Mesa/Boogie Mark Five

For those who came to the electric guitar any date after 1990, chances are that the name Mesa/Boogie will conjure thoughts of towering Dual and Triple Rectifier stacks – the amps that became the industry standard for hard rock and metal.

Rewind another 20 years, however, and Boogie main-man Randall Smith was making his name modding Fender Princetons into the world’s first high-power 1 x 12 combos. The original Mesa-branded, snakeskin-vinyl Mark I debuted in 1972, starting a family line that finds itself here in 2009: the Mark Five.

Smith and his team have introduced some killer features by the years. From things we now take for granted, such as channel switching, through to channel-assignable potential settings with valve or solid-state rectification. The goal of the Mark Series in specific has always been to offer a wide range of tones in a separate amplifier. And boy does that do that.

"Nothing short of a remarkable engineering and tonal achievement."

Check out the

video below to construct out it in action:

Controls

The Mark Five is laid out logically, with each of the three channels getting the same complement of controls. Rotaries cover the basics of gain, master, bass, middle, treble and presence, while the first of the mini toggle switches determines its respective channel’s mode.

Channel one offers ‘clean’, ‘fat’ and ‘tweed’ modes; channel two has ‘edge’, ‘crunch’ and ‘Mark I’; while channel three has ‘MKIIC+’, ‘MKIV’ and ‘extreme’. The channels are footswitchable, but the individual modes within them aren’t. The gain and tone characteristics of each mode are so different, they’re more about setting up the core tone of each channel, rather than tap-dancing within it.

Each channel has an additional voicing switch: channel one has normal/bold, which works across all modes and equates to a lighter and more bouncy feel, or slightly thicker with more punch.

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[Source] Mick Taylor