 Steve here at Blackstar HQ for tonight's webcast and basically tonight what we're looking at is a beginner's guide to tone. Now there's many many factors to tone, obviously the amps very important, the guitar you're using, the harp that's playing it and also the fingers. I've seen many gig rig rundowns and so on of artists and what they use and what pedals they have, what amplifiers, what guitars but at the end of the day these are very important. I think I heard Brian May's guitar tech once say that it wouldn't matter if you try Brian May's complete rig as he would, you still wouldn't sound like Brian and that's a big part of tone if you like. In the early days when I was going into guitar stores as a kid nobody really sat me down and explained the difference between what pickups give you so when I started working within the the MI industry and in stores I made it a mission if you like to especially talk to beginners about the differences of what guitars give you. We've got a nice selection of guitars here today but the first one I'm going to be playing for you is this rather nice Sandberg custom built guitar from Germany from the great guys at Sandberg there. It's a single coil telecaster style guitar and there's a certain tonality that you'll get from single coil pickups you know typical of things like the classic Stratocaster for example. It's kind of a thinner sand but when you say a thinner sand or a fatter sand people tend to gravitate towards are like a fatter sand I want a bigger sand it's not necessarily a case of that it's more of a feel under your fingers and the nuances that you can get when you play and you'll find certain guitar players that use a single coil format will sound a certain way you know for example the likes of John Mayer and Clapton John Frischanti Hendricks that kind of thing and with a humbucking guitar you'll find the Jimmy Pages the Slashes and so on and obviously some of those guys and girls cross over with different guitars that they use just for different tonalities and when you start to get used to that you can really start to open up your tonal palette with the guitar side of things obviously with amplifiers we've got a couple to show you tonight but our amps we believe are the most versatile on the market and they give you tons and tons of tone tonality and usability and they're very easy to use it's a lot of bang for your book and we'll run through some of the features tonight on one of our very very popular HT5 valve mini combos and then an ID30 combo that I have here which is a part of our digital program if you like so if we just look at something like a clean tone on a single coil guitar and we'll play through some tones and I'll try and put you in mind of some certain players um something like a telecaster format is often you know the country guitar to go to because it has that twang has that thin sound that cuts through but you could hear some Fruchanti there I did some Richie Cotson from his poison days and just there's a bit of John Mayer there but you can feel that that thinner sound coming through you know a classic bluesy crunch type tone at the moment I've got my ISF on my Blackstar HT5 set to the British side so it's more of a classic British blues crunch if you like the ISF feature of course allows us to move our tone stack around for more of a thinner mid scoop tighter American sound but at the moment I'm more of a pushed mid classic British type feel let's back that gain off a little that's kind of nice we're getting that single coil pushed gain sound so we're kind of in that Stevie Ray area um with a with a classic warmer crunch sound I noticed there as well as I started playing with my fingers um something that a very good friend of mine said to me when I started working in a store was um mainly the reason that he kept losing his his plectrums um try and do everything you can with a pick with your fingers um it was a lot easier for him just to plug someone into a guitar do a little bit of a nice lick and get them set up and that's a really good thing to do because there's different tonalities there as well so if you notice if I play something with a pick and then in my fingers so you can get a different feel there as well all part of the tonal journey you know um let's give it a bit more drive on the single coil so let's try a different guitar with some humbuckers and see what kind of tones we can get through our ht5 I kind of noticed there it's a warmer fuller sound single coils do have a tendency to have a slight uh buzz to them especially an older guitar more traditional single core guitar um and that's all inherent if you listen to old Hendrix records you can kind of hear that in the mix the humbucker hence the name humbucking um doesn't have that hum so much and inherently is a warmer thicker sound so on our clean channel on the ht5 with where we've got the volume roughly around about one or two o'clock and the tone around about 12 o'clock now with the single coil that still remain quite clean the humbucking uh guitars tend to have a little bit more bite to them you probably noticed that in the tone of the clean there I went to my single selection there it kind of got a bit more sparkle because we're splitting those those pickups uh and it kind of reminisces a little bit of that that kind of single coil sound and that was a really cool trick that jimmy page used to use on his on his Les Paul um went often he would have maybe used the telecaster for the recording on some zeppelin tracks um but that clean is is obviously driving a bit more if we just give that volume a bit more of a poke so those preamps are pushing a little bit harder another very important part of your your tone or characteristics is using the tone and the volumes on your guitar which often get left all the way up um especially with the the younger kind of generation that are just getting into the world of guitars but these are vitally important to your tone as well um if you listen to a lot of slash uh solos he often rolls the tone all the way off to get that particular style of sound that he has um it's a big part of it um if you're into that old school peter green type tone that outer phase sound if you can't get a guitar that's out of phase that will help you as well also bon amassa uh if you listen to a lot of his playing there's a lot of tonal work going on so with the volume side of things if i back my my uh volume off we're going to get a bit cleaner because the pickups aren't pushing as hard we'll start to get in that into that jazz territory there minus the playing but with the tonal controls there we're getting that really nice warm hollow bodied sound so let's try some overdrive and play around with the tones as well so if we back that gain off on the overdrive channel we're in that more of a classic rock kind of sound quite nice if we give it a bit more bite maybe let's take the isf over um to a bit more of the kind of uh let's see a bit more of the american kind of scooped sound if you like that we have watch what happens when i dial that tone back to get that certain characteristic as well and if you're using high gain saturated sounds like the ht-5's giving me there um great gain stage on this amplifier we can really get lots of different tonalities uh and including the isf feature we can get those american mid-scooped tighter sounds or those pushed mid-british style sounds and the clean gives us everything from a clean to a to a more boutique clean the more we push it so a really really unique product there's a lot of stuff going under the hood under here as well which is very useful to know things like effects loop speaker output emulated out which goes direct to a pa or or a mixer you can turn the amplifier into standby mode the emulated out is still active for late night recording different monitoring on stage really quite cool um so let's move over to the digital side of things on the id series so the current sound i've got set up on here is a very similar tone to i was trying to achieve there with that kind of bono maseresc sound if you like um it's a kt-66 on my tbp section tbp stands for true valve parent it gives us a very very good representation of the feel the speaker sag the feel under your fingers the sound of a valve amp and these are really really worth trying when you go to your local dealers um i've got a super crunch voicing setting the six choices there from clean to scream and we've got a nice room reverb added there's four types of reverb four modulations and four delays and we can mix three simultaneously which is very very cool um but this is a very nice blues style tone and again i'll play around in my tonal dials as well nice inspirational sound like i said using a kt-66 more of a british tile tone stack and a super crunch so the marriage on this id of that that voicing where the isf sits and the valve choice is really really very cool so tonality on this is second to none um i can run you through a few sands now that will give you a good explanation on where we're coming from with this product um so if we start maybe on a cleaner warm sound if we go for a six l six isf us um maybe with a a spring reverb for a classic valve style reverb um we're going for that really nice warm american style clean sound a very very populist choice you know of clean let's look at maybe a clean bright voicing push a bit more on that gain stage maybe a six v six and still on the american side of things and we're getting a small boxy maybe 50s american style amp very very rock and roll you know a nice 50s tone you know for a crunch back off that gain stage maybe an el 34 turn the isf to the british side of things and now we start to be in that realm of kind of the classic 70s uh 60s kind of vibe from from the uk you know 66 version there which we started with earlier but let's go for a super crunch maybe an el 34 still high gain you know the choice of a generation for this style of sound won't make you suffer that but you get the idea um so these amps are really full of lots of tonalities if you do want to go down the route of getting yourself an id amp and also we've got our id core range of course as well which is more of a budget level practice amplifier but if you'd like to get in touch with me about a personal easy guide on how to obtain these tones please you can feel free to email me at steve.marks at blackstaramps.com and i'll be able to forward that to you and hopefully uh that'll give you some really good pointers on getting the we're only really scratching the surface this evening but to get those kind of sounds you know um obviously i've spent a long time with these amplifiers getting the tones just right and equally adding the effects afterwards as well to really home in on those classic guitar sounds um so we'd like to thank you for very very much for watching this evening um hopefully it's been a good introduction to uh a guide to tone a guide to what pickups give you um actually utilizing what's going on on the instrument they're there for a reason and what our amps can give you um you know the ht5 a beautiful clean beautiful overdrive and then something as fantastic as the id series to to really find that sound in your head get your identity hence the name um these products are fantastic and black star are continuing to innovate and make fantastic gear so we appreciate your support in watching and of course buying our products before i leave you today obviously i want to talk about um following us on all the social media avenues as always subscribe to our youtube channel uh our instagram our facebook and of course our main website um blackstaramps.com and make sure you check out our merch store as well we've got some fantastic stuff on there um some t-shirts you can see a couple either side of the amplifiers here tonight and as well we've got some really nice uh black star pint glasses so cheers with me water and i'll see you very soon peace