I've owned both the Nomad 45 head and 1x12 combo. Like Koreth said, a lot of people view them as the redheaded step-child of the Mesa line but they do have a following. I think it comes from the fact that when most people think of Mesa amps they usually tend to think of the Mark series or the Recto line but the Nomad isn't either. It's not brutal enough for the Recto guys and its tone doesn't have quite the complexity or the Mark series though it
is a very capable and versatile amp in its own right. I'll give you my insight to the 45 as I owned two of them and its a little different than its bigger brothers the 55 and the 100.
The 45 is the only one of the bunch that uses the smaller bottles (EL84 vs 6L6 in the others) which tends to give it a bit of a sweeter sound. The clean channel for example has a bit more of a Vox AC charm to it than the blackface Fender-ish sound produced by the other two, but you probably figured that already. The 45 is also the only Nomad to feature the Normal/Extreme switch located on the back of the amp. From the Nomad manual:
This two position toggle switch is a bonus feature and rewards those loyal to the littlest
Nomad...the small but mighty 45. This switch reconfigures the negative feedback circuit of this little dynamo and allows two distinct power
responses from the 4 x EL84 harness. “Normal” wires in the magic amount of negative feedback,
producing a warm, round, bubbly response. This position is where you will find the most
balanced clean sounds and vocal overdrive sounds. We would suggest the Normal position
for most of your channel switching needs.
“Extreme” unleashes the fury of this aggressive mid-wattage power section and allows a
more traditional Euro style response. The early British EL84 amps barked an urgent, fast
attack and screamed with a brash, rebelious nature. Negative feedback is stripped away in
this Extreme rendition to arrive at the most forward of all Nomad personalities.
In normal mode the amp is very tame and IMO very basic sounding, not bad but I couldn't seem to dial in any sort of tone that jumped out at me. I always left it on extreme and to me, that's where the amp came alive. It seemed to me like the "blanket had been lifted off" so to speak and everything just plain sounded better to my ears. Now onto the channels.
Channel 1: As I described before Ch 1 has a very sweet Vox-ish bit about it that is really warm and bell like. It doesn't have quite the "spank" of 6L6 (I compared it often to my buddy's F-50 since he left it at my place for nearly a year) but I love the cleans on this amp. To be honest I like the 45's cleans better than my Mark Iv's but still a little behind the Blue Angel I had years ago, now THAT had some gorgeous cleans. Pushed mode is also pretty cool. You can dial it to be quite a monster if you want, as far as "clean" channels go. I can't think of any other high gain amp that can push out that much drive from its green channel, maybe a 5150 in crunch mode.
Channel 2: This one is just plain fun. It didn't start out that way though, I had a head with some VERY tired tubes and the bass pot was busted with the thing cranked all the way up. It led to nothing but a mushy mess and I never like it until I did a full retube and I got the idea to throw an OD in front of it. I put a Digitech Bad Monkey in front (before getting any negative thoughts about Digitech you must know that the Bad Monkey is a real gem with quite the following including many non Digitech users) but the cool thing about the Bad Monkey was the low and high EQ controls instead of the basic single tone knob. I turned down the bass all the way on the pedal essentially sucking all my guitar's lower frequencies out of the signal that hit the amp and WOW. All of a sudden I knew what this channel was about. I could do just about anything from light gain jazz tones to bluesy crunch to gainy liquid bliss. On vintage mode everything is dialed back a bit, a tad more civilized. Switching to modern mode you get a bump in volume and increased cut and presence in all frequencies across the board. With the OD in front I was playing with a metal band and getting all the gain I needed. My other guitarist nearly threw a fit when our bass player told him I had better tone than him and his Soldano Avenger w/upgraded SLO tranny.
Channel 3: Think a bit more "brit" here. Not as full sounding as Ch 2 and you can really tell when going back and forth between them. The low end doesn't have the depth or the resonance and the whole structure of the gain is much more dry sounding in general. When describing it like that it might sound like a bad thing but if you know what to expect and know what context to put it in it can be an incredibly useful sound. I'm sure if you had a Nomad 100 with EL34s you could dial in quite the good Led Zepp tone and many other classic Marshall sounds as well. Maybe die hard Marshall dudes would call BS on that and yea... a Mesa will always have that Mesa flavor to it but I seriously think you could pull it off better than any JCM2000 series. But coming back to the 45 with its tiny bottles the sound once again leans a little more to the Vox side of things but still on the dryer side. I think that might partially be because AC30s are usually biased rather warm where as the fixed bias of our Mesas run on the much cooler side. I've heard of AC30s burning up for that reason but I can't say I have any first or second hand experience so that could be some internet smoke being blown up my rear. The only thing I could ask for is for this channel to have the low end that the orange (ch 2) has. If those two channels were combined it would be brilliant. Then you could get yourself a 45 watt 2x12 with some Alnico Blues and then no one would have to buy a new AC30 ever again.
As far as reliability is concerned.... POTS!!! Everything else was awesome and I played out with the Nomads SO many times and they took it like champions but on both my head and my combo there were issues with the pots. I already explained the head, on my combo there was one or two pots giving me trouble. I distinctly remember the treble pot on the third channel being a pain. I had to shove a piece of paper under the knob, without the shim it wouldn't respond when I turned it and it seemed as though whenever I tried turning it up that I would LOSE top end. Very frustrating considering how Boogies work with that having an affect on the gain and the other knobs. So I just turned it up and compensated with the presence.
Now the Express series. I've had only moderate amounts of time with these and most of that was in guitar stores, bad I know. Still, I'm not a huge fan. I wanted to like them, I really did. I had my Nomad combo at the time when the Express series came out. Being a fan of the DCs, Nomads and especially the F-series I thought it would be awesome. I was really intrigued by that 5w setting. But nonetheless, it didn't do much for me. It felt similar to my Nomad with the poweramp voicing set to "normal." Which again, isn't a bad sound but just uninspiring to me overall. Plus I found out that I actually preferred the sound of the amp running full power turned down versus the 5 watt mode. Of course this is all just an opinion and I'm sure there are plenty of peeps who swear by their Express but if it were me... I'd be looking at another Nomad 45 or an F-30 before I even thought about the Express. Sorry for the uber long post, I just feel the need once in a while to stick up for the little guy (Nomad) since it gets a lot of bad press. Also, I'm hoping I won't get too much heat from the Express guys but it's a really long post and they don't have the time to read all the way through it to get to the bad part, they want everything now! now! now! That's why they got the Express in the first place. :lol:
