Hey Dan,
Just for reference, when you are shopping for tubes, keep in mind what characteristics you want to enhance in your preamp. For instance, if you want to have plenty of low end on tap, then I would recommend long plate tubes. That will allow you to dial in the amount of bass, and warm up your low mids a bit. My personal tastes lean more towards these types of preamp tubes since I primarily play Stratocasters. and this helps me sit in a band mix better.
Short plate tubes sound very shrill to my ears, even with my humbuckers, but some guys like that linear kind of tube response. From personal experience, I would recommend NOT buying any tubes from places like Musician's Friend and the like, but I would recommend checking out Doug's Tubes in New York.
When I got my current MP-1, which I bought from another member in here, It had GT Mullard Reissues in it. They sounded good, but didn't last very long. I replaced them with the same, but they didn't sound quite as good as the original set. I guess these days, buying from GT is a crap shoot as to whether or not you get lucky with a good batch of tubes. I haven't tried the Russian Mullard RI's in the MP-1 yet, but I do have those in both of my MP-2's. Currently, I have a pair of Penta ECC803's in there, and I'm still exploring the range of those when I have time to mess with my MP-1 rig.
My MP-1 is in a monster rack along with a 3TM modded MP-1 and several ADA rack effects, also running through B200S poweramps, and running into ADA Split-Stack Cabs. It's basically your 80's tones, with a lot more hair
Harley