Well, when Roland came to me,
and they say “Hey, we’re doing this concept called Tone Capsule”
The idea being able to program an amplifier just by inserting a piece of electronic equipment
is amazing to me.
The reason why I like the Blues Cube is its clarity.
It has all the characteristics that I love about a tube amplifier,
and none of the problems.
Immediately I was struck with the idea of, to actually get inside the DNA of the amplifier and the electronics.
I think the whole idea of the Tone Capsule concept was to try
for each artists electronically articulate the way they wanted to hear a guitar amplifier sound.
For me, my number one priority was cleanliness, clean.
I wanted crystal clear.
Very, very, very articulate.
I guess because I look at guitar playing as a vocabular.
The better your vocabulary, the more articulate you can be in your expression.
We really spent a lot of time working on the clarity and the definition.
Pushing the parameters of the amplifier way beyond what the designers thought it could do.
In a sense,
it’s recreating whatever the steal alloy is, that went into the string
and sending it directly to the amplifier, it sounds…
it doesn’t get any cleaner than that.
So I’m very happy with this Tone Capsule. Really excited about it.
Especially for guys who wanna play clean.
The other goal was to create an amplifier that would articulate
as much harmonic richness as I possibly could.
Large part of the expressiveness of any guitar player is the ability to control the dynamics.
Other words, being able to articulate the loudness, the softness, and everything in between.
Which is very important part of expressing yourself as a player.
So, you know…
So amazing range!
Now you probably didn’t hear a lot of the reverb while I was playing the peachy music but it’s there.
So I tried a trick that a lot of recording engineers use,
is, using pre-delay.
We added a 100ms of pre-delay, like you would do with the studio,
to enhance, spatialize the sound, without mud.
So that you can still get the articulation of the instrument
but you still have the depth and the spaciousness that the reverb provides.
And not only is it beautiful for electric,
but if you plug an acoustic guitar in,
and use the reverb, again, you have all that articulation and that beautiful spaciousness.
Guys who play country, guys who play jazz, who want super articulation, this is the amp. For sure.
Is there any way I could get a guitar amplifier to also reproduce the sound of a pedal steel?
With a little bit of tweaking,
we could adjust the headroom to the point where it could accept myriad harmonics
and chords from a pedal steel, so again, with the 100ms pre-delay on the reverb,
now it’s just absolutely gorgeous.
Whether I’m playing guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar,
anything it has tremendous amount of super clarity.
So again, I’m happy with this.
Works good for me.