Mesa Boogie MK III – one of the baddest amps ever made?
I bought one of these beasts in 1990. I said to the guy in the guitar shop in Twickenham – what’s the best amp you have in the store? (of course I now know that was a bit of a silly question but I was 21 so what did I know?!). He looked around and said – this Mesa Boogie Mark III is the most expensive. I wasn’t after it because I wanted the best amp in the world – or wanted a better amp than my friends – I just don’t like worrying about what-if – or perhaps I should have bought – or oh drat – it doesn’t do such and such sound. The shop owner said this would do almost everything sound-that other amps did – because it was modelled on their circuitry + it did a bunch of it’s own sounds – now I think generally referred to as the ‘Cali’ sound. Great I thought.
The Mesa Boogie MK III like all Mesa’s is beautifully put together by hand
Anyway – I bought it (when I had a reasonable day job and a steady income I hasten to add) and really didn’t do much with it for 30 years. It was wasted in me I found out later as I never had a chance to play – always tied up with that annoying need of having to food in my mouth. Actually – I thought it was a rather dull sounding amp. But that’s because I used to round off the top-end as I had an eversion to whiny screeching trebly 60’s sounding guitars that hurt my ears + 1 guy in the band I was in insisted on burning out my and everyone else in the band’s ear drums every time we practiced. But I was a bit disappointed – the amp sounded nothing like my hero James Burton or Jimi Hendrix – it just sounded non-descript – so I assumed he told me a load of baloney.
Well anyway – a few years ago I started researching amps as you do online – because everything is there now isn’t it? Basically I needed to re-valve the thing as the reverb was not working and there was now almost zero overdrive coming out of the thing. I started to watch shootouts of all these amps and couldn’t believe it – apart from I think a Soldano which seemed to top it a bit on ‘nastiness’ with high-gain – this old black box was sounding better to my ears than all the other amps it was pitted against – and quite a few of the testers themselves came to the same conclusion.
And then something else happened – I started playing with the amp settings myself – properly – and… well I was really surprised. Not only did I find that the bit in the owner’s manual about it only needing a nudge here or there on a dial to completely change tone was true (in conjunction with nudges on other dials which I never ever did) – I found the sound was beautiful – it shimmered to use that over-used term!
Then I read about different valves and whilst I don’t think they play a huge role – switching these in conjunction with speaker jacks I got some really nice sounds I never knew were inside this box. Silly me – only 30 years to find out! But that’s what happens when you are bogged down in day-to-day work scratching a terrible living and worrying to death every day about everything but what you like doing or are good at.
Now I can say I’m so happy I bought this amp – not least because I could never afford another guitar amp like this – I have to say now – it is a beast – but in al the right ways!
More articles on the MK III
Mesa Boogie MKIII – The best amp I ever played!
www.thegearpage.net – Mesa Boogie Mark III
One Mesa Boogie User says: I think the MkIII is the best amp that Boogie ever made, and I have owned most of them. Mike Bendinelli once told me it was due to the output transformer, which apparently was different from all their other amps.