The ESP Guitar Company

seemed like it was cutting out and making a 'static-y/bad cable' type noise. When I say it was cutting out, it felt like it was loosing power or something, no punch gain or sustain. :confused: It seemed to still have volume, but absolutely no balls. It did this for about two songs or so and then it seemed like it cleared up. Ive ruled out the rest of my equipment in the scenario like the cable and guitar and such.

The amp has had all of the tubes replaced in august.

even tho tubes were replaced doesn't mean it still isn't a bad tube, or a bad tube socket or something; if you had volume but lost gain i'd tend to suspect a preamp tube, which luckily aren't expensive like power tubes, so i'd try swapping those out with new ones or known-good ones one-by-one.

...strange userid. 0]

Haha... Funny. :rollin

Anyway, So if its possibly a bad preamp tube, is the only way of confirming this to swap them out? Will it look a certain way if its bad, or would there be no visible sign of going bad?

Im going to keep an eye on it, it seems to be fine after I play it for a bit, but I guess well see what happens.

i honestly don't know much about amp tech, but you said it had full volume but lacked gain/distortion, and then that faded in, makes me think preamp tube issue - either tube itself or cicuitry going to it;
majority of distortion will be from preamp tubes, ie: a 2 channel highgain amp will use i think 1 or 2 preamp tubes for the clean channel and then like 4 tubes for the gain channel, and they might all be the same tube types.

but that's as much as i can guess at.