I've made a few more changes and decided it was time to record some clips with various guitars/pickups. I really suck at clips, so apologies in advance.
I recorded from the 10" speaker [now a Weber Alnico Silver Bell] only using 2 mic's - a Blue Kickball about 2' and a SM57 about 10' back. There's some clipping on the Kickball that's likely mic placement. I'll try and fix that for next time.
Aside from a bit of flanger at the end, the only effect I used was some delay. Recorded into Cubase with a bit of compression, limiting and EQ to taste - the settings remain the same throughout all clips.
The amp starts out set with Gain @ 9 o'clock and volume almost wide open. At around 2:45 I open the gain up to a little past 12 o'clock and leave it there for the duration.
Stock, the V8 sucked at doing a clean tone no matter how hard I tried, so I'm starting this with my jazz-box - my Danedetto. It's a hollow body with a floating Kent Armstrong humbucker at the neck and strung
with flatwounds.
00:49 I switch to my Hagstrom Viking [335-ish semi-hollow] with SD P-Rails. It starts with the Rail setting, neck solo, then both pups in rail, both pups in P-90, both in humbucker then the bucker bridge solo.
All that changes are the pickup selections.
02:07 is my Sheena. Starts with both pups, then bridge solo, then bridge solo with gain cranked to noon.
03:06 I bust out my Les Paul with SD SH-2N Jazz in the neck and TB-4 JB in the bridge. It goes neck, both bridge than I kick on flange for the end.
It's been a few years now since I've heard one of these stock, but from memory they are really fizzy and farty with no clean headroom to speak of. Boxy and thin with an annoying mid-range honkiness and no balls to save its life. Basically sounded like a cheap little Crate tube amp - which is exactly what it is.
I'd like to squeeze a bit more bass response out of it, but am generally much happier with it now. It does a pretty good job of letting the character of the pickups come through. And there's plenty more gain on tap than in this clip, as the gain knob was only around 1/2 way. I'm in an apartment and can't really crank it without fear of an eviction notice, but I have no doubt it'll get really close to hi-gain metal territory.
I did another mod that I didn't record, and that is a boost switch. It disables the tone-stack allowing the full signal through to the power section. It adds from 10 to 20 db of boost [guessing here] but pushes
the tone toward treble side - which is actually a good thing for lead breaks. I'm going to see about making the boost foot-switchable once I can tame the treble a bit more.