Mesa Flux Drive

ICBM

I seem to have accidentally acquired one of these…

It sounds great. Really great.

It's the first and only solid-state overdrive pedal I have ever tried that doesn't have that irritating slightly separated dirt-on-top-of-the-clean-sound effect when it's almost clean and going into a clean amp.

It doesn't sound *exactly* like valve amp overdrive - it's just a very natural but powerful overdriven sound, but most importantly it's very responsive and musical-sounding. It has less gain than I was expecting too, or maybe that's part of it… it's so dynamic that you can clean it up to a large extent just by playing quietly, even with the gain maxed.

There's no need for me to post a demo because the four clips on Mesa's site are very accurate and played by much better players than I will ever be!

I now wonder how long it will be before Mesa makes an all-solid-state amp - they've been doing solid-state power-section bass amps for some time, their graphic EQ has always been solid state (and is now available in a pedal too), and if you put two (or all four!) of these new pedal circuits plus the GEQ and a solid-state power amp in a box, you'd have quite an amp…

Forgot to say, I opened it up to see if I could find the capacitor , but it's hard to work out what's going on because the PCB is trace-side-up. I will investigate further later.

timmysoft

I used the throttle box for a year with my laney vc30, absolutely devastating! I can't wait to try the new one with the eq on it too!

Dave_Mc

Nice

Any idea if it's based on anything else? I think some of the other new Mesa pedals are (pretty heftily modded, to be fair) TSes.

monquixote

I think the Grid Slammer is the breathed on TS.

Dave_Mc

Yeah when I clicked this thread I actually thought it was this one, but the Grid Slammer seems to be the TS-alike, while the throttle box seems to be a fairly heavily modded one.

ThePrettyDamned

Yes!

Someone who agrees!

I was slated on the old place when I asked if od pedals have clean signal mixed in, because I could hear on my tubescreamer, boss sd-1 and route 66 was like a gainy sound on top of clean (it was in reference to bass players wanting a clean blend). I was told my pedals might be broken! It really does sound like that.

I'm glad I'm not just mad. Glad you're stoked with the pedal, too!

The mxr dist iii and Marshall guvnor didn't have that problem quite so much, though they were set for higher gain than the others.

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

Yes!

Someone who agrees!

I was slated on the old place when I asked if od pedals have clean signal mixed in, because I could hear on my tubescreamer, boss sd-1 and route 66 was like a gainy sound on top of clean (it was in reference to bass players wanting a clean blend). I was told my pedals might be broken! It really does sound like that.

I'm glad I'm not just mad.

You're definitely not mad, but it's true that not everyone hears it. It depends on how you use the pedal - into an overdriven amp or if you're always playing beyond the point of clipping in the pedal, you won't hear it. I tend to play into either a clean amp or one that's fairly mildly overdriven (less than the pedal), and use picking dynamics a lot, so there's usually a point when the sound is dropping back from overdriven to clean. I then hear solid-state distortion as typically having a buzz that seems to be clearly separate from the body of the clean sound underneath it - the buzz doesn't change until it stops suddenly when the signal drops below the point of clipping, so just before that, as the clean sound is also decaying, it's really noticeable. (And to me, annoying.)

I will have a further look inside this one later, I'm really quite interested as to how it's built. I won't do a full trace-out though, from what I can see on the solder side it looks complicated.

ICBM

Curiosity got the better of me and I have had a look .

It is "Tube Screamer like", at least in the sense that it uses a diode network in the feedback loop of a JRC4558, paralleled with the gain control. Which is very interesting, because it sounds nothing like a Tube Screamer. There's a lot more to it than a standard TS circuit though, in particular there is an extra IC (TL072) in there as well.

It's very well made inside too - with one exception, which I don't really like. It's true bypass with a 3PDT mounted directly on the main PCB. I'm not a fan of true bypass anyway, but if you must have it this really is the wrong way to do it - it's just asking for trouble in the long term.

mike_l

As ICBM has said a dirty pedal into a clean amp retains some character, and cleanliness of the clean amp with the dirt piled on top of it.

I've heard this with every pedal I've tried, some more than others, which is one of the reasons I mostly used the amp for dirt for a long time....

ThePrettyDamned

Yeah, I've just had a play and even with the route 66 set at high gain (actually, it sounds a bit like a few Dumble demos out there) it's definitely got that sound.

Especially when spanking the strings.

On the distortion box (power grid) it's not there at all - but that has its own issues, such as graininess and weird artefacts (I like the grainiess and as I use it for fun shred solo the gain is high enough there are not audible artefacts).

So maybe a more od pedal thing that dist.

Is the switch moddable on the flux drive? Seems odd for mesa to overlook something like that (I'm replacing my route 66 because the mechanical switches are beginning to fail and they're pcb mounted I think).

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

Is the switch moddable on the flux drive? Seems odd for mesa to overlook something like that (I'm replacing my route 66 because the mechanical switches are beginning to fail and they're pcb mounted I think).

No, or not without totally hacking the board. The board is supported by the switch at that end too.

It's sad when market pressure leads to products being dumbed-down and made potentially unreliable in order to cater to ignorance. True bypass with mechanical switching belongs in the history books. The whole reason Boss etc developed soft switching was to cure all the problems with it… it's just a shame they didn't implement it perfectly, so it has its own issues.

Typically, Mesa have done the bypass the wrong way with the bypass path going through *both* switch contacts as well.

Dave_Mc

ICBM said:

Curiosity got the better of me and I have had a look .

It is "Tube Screamer like", at least in the sense that it uses a diode network in the feedback loop of a JRC4558, paralleled with the gain control. Which is very interesting, because it sounds nothing like a Tube Screamer. There's a lot more to it than a standard TS circuit though, in particular there is an extra IC (TL072) in there as well.

It's very well made inside too - with one exception, which I don't really like. It's true bypass with a 3PDT mounted directly on the main PCB. I'm not a fan of true bypass anyway, but if you must have it this really is the wrong way to do it - it's just asking for trouble in the long term.

Interesting, thanks for the info. That sounds a bit like the throttle box, too- the first bit of the circuit is more or less tubescreamer, then it gets LOLWUT? (technical term) after that. EDIT: Just in case you haven't seen it, the schematic is in the first post here: http://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23189&hilit=throttle+box

Is what you're saying about dirt boxes' distortion sounding almost "on top" of the clean tone similar to what I say when I say the sustain of them isn't quite natural? It seems to me like they sustain for a while and then the sustain just sort of drops away completely (whereas with tubes it decays more naturally)- maybe we're talking about the same thing in different ways, or maybe that's something separate. ) Either way, I agree with you that dirt boxes (most I've tried, anyway) don't quite "feel" right when compared to tube distortion (even preamp tube distortion, I don't use power tube distortion that much), and I agree that they feel much better (though still not quite as good as tube) when run into a dirty tube amp.

ICBM said:

The whole reason Boss etc developed soft switching was to cure all the problems with it… it's just a shame they didn't implement it perfectly, so it has its own issues.

Yeah I think tha'ts the problem- I agree with what you're saying about the problems with TBP, but at the same time I don't think you can blame people for thinking buffers etc. suck when most of the biggest manufacturers of buffered pedals have implemented them in such a way that they, er, do. ) Unless you're able to make the things yourself (and most aren't, myself included, my meager electronics knowledge is all theoretical), how something should work in theory isn't much use, it's how it's implemented in practice by the manufacturers which matters.

ThePrettyDamned said:

On the distortion box (power grid) it's not there at all - but that has its own issues, such as graininess and weird artefacts (I like the grainiess and as I use it for fun shred solo the gain is high enough there are not audible artefacts).

So maybe a more od pedal thing that dist.

That's funny- I'd have said the OD pedals I've tried sound and feel more natural than most distortions I've tried. I dunno whether that's the way I set them, or just my own prejudice (since I'm more a higher gain player my ear is maybe more attuned to that kind of sound so I'm fussier with it).