How do I dial out the nasal honk?

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john525

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I know this is a MB trait, some love it, me not so much. Does anybody have any suggestions for getting rid of the nasal timbre?
I recently read a review of the lonestar that mentioned the characteristic MB nasal timbre is gone :). Wonder if this has carried-over to the new 5:25+ ?
Cheers,
JS
 
john525 said:
I know this is a MB trait, some love it, me not so much. Does anybody have any suggestions for getting rid of the nasal timbre?
I recently read a review of the lonestar that mentioned the characteristic MB nasal timbre is gone :). Wonder if this has carried-over to the new 5:25+ ?
Cheers,
JS

I don't hear it in my Express.

Maybe a little on the burn channel, but the Timmy dials that out organically.
 
Have you tried one?

Its awkward for me to answer because when I play my Schecter semi-hollow I get the nasal.
My Les Paul... not much so.

For the most part, nasal is in the midrange. I think the contour does a pretty good job at controlling the nasal thing.

My experience tells me that sometimes things like "nasal" and "muddy" can indicate the absence of certain frequencies instead of odd peaks.
 
NomadExpress said:
Have you tried one?

Thanks for the feedback, and yeah, I've got a 5:25. Perhaps I need to play around with the contour control more, I've haven't really explored that control much, but it makes sense.
Cheers
 
David Garner said:
MrMarkIII said:
Play with a drummer. Now the "nasal honk" becomes "cutting through the mix".

Maybe that's why I don't hear it.

Interesting, I play in an acoustic/electric combo with no drummer, and currently no bass either, so perhaps that's why I hear it so much more...
 
john525 said:
David Garner said:
MrMarkIII said:
Play with a drummer. Now the "nasal honk" becomes "cutting through the mix".

Maybe that's why I don't hear it.

Interesting, I play in an acoustic/electric combo with no drummer, and currently no bass either, so perhaps that's why I hear it so much more...
Yup, the mids can get irritating by themselves, but when the sound gets filled up with the highs from the cymbals and snare, and the bottom from the bass and kick drum, the guitar's mids fill in the missing spaces. Acoustic guitars are usually more scooped in the mids.
 
All I know is my 5:50 sounds ridiculously good in a band mix at practice. It sits just right. I switch between crunch and burn, and I use clean on one song. With all settings it just sounds amazing. Great, great amp.

We play roots rock, too, so it's not a typical "Mesa/Boogie" sound we're after. And the tones I get wouldn't be pigeonholed as typical modern rock sounds -- very vintage, very pleasing, and just a fantastic tone all around.

I don't use pedals for dirt, but I do use 2 for a solo boost -- a Timmy and a Maxon OD9. I also have a Crybaby Classic, a DD-20 and a Seymour Duncan shape shifter on the board, plus a TU-3 tuner. That's more than enough variety for our band.
 
john525 said:
I know this is a MB trait, some love it, me not so much. Does anybody have any suggestions for getting rid of the nasal timbre?
I recently read a review of the lonestar that mentioned the characteristic MB nasal timbre is gone :). Wonder if this has carried-over to the new 5:25+ ?
Cheers,
JS

Alleged nasal honk huh.
News to me - I've never heard it on any Express.... or a Lonestar.
And in 3 yrs on this forum I've never heard anyone else mention it either.
Have you got your wah pedal half engaged when you play it ???
 
OK, I know it's been a year-and-a-half since I posted this, but I finally figured out how to "dial-out the nasal sound" that I sometimes was hearing from my Express 5:25 :D
I finally realized that the times I was hearing it most was when I was playing at low volume (accompanying a slightly amplified acoustic guitarist / singer). This, of course :wink: is due to the Fletcher-Munson effect, that lets us hear mid-range frequencies more efficiently at lower volumes (than lows and highs). For an amp that is already Mid-heavy, playing at low volume definitely was a recipe for honk.

With the tone controls on the amp, I was able to dial it out by cutting the mids completely, and setting the contour knob to around 9 o'clock, however this covers a pretty broad spectrum of mids, and makes for a pretty thin tone.

The real solution was to put an eq in the fx loop. I got a MXR 108 10 band graphic eq placed in the loop, and what a difference in tone control! Especially at lower volumes!
Wish I discovered this years ago, what a great tool!
 
EQ in the loop can do wonders depending on the tone you're after. I put a Boss GE-7 in mine for a while before I realized the chip in my King of Tone was the problem more than the EQ (reading upstream, I should note that my dirt pedals are now a KOT and a Monsterpiece STUD, and I now use crunch on channel 1 for gain and blues on channel 2 for cleans). Changed back to the stock chip and it was fine.

The real key to dialing in these amps, I've learned in the year and a half since I wrote the above, is to simply dial them in left to right. Literally. Start with the master roughly where you want it, and with all other knobs at 8 or 9 o clock. I like to do this with the reverb and contour off. Then turn the gain up while strumming a chord. When you get that where you like it, go to treble. Then mids. Then bass. Dial them in slow. Turn up, back off a hair, turn up again, etc. After getting bass set, I like to fine tune treble, mids and bass by strumming a D, A and E chord, respectively. The crunch and bite of the treble on the D should sizzle, the mids on the A should punch, and the bass on the E should boom. That last part might just be tuning to my ears, but it works for me. It usually doesn't require much if any tweaking -- it's usually right. When all that is done, set reverb to taste, and then if you like, set contour to taste.

This maximizes the tone stack in a way I haven't been able to duplicate otherwise. You really get the amp dialed in right. I think most people do what I used to do, which is start with everything except master on 5 and tweak from there. The gain stages in the tone stack don't really mesh well together this way, and dialing them in in the order I suggest affects the tone in descending order of impact on the gain stages. So gain affects it the most, treble 2nd most, mids 3rd, bass 4th. It's much better to dial them in one at a time because you get a better idea of what each does to your tone as you go, and it's easier to correct on that one knob than it is to figure out which one goobered up your tone.

I figured all that out by reading the manual, so this isn't some big secret I've uncovered. But I thought I'd share it because it works, and it works very, very well.
 

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