Thoughts on the 8/24 Dudley Manlove Quartet performance… and some amp woes
On Friday 8/24 the Dudley Manlove Quartet performed in Bothell for one of their free public concerts in the park. I love these opportunities for us to play outdoors and it’s always fun to get exposed to new audiences. We played the usual assortment of crowd-pleasing hits, despite having to set up on the infield dirt of a softball diamond… why oh why did they put us there? Oh well. We happily played and had people dancing in the grass.
During our third set my amp suddenly started to make an odd distortion and the output dropped. I turned around just in time to see the pilot light go out, indicating the fuse had blown. With no spare fuse or amp in sight, I had to wave over the monitor operator and have him patch the output of my pedalboard directly to a DI. I’m told it sounded surprisingly good, but it wasn’t nearly as good as my amp.
The next day I had a chance to get the amp to my tech who diagnosed the issue pretty quickly. First off, it’s partially my own fault. I bought the amp used about a year ago, and while I intended to retube it “real soon” I never got around to it. The original owner had installed mismatched power tubes in the amp, which is a really big no-no in a Mesa Boogie amp because they don’t have a bias control. Three of the four 6L6 power tubes were Boogie tubes, and the fourth was a Ruby tube. Naturally it was going to cause a failure eventually, and it did! I replaced the four power tubes and had my tech check the amp out. No worries. Back in fighting shape again, and sounding MUCH better since the power tube section was properly balanced. I definitely should have checked out those tubes on day 1 and recognized this was a potential problem. It also made me wonder if I should always have an alternate output strategy, like carrying a good quality DI just case something like this happens again.