Mesa Boogie Express 5:50: The Amp That Sounds Like A Train
With a serious Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde complex, the Mesa Boogie Express 5:50 lives by its dualities. Playable at either a venue destroying 50 watts or a practice-perfect five watts, the Express 5:50 is two different amps in one, many times over. Consider that you've got your clean and blues channels, which should satisfy cleaner players right next to the crunch and burn channels, which can make you bleed out your ears if you're not careful.
Jonathan Pretus from Cowboy Mouth talks about how his recent acquisition of this amplifier is changing his perspective on both live and studio amplification. Maybe it'll change your mind, too. Watch this video to find out!
JONATHAN PRETUS: My name is Jonathan Pretus, and I play in the band Cowboy Mouth from New Orleans, Lousiana.
This is the Mesa Express 5:50, which I think is a relatively new amp. At some point in the last year or so, I think they came out with them. I was playing through two JCM2000’s and we decided to downsize a little bit, just, you know, the kind of a little bit smaller, you know, amount of gear that we carry with us. And so I was kind of hesitant at first because I love the sound of the Marshall and, you know, I played a lot of combos and this one just blew me away, and it’s a great amp.
It’s not horribly expensive. I mean it’s a good, well priced amp, and it’s easily, you know, portable, and I mean it just screams. That’s the great thing about it. It’s got multiple settings actually. I’ll show them to you if you like, a little product placement.
On your clean side, you got clean and crunch so you can have a totally clean tone or a slightly driven tone, and I usually keep it on clean and then occasionally jump back in between songs and hit it under the crunch if I just a little light something. And then on your dirty channel, you’ve got blues and burn. Blues is kind of a little more smoother distortion than what I would use normally for Cowboy Mouth stuff so I keep it on the burn. But, you know, it’s a wonderful amp.
It’s got reverb, a full -- It’s got reverb channels on it which are great. These contour knobs, I don’t quite ever figure out what they do so much but I know that I like it when it’s on versus when it’s not so we just left it on really, but it’s a really good simple plug and play amp. I mean there’s really no big fuss about it. It’s a very simple nice amp and very happy having switched to it.
Well, I’m actually hoping to do over the break is work -- try to work a little bit with -- You know, at home, on my recording setup, I use like a Line 6 deal. I’m just trying to start mic’ing the actual amp as opposed to plugging straight into, so I’m hoping that the Mesa will give me some good results with that, so that’s what I’m looking at right now but....
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