Fender Mustang III w/ Pod HD***

[blynn894]

Has anybody joined these two forces together? Be it in the loop, in front, or using the Mustang as a power cab for the HD. I thought of picking up an M9, but for less money (new) I can get either an HD300 or 400. Any thoughts?

[rchiav]

I'm pretty sure jhall said he tried it and it sounded good.

[Wesman61]

Right here (http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=840015&highlight=mustang). He's talking about The RP1000 though.

[blynn894]

Hey thanks for posting this, Wesman

[MusicalCircuitry]

Has anybody joined these two forces together? Be it in the loop, in front, or using the Mustang as a power cab for the HD. I thought of picking up an M9, but for less money (new) I can get either an HD300 or 400. Any thoughts?

I have an HD500 and Mustang III, but typically use them independently. Recently I've experimented with them together and overall the results are good.

Plugging the HD500 directly into the FX return of the Mustang III to use it as a power amp gives good results. There is some coloring through the Celestion speaker compared to my monitors or headphones, but that's to be expected. Some patches sound slightly better through the Mustang, some through monitors. The exception to this is that patches making heavy use of stereo FX sound significantly better through the monitors, but that's probably more a function of stereo vs mono output more than anything else. Aside from the stereo issue, this will probably come down to personal taste - some people prefer modelers through an FRFR system, while some prefer something more like an Atomic Reactor or a Tech 21 Power Engine. If you fall into the latter category, the Mustang III will probably work very well for you as a power amp.

I've also tried plugging the HD500 in front of the Mustang to use it for FX only. This does work well, but it's more finicky. Some FX from the HD500 work better than others, but that's true of the POD in general. The results vary quite a bit depending on which model you use on the Mustang though. I had great results with using the clean models on the Mustang, but as you get into higher gain models, it gets harder to find combinations that work. Higher gain isn't exactly my style though, so it could be something I'm doing wrong, but there have been reports from others users pointing out that the Mustang takes pedals well on clean models, but not so much on the others.

I haven't tried the 4 cable method or putting the HD500 in the FX loop, but my hunch is the trend would continue. The 4 cable method should work great with the cleaner Mustang models, and using the FX loop should be great for delays and reverbs.

As for the HD vs M question - if you were asking about the HD500 vs either the M9 or M13, the HD500 would be an easy choice unless you really prefer the physical interface of the M13. The HD300 or HD400 vs M9 is trickier though - you can do 4 FX at once with the HD300/400 vs 3 with the M9, but you are limited in that you can only use one FX from each block at once - so you couldn't for example run both a dirt pedal and compressor. The physical interface is also a tough call, since the M9 has all the knobs to twiddle with, yet the HD300/400 come with an expression pedal. Other factors are that the M9 is significantly smaller, the HD400 has an FX loop, etc. There is a lot of crossover here since the HDs contain M series FX, but certain features of each make it more suitable to different applications, so it really depends what you plan on using them for.

[Justin Gadell]

running an m9 along with some others through the mustang and the 4x12 cab micd

2U4RkNQzzaw