Hi y'all, I just wanted to share my thoughts having used my 2nd hand bought V12's for a while. First off, I've tried quite a few of other amps, both hybrids, digitals and tubes. I cant put my finger on it but the V12 has such nice sound sculpting features that it's my go to amp. It also has a lot of power on tap which is always good =)
I'm into the heavier kind of music (we play mainly in drop C and drop A) so I'm very much appreciating the tube overdrive. It's got the best sounding bass overdrive I've come across so far, Aguilar Agro and the MXR bass Overdrive pedals are the ones that comes closest to mind but they don't have the same warmth and OOOmph that the that the V12 has. It's almost like the bass equivalent of the Mesa rectifiers for guitar. Needless to say, you can get a crushing and floor rumbling overdrive if you want to.
My only "bad" experience was that I had to upgrade my #91 silver one since it was starting to shut down at higher volumes after just having used it at reasonable rehearsal volumes at 50% gain and 25% volume. When getting ready for gigging I wanted to make sure it was up for the task which it was not. It needed a trip to the west coast and back to get the necessary upgrades which cost me about $400 but to me it was worth every penny. Backup at this time fell on the Orange OB-1 500 which I cant talk positively enough about but it's "just" a single channel amp, but wow, what a nice overdrive!
Anyhow, if buying used, please give the guys at Mesa a call to check whats been done with your potential new amp before buying. Mesa have an awesome support and they know exactly whats been done with every amp as long as you can give them the serial number. Mine was an early one and it needed quite a lot of updates. Needless to say I know now why I got a pretty good deal on it. While having it serviced I came across a newly serviced one so now I'm a happy owner of both an early silver #91 and a later black #677 one so now I'm ready to shake planets out of orbits if needed.
I don't feel I would ever need to get another amp unless I wouldn't be able to dial in a tone I'd want and couldn't with these and in those cases it's probably my own personal shortcomings that would be the main factor in dialing and mixing the right bass or cab to get to what I want to...
Sorry for a veeery long post so in short, these are very flexible amps tone wise where you can get a wide array of sounds from the two separate channels with the independently switchable overdrive settings. I've found exactly what I'm after. It wouldn't hurt if they were a bit lighter but quality and durability always comes at some kind of a cost. There are nice wheeled road cases around, just saying =) I can run them quite hard sometimes and with a 6 inch clip on fan they always run stable and cool.
Cheers and rock on!
I'm into the heavier kind of music (we play mainly in drop C and drop A) so I'm very much appreciating the tube overdrive. It's got the best sounding bass overdrive I've come across so far, Aguilar Agro and the MXR bass Overdrive pedals are the ones that comes closest to mind but they don't have the same warmth and OOOmph that the that the V12 has. It's almost like the bass equivalent of the Mesa rectifiers for guitar. Needless to say, you can get a crushing and floor rumbling overdrive if you want to.
My only "bad" experience was that I had to upgrade my #91 silver one since it was starting to shut down at higher volumes after just having used it at reasonable rehearsal volumes at 50% gain and 25% volume. When getting ready for gigging I wanted to make sure it was up for the task which it was not. It needed a trip to the west coast and back to get the necessary upgrades which cost me about $400 but to me it was worth every penny. Backup at this time fell on the Orange OB-1 500 which I cant talk positively enough about but it's "just" a single channel amp, but wow, what a nice overdrive!
Anyhow, if buying used, please give the guys at Mesa a call to check whats been done with your potential new amp before buying. Mesa have an awesome support and they know exactly whats been done with every amp as long as you can give them the serial number. Mine was an early one and it needed quite a lot of updates. Needless to say I know now why I got a pretty good deal on it. While having it serviced I came across a newly serviced one so now I'm a happy owner of both an early silver #91 and a later black #677 one so now I'm ready to shake planets out of orbits if needed.
I don't feel I would ever need to get another amp unless I wouldn't be able to dial in a tone I'd want and couldn't with these and in those cases it's probably my own personal shortcomings that would be the main factor in dialing and mixing the right bass or cab to get to what I want to...
Sorry for a veeery long post so in short, these are very flexible amps tone wise where you can get a wide array of sounds from the two separate channels with the independently switchable overdrive settings. I've found exactly what I'm after. It wouldn't hurt if they were a bit lighter but quality and durability always comes at some kind of a cost. There are nice wheeled road cases around, just saying =) I can run them quite hard sometimes and with a 6 inch clip on fan they always run stable and cool.
Cheers and rock on!
I had the guy at GC look over the Mesa for me and he said that the top of the amp was vented and he also said that the overall condition was 9.5 out of 10 so hopefully they will do a good job of packing it for shipping?
