OT: Care to expand on that brief review of the Mk VII? Seems like an amazing tool. Can you make effective use of all those modes live, and switch between them?
Honestly, it's a bit excessive for me, but I love it. I alternate between a few different strategies with it.
I run it on the 90W setting for all channels, regardless of volume. It has some useful tones in the 25W and 45W settings, but I'm generally looking for a rounder fatter tone, and don't really need the extra gain push.
Channel 1 is my clean sound. I dial it in on it's 'FAT' voicing, where single coils will go right up to where it almost goes into that ege of breakout sound, but still clean. When I switch to humbuckers, I just toggle back to the "CLEAN" setting and kind of end up in the same edge of breakout type sound. Since I'm right at the edge of my headroom, it will let pedals - like a tube screamer - really shine.
Channel 2 is always set to the "MKVII" voicing, but with the drive dial back. I can easily get the same amount of gain (or more) from the "CRUNCH" voicing, but I prefer the character of the MKVII voicing. It can deliver obnoxious amounts of gain, but I think it does it's best work in that mid/crunch territory.
Channel 3 is kind of a wild card. If I'm playing both single coils and humbuckers, I will usually dial channel 2 for humbucker rhythm/crunch, and channel 3 for my single coil rhythm/crunch. Then I boost up with a tube screamer or Xotic SL Drive for leads.
It seems I'm doing most gigs these days with humbuckers, so I end up treating channel 3 as a my 'lead' gain sound using the MKIV voicing. Generally speaking, I'm not really using any more gain, but I will use it for a bit of a volume & mid boost with a little bit of a low cut.
I love having the IR loader built in. I didn't care for any of Mesa's stock IR, so I replaced them with some 3rd party IRs.
I have one real complaint with the Mark series, in general. I wish the channel EQ was post, and the graphic EQ was 'pre'. I feel like this would allow the channel EQ to help shape the overall tone of the amp. Then the EQ could be switched in/out as a lead boost or something. As it is, the only way I've been able to find my sounds is to leave the graphic EQ engaged 100% of the time. And I barely touch the channel EQ, because as you know - it tends to do very ugly things, especially in higher gain applications.
MIDI implementation could be a little more advanced. It'd be awesome if we could actually program complete presets. Or use it to switch the individual channel voicings. As it is, the MIDI can basically be used to do what the standard 6-button footswitch does (EQ, FX Loop, Reverb, Channel 1, Channel 2, Channel 3). That's not nothing. But I'm spoiled by Fractal in this regard.
Speaking of the footswitch, it uses a really annoying 7-pin MIDI cable. Yes, you
can use a standard 5-in cable, if you're willing to give up the LEDs. They can be modified to use a battery, or an external power supply, but who wants to do that? I wish they'd included a battery clip or 9V power connector as standard. So I run mine without LEDs. I'm only using it to change the amp channels, and I have the LED's on the amp itself that I can look at.
But overall, mark 7 is very well thought out, and works great. I started with a IV, then a V. The 'cab clone' in the V is sort of what started me on the path to Fractal. Being able to run it direct was great. While the original 'cab clone' was a far cry from what we have access to these days, it was still great to have, and opened a lot of possibilities for me.
I've never owned or plugged into a real IIC+, so unfortunately I am unable to vouch for the accuracy of that voicing. I personally don't like the IIC+ voicing in the amp, but I also haven't bonded with Fractal's IIC+ model either (they sound very similar to my ears).
With all of this said, I have been using FM9 for almost every gig this past year. I only use amps for my Replacement tribute band plays (it seems kind of "wrong" to play punk royalty though a modeler, lol). But it also feels a little 'wrong' to do Westerberg through a high-end fancy 3 channel mega amp, lol.
I usually use an I'm trying to decide I'm planning to play the boogie next weekend when we play KC.
