazz strung with DAD flats, both pickups and tone on full.
This band is not what I would call loud (it can get that way, but not in a hard rock sense), but very powerful and dynamic. The tone from the MB212 was PERFECT in my opinion. It was deep and smooth, but so balanced and articulate.
My lead guitarist is not only an incredibly schooled musician, but also a professional mixing engineer, and he couldn't stop talking about the bass tone. He said the tone was "sonically perfect" because it was round, full and clear but didn't intrude on the space the guitars and keyboards were in.
For me it was really sweet being able to pluck right at the base of the neck and get a deep old school thump that was still articulate and let me hear the character of the strings themselves...Chromes, which have this wonderful combination of brightness AND woody thump...it was all there in the tone.
Then when I moved back to plucking right behind the front pickup it had the classic Jazz stacato burp, especially if I favored the bridge pickup a bit, and again, it was just all right there with clarity and definition. This amp seems to be really touch sensitive.
We have a lot of musician buds that drop in when we play, and I had 5 different guys come up and comment on the bass tone. That NEVER happens (c'mon, nobody cares about bass tone except bass players!) so that tells me the sound was really exceptional out in the room.
One humorous note - Every time we took a break my drummer stopped at my amp as he was leaving the stage and lifted it by the handle, he couldn't quite believe that sound was coming out of that little box
OK, enough kudos, I'll just say that I absolutely love this rig and I know for a fact these guys will no longer allow me to bring anything else on stage because they loved it too.
And that's fine by me, my 80 pound 410 can live in the garage for a while!
Yep, this is a similar experience to what I've had in the past with my MB212. I love the fact that I can load my entire bass rig and both my basses (thanks to my Mono double gig bag) in one load and then watch/help everyone else load their stuff in, needing help from all the band mates. Load out is just as fun. It's amazing to be able to load 500 watts of GK tone into a little 38 lb. box. I LOVE IT!!! Drummers envy me.
