Hey everybody, Matt from Better Music and we are here with Steven Marks, all the way
from the UK, and we are going to talk about Blackstar, Steve.
Hi Matt, thanks for having me. No worries it's a pleasure, Blackstar have
been making some really big in roads with new digital technology, some pretty cool products
here. Yeah absolutely.
Blackstar has been on the scene for about 8 years now, and most of the range is valve,
you know, since Blackstar began, but more recently we've concentrated on the digital
side of things, we've got 2 or three ranges of that, and rather than, well the market
generally we've felt was pretty saturated with a particular style of amplifier, and
we wanted to do things that were a little different, thinking outside the box a little
bit. Yeah, not just cramming everything in and
making it cheap, but actually making something that sounds really good.
Absolutely, the big focus for the guys at Blackstar, even right up to the top, you know,
my first day of working there I saw a guy on his hands and knees ABing between speaker
cones, tore up jeans, pretty tatty shirt, I asked him what he was doing and he was considering
speakers for the ID series actually, and later on when I met him officially he was the MD.
So when I saw that passion within the brand, I realised I was onto a good thing, and the
tone of the product, the way it looks is all really, really focused, you know?
Yeah that's cool. And the ID:Cores, they're actually all stereo?
Yeah, And ported as well?
Absolutely, yeah, so the original digital product that we did was the ID series, we've
got an ID 30 here, and the aim of that was to bring out a digital product that would
suit the practice amp right through to the live player, you can look at the timber that
they've used on the amplifier and you can tell it's built to actually chuck in the back
of a van. Yeah all the boxes are really solid.
but what we found was, because it's got a really unique section on there called TVP,
which stands for True Valve Power, it wasn't really appealing to the younger players, because
they didn't know what valves would give. So more recently we brought out the ID:Core,
which is more of a budget level practice amplifier if you'd like, there's three in the range...
Before we move on, the TVP, that allows you to actually choose a different valve setting,
it doesn't have valves in it, but it gives you the feel of a different kind of valve,
whether it's a EL34, 6L6 or even a KT, so it gives you the push and pull of the speaker,
of a louder valve amplifier, and it gives you a valve tone that is similar to the 34
or the 6L6 depending on which one you've got it set at.
Absolutely, I mean, Ian went and said in the media in the UK in a guitar magazine, the
thing with solid state or digital amplifiers is they sound great at bedroom volume and
in the store, but you get them with a live drummer or a live application and they tend
to not give you everything that you need, and it's difficult to mix.
And one of those things is volume, and these amplifiers actually have the volume, you compare
a 40 watt transistor amplifier to a 40 watt valve amplifier, regardless of tone, the volumes
are completely different, where as these amplifiers keep up with that valve amp volume.
Yeah what like to say about that to everyone I meet is, you know it's not meant to win
the fight but it's certainly meant to last all 12 rounds.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good analogy. And it's worth checking out, that amplifier got
a bunch of awards in all the magazines... Yeah you can see here...
It's very highly regarded. But moving on to the newer products, the Core...
ID:Core, so like I said, the ID:Core is a practice amp, it's stereo so that came a little
later, we just wanted again we we're thinking we need something in the market that is comparable
to other brands, for the practice amp area, and it was going to be a single speaker, just a small black
box with some cool sounds, and then along the way the guys decided to go down the stereo
route, and one of my very good friends at the office in the UK came up with a feature
on there which is very much a sonic experience that you have to have with the amplifier,
it's not so easy to get it across on video but it's called super wide stereo, and it
really immerses you in the effects, like reverb and delay more so, but it gives you an impression
that you're playing in a stadium, which is really quite cool.
Yeah right, and it has all the the inputs and outputs that you could really ever need.
Emulated output for recording, headphones, line in, USB out, so it really is all things
to all people, and it sounds really good, it's not just a little box that has had heaps
of features packed into it, they've really gone to the nth degree to get the amplifier
to sound great, and I think that's the real bottom line, that these practice amps don't
sound like "practice amps"! And also these days you'll find that there's
a lot of amplifiers and guitar brands that are using full range speakers and we've done
this on ID:Core, and it's not so easy to get great guitar tones out of full range speakers
so when you play audio through here the experience is fantastic.
Alright cool, and we've got the BEAM as well? Yeah so this is a very, very current product,
the Blackstar ID:Core BEAM, so it's part of the same family as ID:Core -
All the same features but a few more - Yeah a few more features, so BEAM is an acronym,
so it stands for Bass Electric Acoustic Music, so the first big feature really is it's a
bluetooth speaker, so again we've got stereo speakers in here, you can stream your audio
to here, you can even watch a movie via your tablet and use this as your soundbar, if you
like, it sounds amazing - It really does sound good, actually!
We've got the same 6 guitar voices that you would expect on an ID:Core, with the added
bonus of 2 acoustic simulators for the electric guitar, 2 acoustic voices, 2 bass voices as
well, also the effects have been re-written for the bass so we've got a really cool section
for bass distortions where you can blend the overdrive with the clean and the envelope
filter, so apart from anything it's a great desktop amplifier for the home guitar player
but also it's a great USB interface, the speakers are of a very high spec, they've been acoustically
tuned to the cabinet, so it's a proper birch cabinet, it's ported on each cabinet here,
for each speaker so the division is definitely there you can feel it, so this could be an
all-in-one encompassing central hub for your monitoring and your playback and your playing
through as well. Yeah you pretty much won't get a better small
lounge room amplifier, you know, you don't need to drag the bass amp in there or your
acoustic amplifier or whatever, just go straight into that with all your instruments, and it's
nice and compact and looks cool so it can sit on a shelf there next to the lounge and
you've got it going on. In fact when I come home from a day out on
the road, I go into my music room, I've got tonnes of amps in there, and my smart phone
automatically detects when it's on, so you get the beep, it's all I plug into.
Yeah right - And I've got the choice of a lot of amps.
Yeah, very cool.
And lastly the Fly - Yes so the Fly, we wanted to have a go at
building a small, battery powered, mini amplifier, and there's a lot on the market already, but
we felt that they weren't musical in the sense that you could actually get a nice clean tone
and a nice overdrive, they were kind of a bit more of a toy.
Yeah, I think that's one of the key things with Blackstar in general, Is that they're
really going out of their way to make their products sounds really good and really realistic,
and it even goes all the way down to this little guy here which you can double as your
computer monitor speakers as well, and they do a good job.
Absolutely, you've got obviously your guitar input, two channels with gain and volume,
you've even got a built in tape echo delay, so you can give your guitar some ambience,
Blackstar's patent ISF, so you can get your American or British style tonalities -
Infinite Shape Feature, so British to US. Line in, Line out of course, so the batteries
go in the back here, you can use this at the BBQ you can take it camping, you can take
it on holiday if you've got your guitar with you. And then you've got the extension speaker
option here as well, and mains as well as battery, and like you said, the speakers are
linear, full range, you can use this as your computer monitors.
Yeah, very cool, well why don't we have a listen to the ID:Core BEAM with a few instruments
in it and yeah...
So I'm just going to give you some examples of some of the great tones you can get from
the Blackstar ID:Core BEAM. So this is the acoustic voice #1, it's very much a flat sound
with a bit of reverb.
This is the second acoustic voice, a little bit more dynamic, bit more of a mid boost,
and we've added some chorus.
This first bass voice that I'm going to show you is just a standard clean tone.
This second bass voice, I've added an undercurrent of overdrive because you can blend the two
signals together, sounds really cool.
Here's one of the really nice sparkly clean tones.
Here's one of the Hi-Gain sounds with some super wide stereo delay.
So I'm going to now Bluetooth stream a drum backing track that I have on my smart phone,
and then play along wirelessly.