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Post subject: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 9:18 am
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Aspiring Musician
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I'm really stumped by this. I posted here because this is the mustang forum and i know i won't be lambasted by blackstar owners. I just had to vent. On other forums where all digi modeling is discussed, i see quite a few people saying the blackstar is better than the mustang. This is what has me so puzzled. I have the mustang III V2 and in my job i have access to a lot of amps, the BS being one of them. In particular the ID 30. So i've had the opportunity to play thru them plenty, and i gotta say, it shocks me that there are lots of people who prefer it over the mustang. I've been playing since the early 70's, spent 25 years gigging regularly with tube amps, and in the last 10 years i devoted a lot of my free time to building and designing a tube amp in hopes of creating the ultimate single channel master volume marshall. I know what tone is, and more importantly what dynamics/touch/feel means and how important that is. And IMO it is everything that seperates a great tube amp from artificial amps built on solid state and digital platforms. Thats why i have a mustang. It utterly blows me away that it has that dynamic feel that is as good as any tube amp i've owned including the ones i built. NOTHING else i've played has it.

That said, the blackstar has me utterly confounded by the host of owners who think it's better than the mustang. To me thats a statement that makes zero sense. I have tried to get a real tube amp feel out of the ID 30, and the best i can get feels exactly like a digital or SS amp. It has NOTHING in common with a tube amp as feel goes. It may get some dynamics, but the feel is so far removed it's almost comical. The mustang could easily fool me in a blindfolded test, and in fact feels MORE like a great tube amp than a lot of tube amps do. The only thing i can think of that might account for these people is maybe they are inexperienced ? It's just that it's so dead obvious to me i can't imagine anyone who is a experienced player who plays in a way that dynamics/feel is an important part thinking the BS is even in the same league. Maybe thrash/metal people who leave thier guitar volumes on 10 all the time and use uber high gain. Thats about the only scenario i can imagine where someone might not see the vast difference between a mustang and BS.

Anyways, thats for allowing me to vent. Can't do it anywhere else of the BS fanboys will tear me a new one.


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 10:45 am
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 8:08 am
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I spent one hour the other day toying with a series of Blackstar amps at a Guitarcenter.

Essentially I agree with you. I'm relatively new to guitar playing (3 years) but I can instantly put the BS modelling amps on a different category than the Mustangs. I would compare them to a Line 6 emulation amp maybe.

In the other hand I can see why some people might think it SHOULD be a more tube-like experience than the Mustangs. It all has to do IMO with cleverness of user interface design:

-with the BS and the simple controls it has, you can get close to a tone you might be looking for in 1 or 2 minutes: select your base tone "amp" tone, tweak the "Marshall vs Fender" knob, finally select the "power amp tube" which essentially gives you more or less clean headroom and loudness. Done. And do not forget all the tube-lingo terms you get on the blackstar knobs: crunch, overdrive, kt-88, etc... that predisposes the user to think it's tube sound! :)

-with the Mustangs, after two years of use it takes me 15 minutes to half an hour to get to the tone I like. Just deciding which base amp emulation to use many times takes a lot of trial and error. after watching videos of some "tone experts" as intheblues on youtube I discovered that for him it takes even longer to tweak a Mustang preset to his liking...

So essentially, if somebody from the Facebook generation, with an attention timespan of around 10 seconds had to choose, which one would be the winner? :)

Regarding tone dynamics, I also agree with you, but next time you go to a Guitarcenter or the like, pay attention to the other guys testing gear around you. There's a VERY good chance most of them will be trying guitar with active pickups on a Marshall or similar amp, and of course playing only power chords :) Tone dynamics? what is it? :)

So essentially I think the BS are marketing-wise, smarter products than the Mustang for the majority of "modern" players. That said, for the Clean/Blues/Rock/Country player any Mustang of any kind sounds better than the Blackstar emulations, if you have the patience to tweak them extensively.


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 12:27 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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Well, yeah, but thats basically what i suggested in a nutshell.....inexperience. Pro players who have used tube amps for years and been thru it all and done endless gigs wouldn't be fooled by the BS, not even close. At 3 years you are way ahead of the game, and i'm sure most players couldn't tell after 3 years of playing. I know i couldn't have, in fact took me many years to really get it. That tells me a lot about your playing because usually you need to be at a certain level to even understand dynamics and touch sensitivity. It's gotta be those who aren't there yet that think the BS is better or even as good as the mustang. I've had mine 3 or 4 months now i guess, and literally DAILY i plug into it and every single time i think how amazing it is that a modeler can do what this does. If you walked into my house anytime between about 10 years ago and 3 months ago when i got the MIII you would have seem a combo amp i built from scratch with the chassis out and sitting on top of the cabinet with a soldering station and a box of resistors and caps sitting next to it. I probably put a few thousand hours into trying to achieve perfection. Crazy, yes, but it was an obsession. I tell you that just so you know how good a modeler would have to be to make me put that never ending project into the closet and have not touched it since ! And that amp DID sound phenomenal, as well it should after all those years of trying to perfect it. All that and a cheap digital box from fender ended it all ! I'm a walking billboard for the Mustang. :mrgreen: But blackstar even close? Please !


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 1:13 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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at this point the only real purchase to complement my mustang is maybe a tube preamp, but jury is still out on that one.
You see, I have a Mustang 3 and a Mustang Floor, When practicing at home I use both, but when on the move sometimes I prefer only to go around with the Mustang Floor connected to the house PA.
Problem is, the Floor lacks some of the warmth of the Mustang 3. I'm guessing the M3 speaker maybe or the fact the DSP of the Mustang 3 is newer, not sure.
So I'm considering getting a cheap tube preamp to see if it makes any difference when playing with the Floor only
Recently I was checking the Behringer MIC100 and the demos I saw where quite impressive. As soon as I find 25$ to burn on this thing I may give it a try :)


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Mon Oct 06, 2014 1:54 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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I wouldn't bother. A tube preamp isn't likely to add anything you need. In fact, i'm pretty adamant that the real magic in tube feel and dynamics comes from the power section, not the preamp. Thats why you will find that hybrid amps with a SS pre/tube power section always work better than those with the opposite. Your better option would be to use a tube power amp, but then you're lugging a rig around thats more trouble than your III, so no sense in that.

I think you got it right when you suggested it's the III's power section and speaker. When i 1st got the stang i was thrilled with it, but from years of gigging with not just tube amps but SS preamps into tube power and every other imaginable scenario, i thought as good as the mustang was it must be incredible if i take the preamp out to a tube power section. My all time fav speaker is a EV12L in a quality 1-12" combo cab, and thats what's in my tube amp combo. So i put the MIII signal into the tube amp's power section and that speaker. I was expecting nothing less than a bit better tone, but hoping and thinking probably it would be a major improvement. I was shocked to find the MII all on it's own with a celestion 100 watt speaker that i've never liked when i had them in the past, and a particle board cabinet that I've noted time and time again sounds like %$#@, sounded much better ! I'm still floored by that. I even tried turning the cab sims off but still the tone wasn't as good. So my guess is that like the modeling itself, they used high tech methods in R&D to add the speaker and cabinet into the equation when tuning the models. So it's an essential part of the puzzle in making the models sound they way they are meant to. Thats only a theory but i can't see why else my choice of speaker and cab I've always found best would not sound as good as a cab and speaker that I'd otherwise scoff at. Anyways, why don't you just bring the III ? It's so light and small it's no trouble at all. I think you'll find it IS that output section and speaker thats a big part of it.


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014 12:32 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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after your post I went back and spent some time with my floor unit, and did an A/B between my Mustang 3 v2 and the Floor, using the same preset, and comparing using studio phones on both.

I think the difference in sound boils down to deficient Mustang Floor documentation :)

Essentially, you can adjust output voicing of the Floor to "PA", "Combo" or "Stack" and several sub options. Then you can fine tune the level of bass and treble independently of the voicing chosen. By default bass has a "100%" level and treble also has a "100%" level. I discovered that, to make the Floor to sound equivalent to the Mustang 3 V2, you need to configure:

-Voicing = "PA"
-bass level= "50%"
-treble level = "50%"

again, that brings the Floor phones output equivalent to the Mustang 3 phones out, so the only difference standing between the two now are the Mustang 3 speaker and cabinet effect on sound.

To solve that I experimented with an EQ pedal between Floor and the PA and I have to say I got pretty darn close. I got the best result with an inverted-hockey-stick shape on the EQ. Will keep working on it.

Thanks to your comment i saved 25$ that I can now save for the "next-mustang-floor-fund" :)


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Post subject: Re: Blackstar has me scratching my head
Posted: Tue Oct 07, 2014 7:34 pm
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Aspiring Musician
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Joined: Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:53 pm
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As they say, where theres a will theres a way. Tone is tricky but if you keep at it you can usually find a way to get what u want w/o all the extra junk. When i was young i remember our key player's guitar player friend came in the bar we were playing at and he was the guitarist in a pretty famous band at the time. At the break he looked at my rig with all these EQ's and other junk and told me get rid of all that junk. He was so right. A few years later i was gigging with a single channel marshall, a guitar and a couple cables and a clean boost and that was my whole rig. And getting far better tone than i ever did with my million piece rig.


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