by Scott DeVarenne » Wed May 30, 2012 1:25 am
My ears are ringing even more than usual this evening. I spent a good while playing the Ironhorse. The preamp has three modes- Clean, Pure, Solo. Clean is the cleanest(duh!), but not especially clean with my dang hot pickup. My pickup is also bright, requiring me to dial the treble down to almost zero. I left the bass at 12o'clock. That's it for tone controls- bass and treble. Ever the optimist, I see this as wonderfully simple, and the sound is good, so I'm not complaining. The next mode is Pure. It's dirtier than Clean and it's pure. So pure that it don't need those fancy tone knobs. Bass and Treble? Pfft. That's just uppity. Let's disengage those. So now I'm back to being nice and bright. Not offensive like it was in Clean mode with the treble at noon, but it's brighter than I want it and there's nothing more the Ironhorse can do for me because it's Pure now, baby. Plenty of gain for my scrappy rock needs. I didn't even check out the Solo mode, which has more gain but the same amout of tone shaping cababilities as Pure mode (0). The switching capability between fixed and cathode bias is great. They sound and feel significantly different. I was preferring the distortion flavour of Cathode but it didn't feel as if I could make things pop out like I could in Fixed. In other words they are both very cool. I like the overall tone and overdrive character of this amp. With some sculpting tools onboard I might have loved it. I'll never know.