BY PHIL DOBSON
Mesa Boogie, fabled ‘Home Of Tone’ has long been associated with a superb workmanship and quality. The company’s mission has always been one of bringing perfection to the masses, albeit at a slight weight and cost premium over most other brands – in short, if a job’s worth doing, then it’s worth overdoing.
Mesa’s plaudits tend to come from our six-string comrades, but bubbling – nay grinding, slamming and pounding – under is a notable presence in the bass market, particularly in the USA. Along with Ampeg’s venerable SVT series, Boogie’s Bass 400+ head has become a mainstay of many of the world’s stadium stages – a certain Sir P McCartney of Liverpool can often been seen in their company, not to mention many others on the rock & metal scene.
Brilliant though that amp is, things have now moved on a touch, not least really useful built-in trolley/handle. Yet evolution and market trends has led to this little beauty: the M-Pulse Walkabout amplifier.
PRE & POWER AMP
Weighing a mere 13 pounds, this removable head (see Cabinet & Speakers) is a scaled-down evolution of its bigger brothers, the M-Pulse 600 and 360. The latter’s comprehensive five-stage parametric equaliser system is also scaled down for the Walkabout, offering a simplified three-band version, feeding a fan-cooled 300-watt ‘Simul-State’ power stage.
To the uninitiated, Mesa amps can present a challenge as you absorb the individuality of their methodology for the control layout. However, all starts to become clear quickly with this one. Fed by active and passive input jacks, a gain rotary pot controls the input to the valve stage. For anyone not used to a tube preamp stage, what this means is that you can overdrive the front end to obtain a really sweet edge, increased dynamics and extra dimension to your average rock bass sound. More of which later.
You also get master bass, treble and mid controls. The first two are active, offering powerful cut or boost. Boogie goes into the science at some length in the manual; for example, the bass rotary has ‘a Q centre of 55 Hz… as the control is increased past the mid point, there is a 6dB per octave rise in gain…’ and so on. If you want to read that stuff in detail, then head for www.mesaboogie.com and download the manual. In practical terms, what it ‘’YOU HAVE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF CUT AND BOOST POTENTIAL...‘’ means is that you have an enormous amount of cut and boost potential for high and low end.
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The rotary mid control is a boost only, offering you quick global control. The more involved tone shaping fun comes with the complementary three- band parametric equaliser in the centre of the front panel – its position hints at the importance of the mid shape in any bass tone. Here you have a pair of rotary pots, covering three different frequency sweeps, plus +/– 15dB gain for each. The bands cover: 30 Hz to 300 Hz, 200 Hz to 2 kHz and 1.2 kHz to 12 kHz.
After that, you have a rotary DI level pot which controls the bottom/rear mounted XLR socket that comes pre- or post-EQ depending on what your engineer prefers.
Top it off with a master volume control a large on/off toggle switch and red neon and the front panel is complete. Around the back you also get a series effects loop; 1/4-inch jacks for send and return.
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The control panel looks simple, yet there's a huge amount of versatility here. |
CABINET & SPEAKERS
The Walkabout head is mounted cleverly within the rear of the main cabinet. Why clever? Well, if you want to remove it and use it as a head only, simply unscrew the rear panel and the whole unit comes out as a compact head. For example, for rehearsing and smaller gigs, the combo works just fine, but maybe for bigger rock gigs, you’d prefer to whip the head out, and use it atop your trusty 4x10 or 2x15 cabinet. It’s a flexible arrangement, the only minor downside of which is that the rear panel connections of the amplifier are slightly restricted in that the IEC mains connection, speaker leads, DI and effects send and return end up as a vertical plug-in within the combo. It’s ever so slightly fiddly when you’re working in a confined space.
This combo is a classic cube design. This makes it very neat and compact, though with just a single top-centre mounted handle – which more than adequately deals with the weight – it can be slightly awkward to carry for any distance unless you’ve the strength to hold it clear of your body/legs. The Walkabout 12-inch extension cab shares the same basic dimensions as the main combo, and without the head it’s a featherlight 15.7kg. Stacked on top of one another they look super pro, albeit super cute!
One major factor in the reduced weight is that Mesa has chosen to go with neodymium magnet drivers. This relatively new development in speaker design – Celestion is making big noises about its performance, and Vox also uses it for its Valvetronix cabinets – is said to offer excellent tone, yet the neodymium magnets are a fraction of the weight of standard magnets.
Both cabinets include an integral +/–2dB pad for the tweeter response, and also a sting – more of a boom in fact – in the tail is an 8-inch ‘passive radiator’. This is a speaker without a driver and voice coil that’s driven by the air in the cabinet, generated by the active speaker. It functions like a conventional port offering dampening for the active speaker. This is designed to enhance the low end, and make the Walkabout sound much bigger than its diminutive dimensions suggest.
Overall build quality is typical Boogie; superbly constructed cabinets, tough vinyl covering (with slightly less tough leather corner protectors) and a generally all-round pro-oriented vibe.
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Effects loop, power in and speaker outs are on the underside of the inside back. |
SOUNDS
As with all things Mesa, the attention to detail in both the design and methodology in the pre-amplifier and tone shaping is very intense. The mainstay of the Walkabout four-stage preamp is a trusty 12AX7 tube. As such the main gain pot dictates the overall mood of your sound; Effects loop, power in and speaker outs are on the underside of the inside back below 12 o’clock gives a good amount of headroom for those brighter tones, particularly good for the funksters among you. Drive the gain above the mid point and you move in to richer, rounded tones. Keep going past the two o’clock mark and the tubes start driving a little to bring in warm distortion. We’re not talking guitarist- type mega filth, instead it’s fat grind for near-Lemmy drive (without the pencil- punched speaker cones thankfully). For all-round, solid classic rock tones we found it hard to leave the middle area.
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Unscrew these to remove the amp for head only format. |
After that, anything goes. Literally. The EQ here is jaw-droppingly powerful and to get you started, the manual offers some useful suggestions for settings. For example, ‘huge and round’, ‘scooped R&B’, ‘driving rock’ and so on. There’s obviously a great deal of scope to fill in the gaps between these settings, and once you get to grips with dialling in various key frequencies you’re seconds away from a multitude of tones.
The Walkabout unit alone is remarkably fat sounding with scary extremes of bass if you need it, perfect for small gigs and rehearsing. Linked with the extension cab, the volume and headroom becomes full- band-friendly thanks to the clarity and capability of the Mosfet power stages of the amplifier, further enhanced by being pre-driven by another 12AX7 tube stage.
However, while using the company’s stadium-rig pedigree to develop a smaller rig is highly commendable, shoe-horning it all into a 12-inch- speakered combo or mini stack can present some other issues.
At times over a series of gigs with the Walkabout, we felt that perhaps the sheer size and breadth of the Mesa sound almost overpowers itself if you’re not careful; the immense bass response and presence of the Walkabout can sometimes give you a little difficulty in hearing the mid- range as clearly as you would want to. While that may be just a case of spending longer with the parametric EQ, it nevertheless highlights that this isn’t a plug-in-and-go amp: turning everything to three-quarters and wigging out isn’t the answer.
Spend the time dialling however, and overall this is one fat (yep, let’s say it again) sounding amp. And if you’ve any reason to doubt the performance of 12- inch speakers for bass – 10s and 15s are more common – audition a Walkabout and change your mind for good.
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THE MESA WALKABOUT SCOUT BOASTS HIGH PERFORMANCE IN A SMALLER PACKAGE
It’s hard to imagine anyone – regardless of whether it’s their gear of choice – not wanting to own a Mesa amp, at least for a while, such is the braggability potential that goes with this highly revered brand. With this in mind, the Mesa Walkabout Scout won’t do anything to harm that reputation at all in that it fits the usual Mesa mould for quality, performance and generous engineering perfectly.
The sheer breadth and power of the EQ means there are some terrible tones in here along with all the great ones, so you’ll need to be a confirmed tweaker to get the best from it. When you do, just watch as your bandmates grin, the audience wants to go to the toilet more often and your bank manager throws his head in his hands once again. For sure it looks pricey compared to, say, an Ashdown MAG C-300 or Hartke VX3500, but by crikey does it get the job done in a smaller, more versatile package. GB |
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By Phil Dobson,
Guitar Buyer (UK) February 2004 |
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