Just bought a Mesa Lonestar v2 head

Hi all I'm a newbie here.

Pro player here having played since the late 60's on just about everything imaginable. I had a kustom old style 50 watt head that when at full volume compressed wonderfully. Ah well, the old days. Gigging a lot pushed me towards digital gear just for the road worthiness. In the end the digital stuff is just that, digital. I can make it sound really quite good but plug into a great tube amp and big difference. So it's been mostly Marshalls 900, 800, TSL and lastly a DSL 100 that sounded really nice. The green channel was warm and a Carl Martin compressor made it sing. The red channel was pretty good but always required an Xotic RC pedal to clear/clean it up. So on my most recent search for tone, I realized I had categorized Mesa amps as primarily for metal so I never gave them a second look. However after trying every amp in both of the GCs in my town I plugged into a Lonestar v1 2x12 and ended up playing it for about 3 hours. Bought it took it home, played every guitar through it and lo and behold I wasn't using the Carl Martin or the Xotic pedal and it sounded lovely. The distortion is a little too smooth for me I'm sure I'll get used to that. Anyway, just wanted to share my conversion from Marshall, Engl, Line 6, Vox, Rivera, Ashdown, Ampeg, Bogner, Budda and some other forgetables to a Mesa Lonestar v2 head. It's to be delivered day after tomorrow and I can't wait.

So the amp was made in 2007 or so; would you put new tubes in it? It's got GT6L6s in it; would you install EL34s? I have a Vox Buckingham cabinet with Celestion GT100s and a Marshall 1936 with GT75s. What speakers do you like with the Lonestar. I play 60's and 70's rock like Hendrix, Cream, LZ, Beatles, Govt Mule, Jeff Beck, Animals, Trower and originals of same ilk. Cheers.

Any tube / speaker / cab, will sound good and changing various components will produce subtle changes. EL-34's won't turn it into a Marshall so to speak, just a little less of that 6l6 fullness. There is a lot of info in the archives here on these things. Your gonna love the amp with its big, fat clean sound.

The amp sounds best with some good 6L6s. EL34s are nice too, different, but it's not a match made in heaven... you lose a bit of headroom and just a tad of the 3D lushness that makes the LSC so special. I'm really happy with the =C= 6L6s I got from Doug's Tubes after asking for a set for a Lone Star. A little bit spendy but very tough.... mine have lasted more than 3 or 4 years and I've played it a LOT in that time.

When I'm playing classic rock with my LSC, I use TWEED/TUBE RECTIFIER/EL34s at the 50 watt mode with a 2X12 of Vintage 30s. And if you need to switch to channel 1 cleans, then you'll find the EL34s are more than respectable for cleans. That being said, I agree with the other posts in that 6L6GCs will give you a superb clean tone that is to die for.

Congrats on your purchase!