Lab Series L5

B.B. king has a ton of thoese amps.  Also Ty Tabor from Kings X used them for 4 of their first albums.  he swithed to Mesa Boogie Recto's in 94' for the Dogman Release.  You can dial in a good distoriton tone and has a footswitch to add mid boost to the amp.  I think B.B uses the mid boost at all times, but doesn't dial in the gain very high.  Ty basically turned the gain wide open and would swith the mids on and off at will, he also used the Strat Plus guitar which had the active preamp that is now in the Clapton Signature models.  Turn on all that mess and you get metal who would have thought 80's Metal would use Mid range!  Great little amps, but they are solid state, B.B. never seemed to care and he has used them forever.

As a side note my friend Ryan Morris had one 10 years ago and he loved it, he always told me B.B. used them and if you would go see him at a show with it he would buy it off of you.  Not sure if thats true but it makes for a cool story.

Back in 89'-92' Ty Tabor was always being asked what he used as an amp and he never would say for fear that people would buy them up.  He went as far as to put false fronts on his L5 lab series amps to throw people off.  He switched because the recto heads came out.  His fender strat plus was replaced with Zion guitars because they found that as long as the mid range boost circuit was in the guitar it would feed back while in use with the Mesa Boogie having such a high gain circuit already.  Zion guitars put the circuit in a speacial stomp box so he could step on it like a boost pedal, and as long as the mid boost circuit wasn't in the guitar wired to the pickups it would work fine.  Anyway all the info you ever wanted form a guitarist a lot of people have never even heard of.  But those first 4 kings x albums I would put up against just about anybody as far as quality of the recordings and idea's.