Luckily for me, most of my years of playing guitar have been happily filled with various Mesa Boogies. It all started with my friend in my high school band that went through amps like water (he’s since settled down and is happily married to a Single Rectifier). At one point, he was using a Marshall, until one night 30 seconds into our first song at a battle of the bands, he switched to the dirty channel and his amp committed suicide. He got it warrantied, sold it, and bought a Mesa Tremoverb 2X12 combo. I had never played one before because the closest store that had a Mesa license was about an hour away. I immediately fell in love.

At first, lugging that thing into my house made me hate it. That amp was like carrying a suitcase of concrete, but once we plugged it in, I was smacked in the face with 100 watts of tube heaven. The amp screamed and sounded amazing doing it. The Tremoverb is a Dual Rectifier, but with dedicated reverb and auto-assignable tremolo for both channels. The two channels each have separate modes: Clean, Vintage High Gain, Blues, and Modern High Gain. It features independent gain, bass, mid, treble, presence, reverb and master volume per channel, as well as channel cloning. I have always loved the high gain distortion that all the Rectifiers put out — a lot of people do. The thing that they have always lacked though, in my opinion, is a really good clean channel. That’s not to say that it’s necessarily bad, but the clean channel hasn’t quite stacked up against what some other amps offer. I never cared too much, because with the style of music I liked to play at the time, it was on the dirty channel more often than not. I loved the distortion enough to sacrifice a little on the clean side. The Tremoverb makes up for this. To my ears, it has the best sounding clean channel of any Rectifier that I have played, while still being able to maintain that heavy gain, kick to the face distortion that Mesa is known for.

With awesome range of clean and distorted tones, the Tremoverb has always been my favorite Mesa, and I hope to some day add one to my slowly growing collection of gear. Does Mesa make an amp for everyone? No. Does any company? I don’t think so. Mesa Boogie has just always been my preference, and for the people that don’t like them, I think you’d be surprised if you sat down in front of one of these and played around with it for a bit. The Tremoverb is very well known in the Mesa community; I’ve read a lot of posts in forums from people stating it’s the best Mesa ever made. They were discontinued around 15 years ago at this point, so it’s rare that you get to really try them out unless you know someone that owns one. If you do get the chance, I definitely recommend plugging in. Also, if you do decide to buy one, do your back a favor and just buy the head.