there's a few layers on there and the gain isn't too cranked up. a lot of the power is coming from the bass guitar and the guitars are really simple two or three note parts. im sure you could get pretty close. i guess your amp has 6L6s in it, i can't remember if you can run that one on el34s.
The mesa recording preamp is hugely versatile if you can stretch to it. their cabs are amazing and the amp is an amp basically. The trick with mesas in my experience (i've had a few) is to not turn the gain up too high and watch out for too much bottom end. they are pretty scooped in the mids but i find i generally eq that range out anyway for modern rock purposes. they are very quiet noise wise and reliable as you like. the great thing with the mesa preamp is you'll get a speaker simulated out, a preamped output your cab and a clean out to play with. so one pass of the guitar and you've got a bunch to play with. The main tone shaping tool you've got then is what mic, or combination of mics you end up with. I used to have a 2101 which was absolutely awful but i learned my lesson. I agree that new marshalls are bollocks and at the end of the day you can squeeze a wide range of tones out of the cab/amp you have already. a lot of old classic amps don't have a wide range of tones but the mesa eq is so powerful that you can easily get it wrong, the different bands are interdependent, ie the treble affects all the other controls subtly so you have to find the right spot. I bought a mesa because on of the guys from radiohead had one and my sound guy recommended it. I wasn't looking for an all out rock sound but i got a versatile amp that could do most things i asked of it. They do go from clean to way over the top pretty quickly yo u just have to find he right settings.
Lose the digitech and experiment! You could use a watkins copycat as a preamp......it's worked before.
j
