 Hello, good evening folks and welcome to Blackstar HQ this evening for November's webcast. I'm Steve from Blackstar and tonight we're looking at the low wattage options from Blackstar that's on the market right now. And this might be a good idea for you if you're looking to maybe treat yourself for the seasonal period coming up or maybe you're looking to get somebody a small amplifier as a present and we've got quite a lot in the price range here going from a mid-priced £300, £400 options right down to £50, that kind of price point here in the UK but elsewhere you can get the vibe from those costs. So the first thing I was just jamming through there was the HT5 which is a 5 watt valve combo and really this is going to be a little bit of a history lesson for you as well because the HT5 was the first low wattage small product that Blackstar brought out along with the HT1 shortly after. They're both valve amplifiers so they're really a warm sounding guitar tone and they each have a clean channel and an overdrive crunch channel but there are some really unique options with them. They both have built-in reverb as well. So let's just go through some sounds. For anybody that uses single-core guitars or humbucking guitars out there my Music Man reflex will simply allow me to go to single-core mode or go to humbucker there. So I'll play through different options. The humbucker being more of a warmer sound, the single-core being more of a cut-through, more presence in the tone. So it will give you hopefully a good representation of both on the tones I'm going through. The amplifiers in front of us here are more of the up-to-date digital range which will come to thereafter from the valve. So this is our clean tone and I'm going to start on single coil so you can get a good vibe from that so we'll see what we can come up with. I'm going to add a little bit more reverb to get some ambience there in my playing and a little bit more on the volume so we're around about half away now. On to humbuckers. Now can you hear that when I'm going to the bridge pickup especially in the humbucker mode I'm getting a lot more grunt there, more break-up in the clean sound and that's going to basically lead on to what I'm going to tell you next. If you push the volume past the half-way point on the HT5 you can really start to get that boutique clean sound which is on the edge, you know, it's just breaking up especially with a bit more of a treble boost. On the controls of this amp you basically have a volume for the clean and a single tone control for the clean. The overdrive has a three-tone EQ, three-tone stack, bass-middle treble and our patent ISF which only works on the overdrive channel there but we can push the trebles on the clean channel here and get a lot more of an edgier clean sound. It's really quite cool, you know, you can really dig in there and you can get where I'm going with those kind of big windmills, that kind of break-up, you know. Really cool. So on to the overdrive channel. I've got the gain control around about nine o'clock so it's rolled off. So this allows me to, if I'm on humbucker or single coil, it allows me to really roll my volume on the actual guitar and utilise it to back off the gain or the saturation. So if we start off full, let's give it a little bit more level there, humbucker. So we can really dig in and roll it off if we need to. I can turn the gain up quite a lot here and now I'm going to show you how the ISF utilises some different tones. So at the moment, we're all the way clockwise, we're all the way on and that inherits more of a kind of British pushed mid-type tone, more kind of a woody sound. If I roll the volume, sorry, the gain up and bring the ISF anti-clockwise all the way off, we inherit more of a kind of scooped mid-sound so we can get more of a modern high gain if you like. So sticking with the humbucker really on the bridge there. So we can really get wonderful amounts of sound from the nice cleans, the breakups, you know, just on the edge clean. Classic crunch, super ultra high gain. Now, you might be thinking that's still pretty loud. Of course we've got volume on each channel. So at home, this will still give you the warmth and the feel of a valve amplifier. You know, if you're used to using valve amplifiers, you just can't beat that feel under your fingers. The smell of the valves burning. And this is what the five and the one will give you. So at low volumes, I can get tons of gain at a much lower volume. It might be cool if I speak over the playing as well so you can get the drift of where we are volume-wise with that. So you can really get that nice tone. It's useful for recording. You know, you could put a mic in front of there, but also underneath the back of the amplifier, we've got lots of interesting stuff going on. We've got speaker outputs. We've got an emulated line out as well, which we were talking about just with recording. You can take a cable from there, standard guitar cable, go directly into your mixer or your digital audio workstation, anything like that, PA system, and you can take a signal from the amplifier. And also what you can do then, just to let you know if you're playing late at night or you live in a small apartment, you can put the amplifier in standby and still use the signal from the emulated out directing to your recorder so you can get all the sounds of the valves burning without bothering the neighbors, so to speak. So a really useful option, of course you can mic it if you wish as well. There is an MP3 line in, which while I'm on the subject to that, all of the amplifiers we're looking at, including the digital stuff and the valve stuff here, all have an MP3 line in so you can stick your phone in there or your MP3 player with the correct cable and jam along to your favorite tracks, which is cool as well. We've already discussed the speaker outputs and we've got an effects loop as well. And also this is footswitchable. So a really great amplifier. The HT1 is a little bit more limited in regards to its controls on the panel on top. We've obviously still got two channels, clean and overdrive, and we can utilize the gain and volume to manipulate where we were with this with the kind of four classic sounds. And we've got the ISF as our EQ and a reverb as well. So that's what the HT1 is about, a one watt valve amplifier, nice and light, and you can still get all that great tone. I know a lot of good people around the world are aware by these and these for recording. So coming more up to date, at the front line here we've got an ID 15 which is our 15 watt digital series amplifiers and it's more of a professional way of looking at things if you like. Shortly after the ID series came out a couple of years ago, we bought out recently the ID core. The ID core is more of a home amplifier, definitely. We've got stereo speakers as opposed to one single cone standard for a guitar amplifier. We've got six voices. On here we have six channels of voices but we can double it with our six choices of valve options there, our power tube options. Here we don't have any of that but we have the voicing, we have gain and volume, we have EQ as our ISF and we have the same effects on each of these which we'll run through now. And then more up to date, just hitting the stores this month just in time for the seasonal period we've got the fly, the black star fly which is a small battery powered 3 watt amplifier and you may not have seen the extension cab yet but we've got an extension cab already plugged in and I can show you the differences there in a moment but this is really a great option for maybe somebody in the office, somebody in a very very small apartment, students, anything like that. It's great and of course on the fly you can take it to the park, you can take it to festivals, take a guitar with you and away you go. Plug in your MP3 player as we discussed. So come in around the front here, our ID series. So let me just run you through the generalisation of this. You may have seen it all before but it's good to remind everybody out there on YouTube and on obviously live this evening. So what we've got here is six voices, we've got clean warm, clean bright, crunch, super crunch, 32. We've got again on the volume stage EQ and ISF as well and then we've got six different valve choices for our power output tubes. We've then got 12 studio quality effects there comprising of four reverbs, four delays and four modulation types and you can have three simultaneous and you've got a footswitch option as well at the end there and you can get some great sounds out of this. Now the aim of ID series was to give the guitarist a valve-like feel with the option of programmability effects, that kind of thing and also with the ID series and ID core you can use our optional insider software which opens up a whole new world of things it's a great package excuse me, you've got things like a phrase trainer unscreen tuner online community sharing your patches and all that stuff, it's really cool. So let's go for a tone So currently I've got a really spacious reverb on there and I'm using a clean warm with a 6L6 valve and we're kind of going for more of an American clean sound. Now if I turn the valve TVP true valve power section off hopefully you'll be able to hear the difference. Now you might see there's two mics here and that's the reason for that is obviously we've got ID core with two speakers here and we've got the fly with an extension speaker here but currently we've only got one of the mics on for the single cone so this is without with big big difference super super long delays as well and reverbs really really useful so this is a compromise with you know you could have the programmability that you wanted to save store your presets and your patches all the effects at your fingertips or on the computer but you've got that valve feel that instant push on the cone and it really does feel like it. Now I encourage you to go into your local dealers and your local stores to try the ID series out because over your computer speakers and whatever you're using hopefully it's monitors, headphones whatever it might be it still doesn't quite get the message across about how good these really are they're built like a tank you can see the timber on the side there they're built for gigging really I mean the 15 watt here you could still play with an acoustic drummer as long as it wasn't like a math chord death metal band but in anything else underneath that bar blues rock in a small environment in a small practice room you could still get away with this 15 watt it's as loud as valve so let's just look at some of the sands on here just briefly if I just back the reverb off and touch we can go for a crunch maybe more of a British style sound with an EL34 which is a classic sound but we can get some really high gains as well overdrive one maybe more of an American 6L6 vibe going on really great tone and of course you've got a master volume at the end there as well as your volume of the channel here so you can really get some pushed preamp sands with bringing the master volume down so you can get some great valve like feel at low volume as well this is the smallest of the family of ID series the 15 watt we do a 30 and a 60 and then it starts to get to the more pro high-end stuff so really breathe it in try it out well worth it so on to ID core this is really still a current model to a lot of people that you know they're just seeing it in stores as we speak so now we're going to put both mics on so we get the super wide stereo feel now super wide stereo might sound like a little bit of a gimmick at first but you've really this is the one where you need to physically see it and try it because it really immerses you in a massive massive arena of tone especially with the delays and the reverbs and the mods really quite cool I've got some presets already loaded in there so we can look around with these so this first one on a clean warm voicing it's quite ambient it's got a lot of delay there some phase and a bit of reverb and you can really hopefully get the idea of the super wide stereo it doesn't necessarily sound like it's coming from here it sounds like it's surrounding surrounding me as I'm playing that particular tone is like a clean bright and you can really drive the gain stage on there it's amazing so you can get that Hendricksy Stevie Ray sound really useful great tone one of my favourites on this amp crunch I've just put a little bit of tremolo for more of an indie style sound super crunch quite a prominent delay now so you can really get that super wide stereo it's very cool honestly it sounds like it's over that side of the room it's really cool and you got your overdrives as well so you get your high gain stuff for those guys who want a noise gate there's all your noise gate built in as with id series as well but you can turn that off via the software again just to touch the delay there but this is really where it kind of comes to life at home it's fantastic for the digital but inexpensive market it's one of the best amps in the world I guarantee you so make sure you try this there's 3 in the range there's an id core 10 an id core 20 which is this one and an id core 40 there's only 3 and they're all under that 200 price point so make sure you check it out and they start around about 90 £90 in the UK so yeah that's id core so on to our very very brand new fly so this amplifier is definitely you kind of how do I say more of let me just move the microphone up sorry about this it's definitely kind of like on the go on the fly hence the name and it's battery powered as well as mains and you can utilise a built in tape echo delay very cool and again two channels with ISF so the way the amplifier connects if I can just lose the other speaker for the moment this is how small it is sounds fantastic the aim with this product was to give somebody something small but still sounding musical usable you can get cleans on there you can get crunch on there on the back you can see the battery compartment consisting of 6 AA's I've got to say I've had this one for myself for around about three weeks and I've used it every day and it's still still going strong we've got a connection here for our extension speaker and a DC point for our for our adapter we've also got emulated out and headphones and MP3 line in as well so I'll show you how that sounds in a moment I'm just going to show you the back of the extension speaker now you can see I've got like a coiled cable in there and you can take that pretty much as long as you want to because one of the reasons that we've done that is so that you can use these as your multimedia speakers for your laptop or computer and they sound fantastic this is three watts by itself but when you purchase the extension speaker you get six watts so there's a lot of power there and a lot of people have been genuinely very surprised at the level coming out of these so I'm just going to get the speaker in the back ready to plug in but I'm not going to connect it just yet now let's see where we're at this is the clean channel will be well it's a nice and clean very musical you can get that kind of now the more you push the gain stage there's basically a gain in the volume stage if I push the gain stage now we can get the clean with the break up pretty cool again if I go to the bridge humbucker definitely a bit more by it a bit more gain really nice now let me just introduce a little bit of tape echo we have a time control of the delay and also a delay level so if you have a really short delay time you can increase that level there and you can my attempt at chicken picking there which you know pretty cool so if I open up the time a little bit bit more ambience there a little bit more level pretty cool and the most spacious we can get it as far as time and level but at least it gives you that wet sound for playing so we can hide behind your solos like most of us do I do especially so you can really introduce that delay if we just turn the delay down and then go over to the overdrive channel if you've got the gain off we're now definitely in the realms of crunch so I've got the gain roughly around about quarter to there and you can kind of get the classic bluesy style sound if I introduce a lot more gain this is about as really as scream as you can get now what I'm going to do as I'm playing I'm going to introduce the second speaker yes believe it or not that was just the fly three by itself three watts so when I introduce this you're going to get a little bit more mid a little bit more low end and six watts as opposed to three so hopefully you'll hear the difference when this microphone starts picking up the extension speaker really really cool so that's the fly three now there's going to be a couple of options for you when they hit the stores at the end of this month December time just in time for Christmas you can buy the fly three by itself and you can buy the extension speaker by itself but actually we're doing a pack as well this won't really hit stores till next year maybe January onwards maybe sooner but you can buy both together with a DC power supply as well to power it so remember you can you know use it for your multimedia purposes as well as guitar perfect for the office so I'm just going to show you before I leave today an mp3 line in just to show you what it sounds like when you're playing along to a track but also what's very very cool is you can play your iPad through there as well and your computer and play games and it sounds really really good because the speakers are linear so this is just a basic blues track but I'm just going to jam along so you can hear how clear it does sound getting a little carried away there but yeah it sounds great you can really push the level a little more than that but hopefully the microphone's picked it up really well so make sure you come and check out the fly and your local stores and it'd be a perfect Christmas present for anyone that might play guitar if you're thinking about that so listen guys I've got to go now but thank you so much for tuning in this evening if you're watching later on YouTube thanks for watching we really appreciate your support for Blackstar and here at Blackstar we try to innovate and push the boundaries a little further as always hopefully you'll be getting the guitarist all the tools to do what you need to do so remember to follow us on all the social media outlets of course obviously our website the Instagram page Facebook, Twitter, all that kind of stuff to keep up to date with the artists news and where we're at with Blackstar around the world and any questions that you might have just fly them to inquiriesat blackstaramps.com I've been Steve for Blackstar this evening and thanks for watching the webcast next time cheers thank you