hi yesterday i bought a Yamaha Pacifica Electric guitar and a marshall mg15cd amp right but im not really satisfied with the sound. ive fiddled with the settings but cant seem to get a diesant suond and if its up to high it buzzes! ive learnt to play all the small things by blink 182 on sum1 elses amp and it sounds great but with mine its not right! any help wud be appreciated!
Unfortunately, the MG15 is really only a practice amp, and so isn't designed to be turned up very much.
I've used one of these amps quite a lot, and I find them not very nice to work with, however, it is possible to get a reasonable sound from it with a lot of tweaking.
I guess your talking about the distortion sound? Right, fist of all, these amps aren't very clear or defined, you've got to turn the treble pretty much all the way up, 9-10. Next, try to keep the bass low, otherwise you loose some of the definition and it turns to mush, so set that no higher than about 4.
Then, the main control on this amp is the "Contour" you can pretty much totally change the character of the amp with this one. However, don't push it past 3 if you want to be doing anything but solos.
Try to keep the gain fairly low too, I don't recomend going much past 5. I know that might sound stupid, as you probably want loads of distortion, but less is more with distortion. It will sound better, more proffessional, and in fact more distorted if you kee the gain lower.
These are just suggestions of mine, I've used this amp a lot, but the best thing you can do is sit down one afternoon, and play with the amp and change settings until you get a sound you like. Use my suggestions perhaps as a rough guideline.
I suggest that for rhythm playing you use the bridge postion pickup (push the switch as far as it will go away from the neck end of the guitar) this shoudld give more bite.
Finally, It might really be worth looking at a distortion pedal. This will give you a far nicer sound than amp distortion. Try out a Boss DS-1, or take a look at some of the DOD distortions, theyve just released a new range of about 6 different types of distortion pedal. Or, try A Danelectro black Liquorice, (yes I know, stupid name) these are great value pedals.
Hope that helps
Peter
