 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential, my name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video I'm going to be talking to you about building a portable guitar rig with the Blackstar Amped 1. So these days, most musicians who play in bands, unless you're in a really big band with a big budget for touring, you're probably not going to be able to take the amount of gear that perhaps you dream you should be able to take on stage with you. So really the days of walls of 4x12 cabinets are kind of behind us. Musicians are having to streamline their rigs and travel lighter and lighter. Products like the Blackstar Amped 1 make this so easy for us. So with the Amped 1, we can basically create a really portable touring rig just by adding a few pedals to this. So the cool thing is the Amped 1 can actually power two external pedals up to a total of 500 milliamps at 9 volts. You could also add some daisy chain connectors to this and add more pedals as well, providing you don't exceed the 500 milliamps. That means we can use this not only as an amplifier, but as a power to the pedals that we choose to use. So for this rig, I'm just going to use two pedals. I'm going to use the Blackstar LT Dual Overdrive and I'm also going to use the Walrus Audio Fundamentals Chorus and what I'm going to do is I'm going to build a really simple rig that is going to run off the cab rig output of this unit. Now if you were using this in the real world, what you could do is you could either go from the cab rig output into the PA system, meaning you could literally show up at any gig with these three things and get your sound, or if you're playing a venue that has a house back line and there's a cab there, you could actually use the Amped 1 to power the onstage cabinet as well. So all you need for this is to put your pedals in the order you want and you have to treat the Amped 1 like a guitar amp. So this is going to be the final thing in the chain. So everything else is going to sit in front of this. Now with modulation effects, and the same would be true if I was using like a delay perhaps, I could put that in the effects loop of the Amped 1, but just for simplicity I'm going to run everything in the front. So now that I've chosen my three pedals, I'm going to connect my rig together. So I'm going to start with the LTD or first in the chain, that's going to be connected to the Walrus Audio Fundamentals Chorus. For this I only need two patch cables because I'm only using two pedals, obviously if you're using more pedals you're going to need more patch cables. The Fundamentals Chorus then is just going to go straight into the front of the Amped 1. So the Amped 1 is last in my chain as if I would treat an amplifier. You could put the modulation into the effects loop, but just for the purpose of speed in this video I'm not doing that, I'm just running it into the front. Then we have some power hookup cables. So these are going to be used to connect the Amped 1 to each of the pedals. So the first one is going to run to the Fundamentals Chorus, and the second one on the back is going to run into the LTD. Now I need to add some power, so I'm going to power up the Amped 1, and that in turn will power my pedals, so you can now see both of these pedals switch on and off as well, they're drawing their power from this unit. My guitar cable is going to be connected to the LTD wall, and then I'm going to use an XLR cable to connect the Amped 1 straight to my audio interface and straight into my DAW. So my signal flow is going to be my guitar into the LTD wall, that's my twin-sided overdrive, into my chorus, into my Amped 1, so I'm also getting my reverb from the Amped 1 as well. So like I said, this is a really simple chain, it's just a dual overdrive, chorus, and then the amp with reverb, but obviously if you wanted to you can add more things here because the outputs on the back of this will power up to 500mA, so you need some daisy chain connectors, but in theory you could add a bunch of pedals as long as you're going to exceed that limit, but I've just got a chorus there, you can't run these in the loop as well if you want, but like I said, I've just got them going in the front, so very, very simple setup. Alright, so now I'm going to run you through how I would set this up tonally, now obviously when you're making your own small rigs, you need to use your own tonal judgements on what you're going to do. So I'm using the Amped 1 just as a clean amp here, you can push this into some light overdrive if you want as well, but I'm using this for this video exclusively clean. I'm using the 6R6 Response with the USA Voice, I've got the mid slightly scooped bass at midnight, but I might scoop that back a little bit depending on how much low end the overdrive adds, and the treble I've got a slight top boost on, and I've got quite a bit of reverb on here as well. So I'm not using much gain either, that's quite low, I want this to be pretty clean. So whenever you're ekeaming an amp, I always recommend setting everything to midnight, and then listening very closely and making slight adjustments as you go. What you don't want to do is you don't want to go like this, and completely scoop something out. Just make little adjustments either side of midnight until you find that sweet spot that really works for you. I'm using the Chorus as a very light chorus just to add some swirl to my clean tones, but I can also pair that with my rhythm tone. The LTD well I've got set up with Channel 1 being my rhythm tone, and Channel 2 being my lead tone. So I've got them both pretty much set at the same level, even though Channel 2 is actually a lot louder than Channel 1. I've got more gain on Channel 2 as you can see there. I've got the tone and the ISF boosted up to about 3 o'clock. That gives it a bit more of a British character with a bit of a top boost. So here's my rhythm tone, and then when I want to play leads, I go to Channel 2. So even though this is a very simple setup, I have enough sounds there to get me through most instances. I'm just showing up for a gig and playing. I can probably get through with those things. I've got a clean tone, an affected clean tone. I've got some reverb, two different types of overdrive. What I can even do is I can even pair the rhythm tone with the chorus or my lead tone with the chorus. And that just gives me a couple of additional tone options there as well. So you don't need a huge rig to get a lot of sounds. Now, obviously the cool thing with building a rig this way with the Amped one as your centre point is that you're really scaling down your rig. So you're treating this like an amp and you can just pair a few of your favourite pedals with it, take that anywhere you want to go and either plug this into the PA or use this to power an onstage cab, whether that's your own or rented one. And there you go. You can pretty much fit your entire tone into a suitcase. So let me know down below the comments what you guys would be using if you were building your own Amped one fly rig. I'd love to hear what kind of combinations of different pedals and effects you guys out there would be taking to gigs with you. Don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more free videos just like this. And if there's anything you'd like to see us doing, particularly with the Amped series, let us know in the comments and we will check that out for you. If you're looking for a music teacher in your local area, don't forget to head over to musicteacher.com. There's a great network of teachers all over the country waiting to help you guys out. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you soon.