For those of you keeping score, I brought my Musicmaster Bass amp to Barnstorm this weekend. It sounded great, but struggled once there were drums. It had a great crunch on 7, with the tone control (which is a high pass filter) on about 4. But, as you would expect with a 12 watt amp, maxing the volume or boosting it didn't give any more volume. It just ran out of headroom. This would be ok if the amp were mic'd, but it made me think about how many small clubs I've played where the amps are just hot off the stage. As it happens, Heel had an Eminence Tonkerlite he wasn't using and a trade was made. Jello was kind enough to install the speaker while we were at Atomic Music.
Now I'm not sure how exactly a speaker that's supposed to sound like a Neo V30 lines up in its frequency response with the original speaker. To my ears, it's really close. The amp is at least twice as loud now. It still breaks up in exactly the same spots on the volume knob, but the amp can now compete in a full band. And in the few minutes I had with it at home, it still sounded great at low volumes.
The reason for a lot of people to buy a small amp, though, is that breakup. And as I tried out the amp in the barn, I thought about the quality of the gain and how I could achieve that at lower volumes. The DOD Boneshaker, which many people dislike for a variety of reasons, once again proved its worth to me. IMO, the Boneshaker kills on bass, but I had difficulty finding the sweet spot on guitar. It was designed to put a dirty amp into stoner/doom territory. But it also excels when you roll off the volume knob. Even with the distortion all the way off, it has a decent amount of gain. And as it turns out, the quality of that gain is very close to the Musicmaster with the stock speaker. And the semi-parametric EQ, which nearly gave Chad an aneurysm, was key to dialing it in just right.
So I'm really happy now. It may be the perfect NYC amp.