Laney builds on its family recent 8-knob 60W Ironheart Foundry Loudpedal - where it adds the Secretpath Reverb with its own Level Control and Footswitch, alongside a new Master Balancing EQ Tone control, and further Boost option. So taking the guts of the original pedal to higher levels, where the new Ironeheart and Lionheart pedals are collaborations with long term Laney artists - Martin Miller, and Tom Quayle. These are weirdly not billed so much as signature pedals for those artists - but ...
There’s been quite the trend for Tube Preamp pedals of late - what with Friedman’s IR-D and IR-X, ThorpyFX Electric Lighting, Tubsesteader Lightkeeper and Magnesium, obviously some fairly large format solid-state types too like Thermion’s Freeway. And longer-term players too like Kingsley and Victory Amps. There’s never been more choice! And so much of what is now available is fantastic.
This new Tsakalis Mothership is another really smart take on floor-based tube amp / preamp with 2 ...
I’ve gone a little bit movie poster on this one! The saga of the forgotten Top Gun :
’The Bluesman!’
I’ve long been a fan of Chris Buck - and indeed named him as one of my favourite 25 Guitar Heroes back in a 2022 article. His incredibly expressive touch is second to none! And he can wring out the most impressive detail and nuance over several bars - from just a single note!
So it’s entirely fitting that Thorpy has built him an equally dynamic and expressive pedal to match Chris’s ...
I covered the IR-X back on September 28th - marking what a rip-roaring success it was - combining an all-analog Twin 12AX7 Tube Preamp with DSP Emulated Power Amp and Cab IR’s.
The control topology of the two pedals is nigh identical, with a few subtle differences, including Dual Bright + Structure Switches on the IR-D. Both pedals have Gain and Boost trimmers on the right-hand side. And both pedals retail at $499 | €595 | £499. Still relatively compact at 165 x 140 x 58 mms, while the ...
I’m totally in awe of the technical prowess presented on this killer dual analog amps in a pedal format.
It’s actually a very compact device at just 125 x 105 x 65 mms, and carries so many advanced functions here almost entirely in the analog domain. There’s not a single sub-menu here - this is surely WYSIWYG perfection - while it does use every available surface to cram in all the technology that is needed to support all those features.
At first encounter this all seem wholly intuitive...
The FREEWAY is actually a sort of shrunken down and evolved version of Thermion’s ZERO Amplifier - minus the Power Amp stage, and with some extra features for the modern player. Its key attribute is how you can pretty much plug it into anything - analog / amp / DAW - without the need for any additional interface.
As the above visual highlights - this features a version of the ZERO Analog Amplifier with further Analog Speaker Emulation, and an expanded Digital Reverb section from the ZERO - ...
In a fairly signifiant innovation here - David has managed to distil down two of his most popular amps - the Plexi-style Small Box 50, and Hot-Rodded Plexi / JCM800 style BE-100 - into a single relatively compact 2-Channel + Boost format. Interestingly, and differently to the full-fat Victory Amplification V4 floor-based amps (Analog Tube Preamp + Analog Power Amp), David splits the two halves of the circuit into Tube Analog (Preamp), and DSP Modelling (Power Amp, Cab Sim & IR’s). This ...
As a strictly non Bass Guitar owner/player I rarely feature specifically Bass gear, and when I do - it is typically from Darkglass as I really admire what they do - in terms of their signal processing, aesthetics, and smart modern technology and interfaces.
I have not seen any guitar demos of this unit yet - I don’t believe any are official yet, while Darkglass say it’s great for Guitars too - but this was obviously developed very specifically for Nolly - for his own ...
The amount of different versions of Helix is now almost getting to pandemic levels - with Line 6 offering up yet another variant - in the guise of the HX Stomp XL.
The stats for this really could not be any simpler - as what you are getting is essentially the exact same HX Stomp Unit - with largely all the same functionality and screen - but with 5 more footswitches - for more Stompbox mode switches, and the ability to select up to 4 different Snapshots.
All the ports on this ...
Currently running as a Kickstarter Campaign and thus far two years in the making - the forthcoming Zero, Dynamic Hybrid Amplifier is an entirely new design of Class D amplifier which fully recreates every part of a Tube style amplifier with a highly innovative active OpAmp array. While typically OpAmps are used in active amplifiers between passive stages like a more conventional EQ / Tone-stack, with the Zero, all EQ Filters are fully active in order to draw more dynamics and harmonics out of ...