Best Budget Melodic/Progressive Metal Amp

The problem your in is Prog metal uses a LOT of effects. Petrucci for certain owns every dial and knob on earth and on top of it all, he uses an Axe FX. He uses a lot of Mesa Boogie. I might start there. You get what you pay for with tone. Maybe look for a $1000 Mesa tube head that's used for 600.

aww jeez, that's a low budget for a genre that relies on gobs of effects and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink tube amps with multiple channels, lots of bells and whistles...

in the cheap seats of high gain, a lot of people love Jet City, they are very similar to a soldano hotrod having been derived from the slo/hr circuits by the man himself for JC

if you REALLY scour there are deals to be had on mesa, especially if you are flexibe about the model and cosmetic condition, your genre utilizes both mark style and recto style amps (and the recto is very similar to the 5150 on paper which itself is a knockoff of the soldano slo100)... the ubiquitous 5150 and its descendents go for about 600 bucks usually....

a crushing gain amp with a capable enough clean channel for mellow sections that will also take effects well out front as well as in the loop is a tall order in this price range, especially if you care about reliability! even mesas are not so reliable, the more features, the more shop time until you bust into the upper eschelons like Bogner.

when you need to switch between more than 2 channels headroom is imperative, the way I play, 15 watts can be a lot for clubs and abrs thru a good set of speakers. You can always scale up as the stages get bigger but its hard to sound good rolling the ,aster too far back, all your tones will get anemic.

I know Bruce Eganter is a great engineer, but his current crop of stuff like the tweaker and vengeance never knocked my socks off.... check out blackstar's club series, theyare just versatile enough covering fender to amrshall thru mesa and other modern sounds but not so versatile they lack personality. Also cheap. Never see them broken either whereas the post MTS eggies with the 2 tone tolex? hrrrm....

they re all the same preamp with different output sections, so they have varying degrees of headroom and slightly different 'feels' but its pretty subtle... like the difference in volume between 30 watts and 100 watts is pretty subtle, just a quextion of headroom until you reach ear-bleed levels, so a series of amps offering like 20, 40 and 60 watts? very subtley different.