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Full Transcript

I want to buy a new amp and one thing it can be really loud but also really quiet maybe something I could plug headphones into so I could practice late at night when I should be asleep and maybe something that can do a fender clean and a Marshall overdriving and some other tones as well so I can instantly play around with maybe with some recording software with USB connectivity and midi connectivity and you know something that also fits in my gig bag as well [Music] oh well I wish anyway back to work oh once Tom left this box here let’s have a look inside

oh my God what is this it’s Amp one amp two and amp3 we’ve got to get these plugged in

hi I’m Sam from Guitar Village and today we are checking out the new amp series from Blackstar we’re going to plug each one of these in see how they sound and see how each one differs as well and let’s be honest why you need one let’s get started okay so first up we have the amped one pedal this is the smallest and most simplistic pedal in the lineup you’ve got some really great options on there that we’re going to talk about once I’ve plugged it in on the back here we’ve got our ends and we’ve got an effects Loop option there as well and you’ve got your speaker outputs too plus these two really handy Pedal Power outputs as well so you can really run this from your pedalboard on the side here we’ve got a DI app to go straight into the desk or you know your recording setup and the headphone socket let’s plug it in and have a listen Okay so we’ve got the AMP one plugged in now I’m going to do some kind of messing around with it we’ve got it plugged into this 112 cab I’m using this great custom 2408 so we’ve got some really cool options I’m going to run the uh the neck pickup on a single call in the bridge on a humbucker so you can hear some really good tones we’re going to get from this from clean to pretty saturated um we’ve also got an output on there which is going to our interface as well so we’re going to hear some of the direct sounds and some of the cab sounds as well so you can decide which you prefer so this is their kind of first up their clean sound this is the USA setting on the preamp [Music] so you can mess around you’ve got some different responses on here so that was 606 you can go 6v6

territory anyway um you’ve got a master volume here and then you’ve got power output I was running that on the 20 watt setting you can drop it down to one watt which is going to be great if you want to push the the power amp section on there or you can go to 100 watt if you want kind of big clean Headroom as well

let’s knock that back to 20 watt now the UK setting on here this is kind of more martial s because I’m sure you guessed already [Music] single coil neck picker let’s try on the humbucker [Music]

now let’s trim that around let’s go for an el84 sound [Music] sure I’m loving the trail arm today for some reason on this it works really well okay so that’s on the UK setting there is also a flat response which you’re meant to use with the linear response there to get I think the most transparent sort of preamp tone you can from that [Music] which isn’t bad I think that really is designed if you’ve got you know maybe something you want to run it into or something you want to run into it to kind of keep it sounding pretty much the same just making it louder now some other features on here which are pretty cool so let’s go back to our clean sound again for this um

okay so you’ve got a separate Reverb with an on and off control there and if you hold the the Reverb button down it kind of does that freeze thing

you’ve also got a preset option so you can set your controls wherever you want them on here and then you hold the preset button down and that will store your preferred settings so I guess you can kind of have like two amps in a box okay so in terms of ins and outs on this pedal as well on the back here we’ve got a two speaker out so you can run it into a an 8 ohm or a 16 ohm cab um you’ve got your guitar input there and an effects input as well so if you want to run any of your kind of modulation effects things like that after the preamp you can do that you actually get like a y cable with it as well now other things on this side you’ve got a caption output and the headphone output and there’s three options on there which give you different sounds you can actually use the software online and you know choose your own oh sorry upload your own cab Sims as well if you’ve got one that you prefer the sound often kind of really mess around with it there I’ll give you a quick demo actually between um the sound of the cab Sim and the sound of the actual cab that we’ve miked up with an sm57 there

all right

now you’re going to hear the cab Sim one there’s three options this is the first of them

[Music] now let’s switch that over to number two

[Music] and number three

[Music] not bad anyway let’s check out the amp too this is the amp 2 and I’m sure you’ve guessed by now this is a bigger box than the white one we were checking out and it’s the same with the amp3 as well they’re both bigger boxes now this one is really interesting because it’s kind of like the next step on from the white one although they do slightly different jobs in terms of the amplification sections um this one has got a bit more on it in terms of you’ve got a drive section you’ve got modulation delay Reverb and you’ve also got a tuner built into this as well so this really is kind of like a bit like your Swiss army knife in terms of you know gig bag essentials almost now instead of having the the caption on the side there they put the outputs on the back so everything is fully controllable on this side we’ve got uh two power outputs for your panels you’ve got a midi in and a midi through um same connectivity in terms of the speaker out it’s an 8 and a 16 ohm cab you’ve got your guitar input you’ve got your kind of amp output there and Ascend and return effects loop on there as well plus your headphone output and a level control as well so this thing could be really really good for you all right so we have now got this hooked up to our 112 cab as per last time and we’ve got the cab Sim sorry the XLR running out from the cab Sim out on the back there something I haven’t mentioned actually when we were just checking out the last one is that you can actually run this without the speaker cab so if you literally just want to record or put your headphones on you can do that so at the moment I’ve got this set to a USA sort of Fender e clean tone on there [Music]

so not bad straight away let’s put some Reverb on I certainly prefer it to be a little bit wet not too much of a dry guy [Music] at the Reverb on this so um before we get into everything else actually because I think for a lot of people you know messing around with the Reverb could be one of the first things you do after you kind of set your core tone so at the moment I’ve got this set on the plate Reverb setting um it’s got quite a short kind of Decay time so goes away pretty quick but the levels set High set that for Unity first let’s go for a spring reverb [Music]

you can hear with the time turn up it just goes on a little bit longer but the effect isn’t quite as dramatic as the levels turned down

it’s a nice sounding room Reverb on there let’s turn the decay all the way up and the level down a bit and go back to that spring again [Music] okay so let’s move on from the Reverb scent so let’s go back to the amplifier so at the moment like I said I had it set to a fender type clean on there let’s check out the UK settings so that’s kind of more of your your martialesque type sounds

[Music] so that is uh still single coil on the the neck there which um it still sounds pretty gainy you know whereas if we knock it back to the bridge

definitely getting some of those Marshall tones out of there this one has a third option the classic which is based on uh one of the black stars [Music] pretty gainy as well now if we head over to the next section this is like having a separate Drive pedal in there so you’ve got the on off switch for it there you’ve got a a boost function a drive function and a fuzz function as well so you can kind of use this either as a solo boost if you always have your amp set pretty gainy or you can just use this as having just like a nice Posh kind of dry pedal in there so with that off [Music]

pretty nice sounding Overdrive [Music]

then the Boost function on there which I guess is really just to make your sound louder

and then the fuzz setting which I think a lot of you are going to like as well

[Music] [Applause] [Music] pretty good sounding fuzz now let’s move on the modulation section on here so we’ve got kind of four options You’ve Got A Chorus and flanger tremolo and phaser all in one you can choose however you want to have them set up [Music]

thank you so there’s the chorus let’s get into some flanger territory [Music] and the tremolo which I think if you’re running the amp clean might be quite a nice effect if you really want to get like a fender kind of setup between the uh the Reverb the amp and the modulation there [Music] okay [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] yeah it’s a pretty deep sounding tremolo on there and you’ve got a phaser for kind of you know some some kind of more kind of chewy effects I guess [Music] foreign [Music] and a delay too so this thing is really flexible

but if you add that in with that fuss you get lots of noise [Music]

that’s pretty damn good so on top of that so on top of those incredible kind of amp settings you know your drive delay and Reverb units and the modulation as well there’s also a built-in tuner you just hold down these two panels at the same time and you’ve got a tuna belt in too I mean how incredible is that okay the last one we’re going to check out is the amp 3. now this really is more like three amps in a box whereas the red one was like an amplifier that has some pedals as well they’ve got a pretty simple layout but what they have got is blackstar’s ISF which changes the frequency response and just the overall feel of the amp which is great for some of the overdrive tones as well it’s got a clean Channel which has a warm and a bright setting you’ve also got a light and dark options on the Reverb you’ve got a presence control Master output same response as the last one with the el84 el34 and the 6l6 power section you can go to the crunch Channel which has two options Crunch and super crunch on there and that’s where I really think the ISF comes in with the drive tones on this because that will give you you know kind of a completely different sound you know the overall sound and feel um the overdrive section is more your High Gain section so crunch would be like low to mid gain overdrive is kind of like mid to high you’ve got a boost option on here so you can either run it as a pre-boost or a post boost so either if you want to add more gain into the the mix or you want to make any of these sounds louder and it’s got Reverb on there as well now one thing you can do with this um you can either have it in manual mode or you can have it in a preset mode so you set your controls where you want and hold the button down where you want to save it on which channel so it’s a really smart one in terms of the back panel on this this is exactly the same as the red one so nothing to speak about there anyway let’s get it plugged in all right so we’ve got the amp3 plugged in now at the moment we’re going to start straight away on the clean Channel we’re going for the warm uh clean sound [Music] so that’s one well it’s not set up to 20 watts that’s more like it [Music] yeah it’s a pretty Pleasant clean sound straight away let’s put some Reverb on [Music]

so with the Reverb you’ve got two settings you’ve got light and dark on there so we were listening to the light just then let’s check out the dark [Music]

there’s the dark and back to the light

so it’s a little bit subtle but there’s definitely some difference in there

actually you can hear a lot more with the Reverb control turned right up now enough about Reverb let’s check out the bright setting on the clean there [Music] foreign

[Music] now let’s move on so we were kind of let’s move on to the crunch Channel next because I think the clean Channel A lot of these controls are pretty self-explanatory you’ve got you know bass control middle treble and ISF which it kind of goes between an American sound and a British sound I think I’ve got that the right way around I can never remember with that now the crunch Channel [Music] set that up so let’s go El 34 on there we’re going to stick to the 20 watt mode we’re going to stick to Crunch let’s get that gain up a bit uh employee

it’s not bad really I mean I’ve just kind of rolled the volume back a tiny bit on there and gone to the next single coin it really cleans up nicely let’s take a look at the overdrive section next this is kind of really like your proper High Gain section

okay so that’s pretty good straight out of the box so that was running on El uh a 34 mode 20 watts you can obviously make that louder and you’ve also got this boost option on here as well so if we run that as a preamp boost you can just make that even more gainy

all right so there was the uh the boost mode there now what you can also do um with the Boost so I was running it as a a pre-boost so that’s going into the gain you can also run it post so you could have it as a solo boost as well just to make any one of these sounds louder and on top of that you’ve got some Power Amp shaping there you can go from one Watt 20 to 100 just like the other two and uh response wise you’ve got el84 el34 and a 6l6 response so this thing is going to be pretty flexible and it’s really more like three amps in one all right so there’s some of the features and sounds you’re gonna get with this new amp series from Blackstar to be honest with you in the room that sounded incredible I thought the cab Sim sounded pretty good as well so if you want something you can kind of turn up to a gig record with play at home practice you know plugged in with headphones or you know low volumes going through a small speaker cab direct into your PC honestly these things are going to be really really good in terms of how I feel about each one I actually couldn’t tell you which one I preferred usually I kind of get a Vibe on which one I’d kind of want maybe the black one just because I really like the way each of the amp sounds are on there you know from clean to like super high gain but to be honest with you they all do a different job so when we talk about the white one that really is for you know someone that just wants an amplifier sound maybe for someone that you know it’s kind of like me where you turn up to a gig you have your amp you plug all your pedals into the front of the amp you plug your guitar into the front of the pedalboard and you go that might be more suited to you the red one I think is great if you want to keep it as like a gig bag essential so if you want to turn up with one thing put it on the floor plug it into a cable just direct into the desk and just play and have you know still a lot of the options you’re going to get from a regular pedalboard and with the tuner built in I think that’s pretty cool however if you want you know three different amps in a box with the flexibility of the solo boost if you need it and a really nice Reverb as well the black one is a great option too anyway thanks for watching this video I really love getting to know a little bit more about these pedals and you should definitely check them out all the links will be in the description below thanks for watching [Music]