Your M60 should give you gobs of distortion so something is definitely not right.
I am not trying to sound condescending so please don't take anything that way...make sure you are in the correct channel. *The channel with controls to the far left of the head is your clean channel, the set of controls to the right of those is your lead/distortion channel. *That's where you need to be. *Now turn the master volume all the way down, turn the Vol/Gain all the way up, and pull out the bass and Treble knobs. *This allows you to saturate the preamp tubes, and it kicks in two extra gain stages when you pull out the knobs. *The mid knob when pulled out engages a phase contour control that changes the way the frequency curves operate which isn't important for increasing gain. *The key is to engage those other two stages of gain, so pull out those bass and treble controls. *Now play something and slowly turn up the master vol. *If your amp is ok, you should hear a nice creamy distortion. *You do not have to crank this amp to get it to sound good, however it sounds best when it is very very loud. *The power tubes will begin to compress the signal as volume increases and this improves the amps overall response, but you will blow the windows out of your house. *As a point of reference, I usually ran my lead channel with the gain set around 7 or 8, both gain stages engaged and master vol never had to get above 2 and that was when playing with a full band with another guitar player, with the M-100 running at half power (50 watts).
Also check that the pentode triode switch on the back of the amp indicates that you are operating in pentode mode.
You should also be able to get some decent gain from the clean channel by maxing out the gain/vol and controling the actual volume via the master volume. *But this is really Fender type gain, not the modded-marshall type gain of the other channel.
You can download user manuals from Rivera.com or call them, you might actually get Paul on the other line, as in Paul Rivera, Jr. *THey are very helpful. *If you do what I listed above and you still don't have any gain, you have a serious problem with your preamp section and you should have it checked by an amp technician. *Do not monkey around inside a
tube amp unless you know what you are doing...very high voltages are running around back there. *Hope this helps....e-mail me if you have any questions.
(Edited by Gresh at 8:32 am on Aug. 27, 2001)
