I forgot to post this yesteerday before I had to leave.
Per psychodave's request, I experimented with the volume knob on my guitar to see how much nuance I could get.
On the Vintage Brittish you can get a very nice just breaking up clean tone when you roll the volume off on your guitar. The Mega channel cleans up decently, but not as well as the British channel.
Interestingly, I was doing the experiment with the most BREWWWWTAL
settings I have so far on each channel (and by the way, I can take the Vintage channel all the way into death metal territory using the pre and post parametrics)...I figured if I could get it to be decent using these settings, it would work well everywhere.
However!!! The key to getting this to work well is turning the threshold on the hush WAAAAY down...or just turn the hush OFF when you want to roll the knob back. I am assuming you could assign a button on your foot controller as an on/off switch for the hush, but I am not that far along yet (can't do anything but switch channels on the midimate yet
)
I am actually surprised how well the unit responds to rolling the volume knob back...especially on the brittish channel. I was expecting an improvement over typical digital stuff, but this is very nice. Keep in mind, I am using EMG pickups, so it probably works better with passives!
My bet is some vintage tone snobs would not like it, just on principal, but it works very nicely
Another note. I was mostly using the clean and Mega channels, then decided to see what I could do with the Brittish channel. My expectation was sort of JCM800ish levels of gain and texture. The unit definitely does this, but this channel can do everything from nice Marshallish cleans to buesy stuff (though the blues channel does it better) all the way up to all out high gain armageddon.
I can't wait to run this thing through a dedicated stereo power amp. Right now, I am running it mono into the effects return of the JVM, then out to 2 cabs. My VHT cab loaded with the MC90's is louder in this format than the Voodoo Amps cab with v30's, so the 90's are dominating the tone (which is not a bad thing). Once I have independent volume controls, I am looking forward to hearing an equal blend to see what I think.
Too bad I can't touch the thing again til Friday evening