I recently learned that my kindly neighbor had been quietly enduring the lows from my Mesa rig in her house for almost two years I DO NOT want to be “that guy,” so I have retired that rig from home use—including micing for home recording—until I can look into some serious soundproofing. Sheltering in place doesn’t have many upsides, but I had at least hoped to make the most of the opportunities it presented for rocking out and recording. My Peavey rig still sounds good at a more acceptable volume (top cab only now) … … but I miss that tube-y Mesa goodness; and the fairly popular D.I. pedal I have had for a while now has never really done it for me through headphones. What to do? Reverb to the rescue! A year or so of twiddling knobs on that D.I. pedal never got me close to my sound. The Mesa V-Twin got me there in minutes! I got it anticipating it would work well with guitar, and hoping it would work well enough with bass, but I haven’t even gotten around to plugging a guitar into this burly box yet! This comes really close to what I have been missing. Hopefully I will have the pants-flapping rig back in rotation by this fall, but this makes headphones and going direct way more appealing than they were yesterday. The Mesa rig’s time will come … … but home recording and tube-y goodness won’t have to wait.
Interesting! I have had one for over 20years and I don’t recall ever plugging a bass into it. I’ve always used mine for guitar, either into the front of an amp or as a stand-alone preamp. Experiment with trying different tubes in yours, I did and it made a big difference.
I’ve wondered how these would work on bass; I have a few guitar pedals and rack units that I thought would sound good on bass and then did not reproduce all the lows. Does it use a wall wart, or is it 110v? IEC?
12v wall wart. I have used it only with headphones at home (it has a headphone out), but when I tried one at a store a while back it sounded good in front of an amplifier. I have had the Mesa V-1 Bottle Rocket for a while and I think that makes more sense in front of an amplifier for me, but for phones and going direct, this will be tough to beat. I don’t notice any real loss of lows with the V-1, or the “clean” or “solo” channel on the V-Twin; the “blues” channel seems to cut both highs and lows. Looking at how this pedal is set up, I don’t think it’s really designed to switch between “clean” and “blues” in a live setting; set one or the other how you like, then kick it over to “solo” to make it scream. The “clean” channel gets pleasingly gritty without a ton of prompting.
I had mine modded by the fine folks at Mesa Boogie. they replaced the push button that selects between the clean and blues channels with a stomp switch. they also added a separate gain control for the solo channel so that I could better balance it with the other two modes. It does in fact run off a 12v wall wart style power supply, but take note that it is 12vAC, not DC.
I’ve been using mine for home practice lately for guitar so it’s all set up and ready to go. Mixer/headphone output into a mic pre and mixer into my studio monitors. I just plugged my jazz bass into it and played for a bit, it does sound pretty dang good for bass! I was really surprised, I didn’t even turn any knobs from where I had them set for playing guitar!
MAN I loved this pedal when i played guitar; I should try to find one again for bass duty, when I have some extra cash.
I finally plugged a guitar into this thing and liked it, but I think I like it even better for bass, at least through headphones.