 Good evening everybody out there in the World Wide Web. Welcome to tonight's webinar on HT pedals from Blackstar. I'm here to remind you this evening of just how great they are, how great they sound and we're going to go through the whole range. The six in the main range which give you distortion, boost, overdrive, that kind of vibe and then we've got three effects pedals as well. Now the pedals that came out from Blackstar, the HT range were one of the first products that came to fruition for the brand and it was really there to set the benchmark for everything else to follow. And seven years later here we are with lots of fantastic products on show and a bit later on in the next half hour I'm going to show you a little sneak on the new products that have just hit stores right this week so you can get in and try those out. But importantly when Blackstar came out they came out with a very very cool amplifier called the Artisan range. I've got one down here just on show this evening but a really nice hand-wired boutique product and also we brought out the pedals. Now generally speaking the effects pedals came later but we had some really nice overdrive and distortion pedals to choose from. Now one of our main sales guys, his spin when he used to go into dealers to see people about this new brand called Blackstar. His opening line was often he had a pedal in his hand and he said show me your most terrible amplifier you have in the store. The one that's been here a long time with a thick layer of dust on and I'll make it sound really good and that's the thing about Blackstar. The main focus was giving you the guitar player a lot of flavour so you can get all sorts of sounds and make for example using a drive or maybe a HT dual in line with an amp, especially with the dual you can convert a single channel amplifier into a three channel tone monster so to speak. So really the focus is to give you guys all the sounds under the sun. So as far as the distortions and overdrives go you can probably tell what happens as you listen to them but you get progressively more gain up to the point where we have the HT metal which is pure full on filth if you like. But importantly the one thing that I see everywhere around the world when I visit is that people still buy with their eyes and they don't buy with their ears. So it has to be a certain thing or it has to do this, it has to look like that. The fact is I'm going to show you in a moment the metal pedal and I'm going to show you that you can back off those gains and it still becomes a fantastic blues rock distortion. So just because it says metal on it doesn't mean it's just full on metal all the time. So I'll show you that in a moment but the first thing's first, I'm using a standard American telly this evening, my guitar. And I'm going through our HT5 2x10 so this is a 5 watt combo with two 10 inch speakers. Basically obviously we have the choice of any amplifier we do here but just to show you a good middle ground for someone. The clean tone that we've got running currently hopefully should represent most people's decent clean sounds on your amplifier. So that's on my neck, the middle and the bridge. So that's given you the root of what we're working with tonight. So first things first I've got the effects pedals as well going through the effects loop of the amplifier. Our HT5 series and all our HT Venue series as well as most of the stuff we do has a send and return and effects loop. If you're not sure what an effects loop achieves then most probably if you go to your local dealer they'll be able to explain it to you but they'll probably more than likely say well an effects loop is simply just for modulation delay reverbs that kind of thing. Because what essentially you're doing is bypassing those pre amp tubes so you're not getting any of that pre distortion or that saturation on your effects. So it's more of a pure sound. I prefer it personally after being told when I was a young guy in a guitar store how it works and when you put that kind of effect through the send and return it really lets you get a much more pure signal if you like. So I've got the HT modulation, the HT reverb and the HT delay going through the send and return and also I've got our HT boost. Now this is a really important thing. Hopefully if you're watching and you're a dealer or a sales guy in a store please use this demonstration that I'm going to show you with the boost through the loop because a lot of people aren't aware of it and it will give you a true signal boost on anything from clean to high gain distortion. What happens when you put a boost in line because I've got one this end to compare is it will just add more saturation distortion to those pre amp tubes, that pre amp distortion. It won't push the power tubes. So I'm going to show you the difference of what you can achieve and I'll set them exactly the same. But yeah, first things first, HT drive. So there's our clean sound. Now the gain stage is set around about quarter to there, just over. So this will give you a very kind of nice classic blues, classic rock kind of feel. The webinar that was the pedal that was engaged. Now our pedals use a tube. They use a ECC83 and it's more commonly known as a 12AX7 tube. So it really gives you the feel of a true valve amplifier. The HT pedals, HT actually stands for high tension because the pedals are running at 300 volt DC. So you can really, fairly low volume here in the studio at Blackstar HQ, but you can still get that response if you like. So I'm going to run through each of the pedals one at a time and after each one I'll shout what it is of course. So this is our drive. So you can hear there that I actually got quite a lot of gain out of it. It's not just a drive pedal. I cranked the gain up full there and it gave me a very modern sounding rock tone. The Jewel, one of our most popular pedals. This gives you two stages of distortion. So on the first pedal you actually have a choice of clean or crunch. So there's a button there that you can choose. So you can have a clean boost if you like. I've currently got it set to where we left off with the drive. So my green channel to the red channel. So imagine having this on stage. You've got two channels to choose from as well as your signal from your own. So on each side of the pedal here we've got two cascading controls, each looking after the gain and the volume for your first channel and the gain and the volume for the second channel. So if you want to you can push that second channel a little harder and we can kind of get almost a boost for our lead if you like. So clean. If I want more gain there I can have it. So you can see it's very versatile and that's the HT Jewel. Next if we back off that volume so we can compare in a better sense. There we go. Next onto the HT Dist, HT Distortion. And you can probably tell where this tone is going as well. So I'll go from the Jewel onto the Dist. So the gain was set pretty much to the top there. So you can probably hear where that tone is kicking. A nice classic rock stack. So on from the Dist to the Dist X, the Dist X ultimately is a much kind of brutal rock sound if you like but works great for metal if you're detuning and great if it's backed off still as a rock distortion overdrive pedal. So the gain on here again is up full as well as the Dist and I'll compare, I'll go from the Dist to the Dist X. Really nice smooth high gain distortion but if I back that gain off again thinking about giving guitar players a lot of flavour. So it still acts as a really nice smooth drive as well. Now the Jewel, the Dist, the Dist X all have Blackstar's patented ISF feature as well as the HT Metal which we'll come to in a bit. So you can shape your sound from that UK British vibe more kind of woodier open sound to more of an American tighter modern sound if you like. So I'll move on the Dist X as an example. I'll give it a bit more bite and I'll move around at the moment with more of an American mid scoop and I'll take it over to the kind of British side of things. So hopefully you could tell a lot of tone or change there and I wasn't touching any of my three tone stack, my bass, my middle or treble. It was all ISF so it really gives you the chance to shape that sound in your head which is what Blackstar is all about. The boost on the far end, when you're running your amp clean it's a great increase to give you a bit more bite, a lot more kind of gain if you like. More saturation to your preamp. This is clean. Boost. So you can imagine through a large rig, a clean channel that is a great pedal to put in the front. Now if you add the boost to any distortion or high gain stuff what it will do is just add more saturation and more noise. It won't give you the lift that most lead guitar players are searching for. So let me demonstrate that to you. I'll put the Dist on, I'll back the gain off a little bit and then if I add the boost you'll notice it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. A very small difference and for the lead guitar players out there, you really are looking for that huge lift to make the audience look your way when you're doing your thing. So with the boost pedal set exactly the same as this one on the end here, through the loop, it's coming off the end of this delay pedal, it makes that difference. So any guys in stores that are watching please use this as your demo. It's all safe. You can do it with any amplifier with a send and return and it will help you sell the pedals and get some money in the till so to speak. So we're going with the HT Dist again. High gain. See I mean the settings, you'll have to take my word for it, but the settings are exactly the same so a great proposition. Usually if you put it in line it will work perfectly with clean and semi-driven blues tones but high gain it won't give you any lift whereas through the loop it will. The effects pedals just to show you where we're at with those. I love to use these through the loop as we mentioned earlier. I've got a really nice lush reverb there. Give it a bit of drive. So on each pedal there's eight settings. There's a very cool feature on these if you don't know already that is called either a dwell or saturation and it will basically feed a lot more voltage to the valve and give you a distorted signal for delay. So the first initial signal will be clean and then it will distort as it travels. So the modulation for example, fantastic for keyboard guys. You know the tremolo's, the choruses, the flange, the phaser that's on there. You can really kind of add it to a Hammond kind of vibe. Perfect for that. So just throw some ideas at you. Basically we've got our reverb there. Our delay, I'm set to a linear. We've got a nice chorus. Really nice clear responsive true sound. It's almost as if it's just adding a bit of gloss to the sound. It's not swallowing the tone of the amp. If we push it with a drive pedal, let's again, D-stecks maybe this time. Reverb there. Added chorus as well. All kind of zachua sound from the Aussie period if you like. But yeah, great pedals. Get into your dealer. Try them out. There's another important feature on the distortions and the overdrives is the emulated line amp. And you're probably used to saying that about other Blackstar amplifiers. But it really gives you the opportunity to send your pedal and the sound of that high gain distortion direct into a recording device, a PA. So not that we want to put anything in your mind that your amplifier will fail at a gig, but sometimes it happens. It's life. A tube might go, fuse. If you aren't ready, then you can't do the gig. So what I'd like to put in your mind is that the distortions and the overdrives that we do in the HT range have an emulated line out that will allow you to finish the gig. Now I'm going to demonstrate the HT metal through our small PA system. Okay, so we've got a couple of Yamaha studio monitors and a small four channel Mackey mixer at the back there. And I'm going to show you what you can achieve from the emulated line out. So swap cables. So there's nothing going on apart from the pedal kicking into the mixer. A touch of reverb on there just from the desk. So imagine we're at the show. This is our big PA system. The engineers said, well, I haven't got a spare amp, brother. What do we do? Just go and grab a beer. The next band is going to go on. You grab your pedal, you say, can I have a DI direct input into the emulated straight in and you get this kind of sound. So for example, the HT metal that we have here is very, very similar to the dual. We've got two cascading volume and gain controls, three band EQ, a clean boost or a drive option for the green channel. And then we've got Blackstar's patented ISF to get our American or British tone. But there's our clean sound direct through these speakers. Channel two. Pretty insane. Hey, if I just show you what a normal distortion will sound like through a PA or a mixer or a direct line, it sounds fizzy. It sounds horrible. Some people might dig it for the old school stuff. Maybe you want some different sounds. But if we mute the channel and go into the standard output and then turn the channel back on, generally what a distortion or overdrive will sound like direct. It's really fizzy. Again, emulated, the true sound of an amplifier from this valve pedal. This is all that's running. Pretty insane, really. And when you've got it cranked through a big PA, amazing. Think about the demos when you're recording at home. Do you really need to crank the amp up? Direct. This will be amazing. HD metal. So that really brings us almost to conclusion for this webinar. We appreciate you tuning in. Remember as always to follow us on all the social media avenues. There's Blackstar on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. And if you have any inquiries this evening, or you'd like any advice, my personal email is steve.marks at blackstaramps.com. And also you can send an email to inquiries at blackstaramps.com. Right, so let's just mute that for a moment and take our cable out. This brings us up to date for our brand new practice amp that's just hit the market this week. So if you're going to any of your local Blackstar stockists, check this amp out. For the first time in a long time, if I was still working in retail, it'd be the first time I'd really, in a long, long time, take a customer who's maybe a seasoned player or a beginner up to an amplifier that's under that $200, £200 price bracket and say, listen to this, this is something new. So what we've got is three models. They're all stereo combos. So there's a stereo 10, which is this one, which is under that £100 price point. We've got a stereo 20 and a stereo 40 as well. There's six Blackstar voices in there. We've got an emulated line out, stereo line out to connect to PA or headphones. We've got an MP3 line in. Now, of course, because the speakers are full range, it really gives you the sense of a high-five or a boombox. It sounds fantastic as your iPod Darko for your tablet or your laptop. We've then got our input. As I said, the six channels, you can also store a preset or a voicing with effects and everything to your channel. We've got a gain and a volume and our patented ISF as our EQ. And we've got 12 super wide stereo effects. So just to show you how great these sound, I'm just going to show you what you can achieve. So if we just go to manual mode and we listen to something like a clean warm, clean bright, crunch, super crunch, maybe a little bit more gain, OD1, OD2, riff right. And I'm from Birmingham as well. There you go. And you can also store six presets as well. So these are some of my presets to hopefully accent the sound of the amplifier. One thing I want to point out as well is that the two clean channels sound amazing if you turn the gain up. Let me just show you a clean bright, which is the first one that you kind of heard really. Nice touch of reverb there. Speakers at home, you start to get a sense of that really wide. If I crank that gain up, you start to get that really nice natural compression from the amplifier, which is an important feature for a pro guy, but the beginners are going to love this as well. So let's look at, I mean, the fact that you can get these huge, huge amounts of reverb as well, which is very pleasant if you're just jamming by yourself, you know. But yeah, I mean, that sound is just very pleasant if you're just jamming by yourself, that huge amount of decay to choose from. But let me show you some of my presets. This is clean warm with a fairly spacious delay on there. Clean warm, I've really cranked the gain to get that really nice Texas blues. Crunch, there's a nice tremolo with a super wide delay to give it that really kind of spacious feel. Super Crunch, I've gone for that typical kind of high gain. A bit of chorus there, some delay. OD1, you'll notice there's a noise gate built in. You can actually turn that off via the software. The software that's compatible with this is our Insider software, which works with our ID series. Phrase trainer, tuner, patch library, online community, very, very cool, deeper editing, so that comes with this as well. So OD1. And then lastly, OD2 with a rather large delay just to accent that super wide stereo, because if I'm at a trade show or a store, it's really sometimes quite noisy with the ambient noise around and you really need to kind of get that impression across very quickly. So this is a really large delay. So there you go, a great product. There's three in the range. Make sure you go and check them out, because they really have to be heard to be believed, if I'm honest. Hopefully you'll get the point across for your home laptop speakers. But again, thank you for watching. I've been Steve at Blackstar and we'll see you next time. So keep it rocking, keep it loud and crank those Blackstars. Cheers.