Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier

By Brian & Jeff On October 14, 2011 Under Musical Instruments For Sale

Before I decided to start this Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier
review, I wanted to take a little bit of time to evaluate what a few other serious customers really think about this product. One started fiddling with the amplifier for a few days, which included messing with the effects so he could end up creating his own personal presets for his own playing styles. One good thing to note is the sound is literally unbeatable and you don’t have to end up investing thousands of dollars in separate amplifiers and effects not to mention investing in massive storage space just to store all of the music equipment you would’ve ended up aggregating. The sound that eminates from this amplifier is as good as or to find anywhere else, and this also includes heavy metal sounds. If you’re looking for a good bluesy type overdriven tube sound you can accomplish this as well. Tube amps used to be my thing for quite a few years and I wasn’t personally able to detect any sort of noticeable difference between the Mustang three and a real tube amplifier.

Maybe some famous musician like Axel Rose might be able to, but I wasn’t. One thing you need to be cognizant of, is that this amplifier has trouble remembering the last setting it was on right before you turned it off. The default setting always goes back to the preset 00, and temporary setting changes are not held when you’re trying to flip between different presets. Let’s say you’re trying to use a wide delay affect on your favorite preset for example, and then you also want to maintain this while at the same time switching over to a different preset unfortunately it just won’t do this. You can’t do this if you saved the wide delay to the patch before you start playing. The good news is that once you understand this limitation planning around it is very simple for almost everyone, however you do need to be aware that this exists. Unfortunately it just won’t work like a petal that automatically stays on until you decide to stomp it off.

The Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier ships out with only 100 presets and many of these I didn’t find extremely useful but a few of them I did. You do have the option however, using the basic amplifier models with presets 88 to 99 and all you’ll need to do is copy and paste them into 00 to 12. Then you can go back and tweak each one to your desired sound, then go at all the different effects you want and then just hit save. Once these settings are saved it’s easy to tweak the volume gain and equalization by just listing the knob just like you would on any other legacy amplifier. At the end of the day, I’m very happy with the performance of this particular amplifier. The sound is cool and it is even easier to use than most of the pedal boards you’ve been hearing about lately.

Each day that goes by a find myself more and more impressed with the Fender Mustang three guitar amplifier. I can’t get any sound I want now out of this and as time goes on tweaking it in customizing the settings just gets much easier. What makes this different from the Mustang I and Mustang II models is its ability to transform individuals sound effects on and off without having to constantly switch patches. Heck, you can even add a stomp box setting for functionalities such as overdrive or compression as well as some others without the need to switch up the patch or even use the few software that comes with this guitar amplifier. Personally I like the overdrive and compression functionalities and find them very helpful and at this point I don’t regret spending the extra hundred dollars for the Mustang III version. Plus the other thing I like about the third version is that I don’t have any problems finding which settings are active on my liquid crystal diode screen, which is a lot harder to do on the Mustang one and two versions.

The Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier has come in very handy for a couple of my band practices. There is no problem with clarity, and I also tried it with one of my Les Paul models. You can use this not only for practicing songs but also for learning new songs and using this instrument for this purpose makes things a lot easier. I do find myself always having this musical instrument close to my personal computer, so I can pull be top Internet and it sounds great even when it’s playing at a low volume. I did find myself purchasing a mono adapter as well as a mono guitar cable so it would properly plug into this amplifier before started recording with it. Another thing to note is if you try to use one of the stereo adapters it can sound like garbage. Any extra cables you need like a line out cable, the mono guitar cable or the mono adapter can be purchased at RadioShack.

The only real beef that I have with Fender about this particular model is that I wish they had it made the line out loud half an inch. The patches on this model are a lot more suitable than some of the patches that I’ve seen previously on other modeling pedal boards. So I have to give Fender credit on an outstanding job that they did while they were modeling this amp. I don’t have an exact number, but I think there is somewhat in the vicinity of 99 patches, and of these 99 about 40 of them are really cool. I also wish Fender would’ve devised a comprehensive owner’s manual with this amplifier, had they have done this it would’ve been even nicer touch. All things being equal, I do plan on using this particular Fender amplifier at my next gig so obviously have nothing really bad to say about it.

I do have to make a final confession though when it comes to the Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier. I’ve been a lover of Fender amps for decades, ever since I’ve been a 10-year-old kid which was about 30 years ago. I grew up in Orange County California and every single kid in my neighborhood was a wanna be rock star and musician. I used to always have a predilection for the black face amps. Because if you’re working with a great right panel, you can really knock out some awesome distorted tones and when the pedals not on, it can be argued that angels are singing. This modeling amplifier does anything you want to. I can honestly say that it takes the place of several different lactase amplifiers as well as providing specific tones for a broad range of other amplifiers. And using this amplifier doesn’t limit you to just playing one kind music.

Whether you want to use it or practice with it playing life with the pedal switch how you operate individual channels or any via fax is completely up to you. You can use this amplifier for just practice or you could it at any live gigs you decide to play at. Personally I think the Fender Mustang III Guitar Amplifier is the top of the heap when it comes to modeling amp technology that then again, like I said I’ve lived in Southern California all my life and I followed them since I’ve been 10 years old which is about 32 years now. So if you happen to have a different opinion than me, I have this respect this. But to this day, I’ve personally never found a guitar amplifier that does everything this one does for under $300.