Mesa woes.. Maverick too dirty

[StratKat]

Wondering if anyone out there has gotten more clean headroom by changing speakers (it has 2-30watt celestians stock).

 

Or if there is any simple mod internally that would increase the clean tone. It just dirties up too fast and for dirty blues that's fine. But I do a lot of genres. I love the Mark iii'S IN STOCK CONFIG (70w WITH 200W SPEAKER.

 

...hate that caps key to pieces!...

 

Buying a bigger watt amp seems to be the only way ive found so far to get more clean headroom. But I cant afford another amp for quite a while

[thenakedarab]

Mavericks came with V30's which are rated at 65-70 watts per speaker, so 130-140 watts power handling for two. That shouldn't be a problem. EL84's do tend to crunch up pretty early, and grind in the upper midrange. The upper-mid spike of the V30's may be emphasizing that. Still, you should be able to get a nice and robust clean tone out of it. What kind of guitar are you using?

 

Are you using a humbucker with medium to high output? I've never played one in a band situation myself just noodling in the store, but a guitarist for a blues/rock band around here used a Maverick head and matching 2x12 for years, and he got some nice clean tones out of it. They played Stones, Zep, CCR, SRV, covers and the like + originals. It definitely isn't an amp that's suited to uber clean metal/hard rock cleans though. It's always going to have more of that vintage cathode biased EL84 vibe going on.

[StratKat]

I use both a humbucker guitar and a strat at diff times.

 

The humbucker seems to get dirty too fast whether im using a pedal board or straight in. And the strat is so weak that i have to turn the amp up and then get noise out the ying-yang.

 

For blues its cool. But not for church rock with cleans and distortion at diff times.

 

When using a big pedalboard i went to the current fad of using a buffer. Waiste of time since i have several boss pedals and all of them have a bvuffer built in. And im only using a 12 foot cable going into the amp.

 

Ive been told that i should use a Lehle sunday driver switch when using the strat so i borrowed one. It definitely gives the strat a bigger fuller sound/signal, but it dities up the amp just the same as the humbucker guitar.

 

It seems im either stuck with a dirty preamp or background noise. What i need is lots of clean headroom and let a pedal make dist when i need it. But im poor. Soooooooo i loook for tricks or mods.

[VagueSubscription]

I have a very similar Boogie amp, that shares the same power amp section (35 watts Class A, 4 EL84s). 

With good tubes, it has plenty of clean, no problem. I've even removed the outer pair of EL84s to get it down to about 18 watts, still plenty of clean.

 

I suggest not using any pedals to get a good sense of what the amp ITSELF can do. The Maverick is a dandy little amp with a tasty overdrive, just great for blues, fusion and country. It is not a heavy metal amp, nor is it a JC120.