 Good evening everybody, welcome to this evening's webinar here at Blackstar HQ. My name's Steve Marks, I'm the product trainer in the UK and I get to train all you lovely guys out there and girls on your gear as well as the guys in store so they're all clued up. But tonight really we're going back in time a little bit. Just to really look at a fantastic range of amplifiers that we do called the venue range and all of the amplifiers that really kind of sit under that umbrella I guess, they're an award-winning series of amps and really the best way to describe them is you know your working musicians multi-tool, they do a number of things and obviously through your speakers at home hopefully you'll get a good vibe of what they're all about but I encourage you to visit your local Blackstar dealer and just go and try these amps out. If you're in the market to buy a new product or just get out there gigging and you want something new they really tick a lot of boxes. They give you everything from really nice boutique cleans to really super high gain sounds so you can get a number of things in between as well. So for somebody who's really into that classic maybe American clean tone you can get it. If you're into that British clean tone you can get it, like a nice 60s 70s boutique thing. If you're into really kind of nice bluesy overdrives it's in there and also really modern high gains it's also in there as well. So I'm going to run through some of the amps here this evening. Probably we haven't got the whole range and we've got some other new additions as well to kind of remind you about. We'd love to have them all here but we've got a few anyway for you to have a look at. Now before I go any further we've actually got a competition running this evening. You can win a fantastic HT1 combo which is signed by our good friend Gus G from Firewind and Ozzy's band and currently he's got a brand new solo album out as well so it's worth checking that out on YouTube. But this is the amplifier, a very lovely HT1 valve combo, one watt combo and that's hopefully you can see his signature on the side there. So in order to win that we're going to get you to email us with the answer to a question. I'm going to ask during the webinar so make sure your ears are peeled and hopefully you'll get it right at the end. I'm going to give you the email now so you can make a note but I'll also remind you at the end as well. If you can send your answer to inquiries at blackstaramps.com and just reference it Gus G and we'll announce a winner tomorrow here at HQ. So that's a pretty cool thing to have because they sound amazing. So the first thing I'm plugged into is actually one of the venue heads, it's the Stage 100. All the venue stuff apart from the newer metal range run EL34 valves so they're inherently a British tone but with our ISF you can of course get that scooped American tighter sand as well which I'll run over with you. So at the moment the 100 watt head is actually a three channel beast, it comes equipped with a foot switch as all of the venue amps do so it's fully accessible straight away. You could buy it on the Saturday morning and gig it on the Saturday night. A lot of people around the world always comment on the venue range especially in every blackstar amp that as soon as you plug in it's not hard to find a fantastic sound. So I'm going to show you how easy it is and hopefully you may have one of these amps already if not you can maybe like I said check out your local dealer or check them out on our website so you can see the panel controls. But on the amp itself we've got here we've got a clean channel with a voicing switch and that consists of a treble and a bass for our EQ and then we've got an OD1 and an OD2 both of which have got voicing switches and then we've got our EQ section which consists of a bass mid and the treble with our ISF as well and we can really use that only on the overdrives but it allows us to really achieve that sound in your head. Blackstar's ethos since day one there's always been about removing limitations and it's about giving the guitar player and the professional guitar player every option these fingertips and it really it really is in there. So we've got reverb on here as well which is a digital reverb it would have been very easy to go with a spring reverb like a lot of kind of classic American style amps but we felt that a digital reverb reflected the overdrives much better and it's a little more controllable. There's two reverbs on on venue amps which is also a cool thing if you didn't know that. There's a dark and a light switch on the rear panel of the amp which allows you to get more of a shimmering modern reverb with the light and darker and much dimmer kind of classic reverb sound. We've then got our master controls which consist of a master volume and a resonance and presence control so they're really there to tailor your sound to the to the room that you might be playing in or gigging in to look after the the bass and treble response of the cabinet. So at the moment I'm in the clean channel and I've got my voicing switch in which means I'm on a warm clean sound so this remains clean no matter how loud you go and it's a lovely lush warm full bodied modern clean. Really quite sparkly but still full bodied. The voicing switch out is more of a boutique clean so it's got a more grittier clean tone so it breaks up earlier and the harder you dig in of course you get that kind of boutique brittle sound so. In the mind of a couple of licks you know you can back off your attack on your pick. Clean you know so very very shimmering. One very cool thing that not many people will realize with the with the venue stuff especially if you take your clean channel there for example and if I just turn my master volume down and I increase the volume of that particular channel we can virtually get what I'd deem as a drive sand. Now to get that out of a clean channel of an amp at lower volumes if you like maybe for recording or gigging it's a very very cool thing and of course we always try and encourage you using your volume on your guitar to back off and then you've got a clean and then a semi-driven clean so check it out so if I crank my guitar now if I roll my volume off still on the clean sound very very cool to be able to control your amp like that and try it out if you're a guy who works in store if you've got a local store that you know sells Blackstar go and check it out it's very cool. So if we back that volume down again so on to the second channel OD1 we just go there I've got it set basically with the voicing switch out and the gain roughly around about two o'clock and my ISF will go for more of a British sound because we can engage our EQ and ISF section now. If I roll my volume as well so you can see there's so much control from the guitar just through one channel of the amp so if you're utilizing all three the world's your oyster really. If you put the voicing switch in you get a slightly more modern higher gain, put your mind of a lick, voicing switch in so a really nice modern high gain and then even more so with our red channel OD2 I've got the gain around about three o'clock here so it's quite high now let's go from R, let me just mute that channel so it's not making noise. I'm gonna go from my British high gain if you will right through to a tighter American sound utilizing the ISF. If you don't know what ISF is it's a patent black star and it stands for infinite shape feature and it allows you to really control the sound that you're looking for the sonic and what happens is you've got your bass, your middle treble which is your tone stack and it basically if you move in ISF around it really moves your tone stack all the way around but it works very much in conjunction with the mid cut, the mid dip which occurs on any amplifier tone stack and it really helps you shape your sound so we can get a woody a British open sound like we've got we'll start with then I'll move over to a more tighter American feel. So trying to get a bit metal on you there it's really a great versatile amplifier if you think back to where we were, lovely warm cleans, boutique cleans, classic crunch, more of a British vein through to a more modern high gain American style sound so really you can't fail to get something fantastic out of this as any guitar player. So that's really one of the heads and all of the aspects that I've shown you work on every venue amplifier just in a different wattage in a combo for example before I forget as well a very cool feature of the venue stuff is the amplifier automatically turns into standby if the lead gets pulled out so you'll notice there's no nasty you know we still got the amplifier running as soon as you plug out there's no nasty pop which is a really unique feature so I mean for example down the bottom here we've got our stage 62 by 12 which is very very similar controllability wise as I've just shown you on the hundred head we've got a club 50 head there as well for you know 50 watt kind of guy this is probably one of my favorite amplifiers and very very cool to gig with in the middle here we've got the 40 which is probably the most value bang for your book for your money basically so with the 40 watt it's an ideal gigging amp it's it's light enough that you can carry it by yourself and you can keep it at home and jam at home of course now the the venue series has some really unique things going on on the back we've got things like speaker outputs different omages that you can choose from so you can connect to external cabs we've got an effects loop with a DB increase on there as well if you're using rack mount or pedals for your for your mods and delays anything going through the effects loop and also we've got a very cool thing called an emulated amp if you don't know what that is it allows you to connect directly to an external source like a mixer a PA or a recording device or anything like that now the one thing you can do with this is one thing I do anyway when I'm gigging it's thinking outside the box a little bit but that's part of my job I actually put an emulated cable in which is just a normal standard guitar cable into the mixer and I'll put the amplifier on standby and that means a couple of things you can record silently that way if you're at home for example or you can just monitor simply the emulated out mix which is voiced slightly differently to the traditional mic sound in front of the amp and I'll get a mix through the PA when I'm playing live and get it just sounding nice enough through my monitor if I'm lucky enough to have any and then I'll mute that channel but then I'll stick a nice microphone in front of the cab and then I'll stick that through the PA as well and take the traditional sound of the amplifier so really I'm getting two signals from one amp and that's a really cool thing to do and you can mess around with the panning of each and it sounds almost stereo like if you if you will so it's a very cool thing to try but now as you can see probably we haven't got a microphone in front of this we're using the emulated line out so I'm going to let you hear a 40 watt using the emulated so bear with me for a second we're going to plug in make sure that's okay level wise so now you're you're listening to the amplifier via the emulated output so we've got such a reverb on there and I'm going through the warm clean currently so right clean as well for you overdrive SF infinite shape feature was on the British side then so voicing switch in same amount of gain ISF USA we get a nice kind of tighter American style so hopefully that should have given you a really cool idea of how the amplifier sounds via the emulated and that's the kind of if we just switch it to standby I'm not listening to anything pretty cool so if you live in a small apartment maybe or a small house where you've got a young child great for silent practicing with headphones silent recording so one of the new additions to the venue family was released last year HT metal predominantly the thing with this is they use 6L 6 tubes which are more renowned if you like for American high gain amps so we've got the hundred watt head plugged in currently so I'm just going to let you listen to this it's a very very similar configuration at the moment we've got a HT 5 head as well as a 60 watt combo you can see the very cool metal fasher on there to really kind of make it look very very metal currently they have actually won some awards as well the metal 5 and the 60 of one best buy total guitar and the 5 has won a gold award for guitarist as well which is a fantastic accolade and they're not easy to come by so again if you're really into that kind of high gain sound with a bit more sting in the tail these are fantastic for that so currently the clean channel so voicing switch in voicing switch out Rital on to overdrive one ISF was actually in the middle there and when I was jamming earlier I just felt that the the middle position was right for me and that's the beauty of blackstyle you can find your own sound let's really put it over to that American side on OD2 so we really take an advantage of that high gain tons again at your fingertips really loud really prominent great for metal guys but one of our sales guys that works here for the North gigs a metal 60 combo and he's a blues guy so that just shows you that the sounds are so versatile it's not just aimed at the at the high gain metal players you can get wonderful bluesy stuff out of it as well if I just bat my gain off then go for more of a maybe a British sound so you can see there's more than just high gain out of it these little babies at the back here really redefined what blackstar is all about and it really opened up a lot of people's eyes we've got the one what of course which I mentioned earlier you can win I'm gonna ask you a question at the end of this webinar which is only a few minutes away and hopefully you can kind of get in touch tomorrow or this evening inquiries at blackstaramps.com reference it Gus G and as long as you got the right answer you could be a winner the HT5 is really one of our most amazing amplifiers it's one of our best sellers around the world and really reshaped smaller valve amplifiers we've got a clean channel and an overdrive channel as well as our infinite shape feature ISF and we can get some wonderful high gain sounds low low volume now you might look at a HT5 and think five watts it's pretty cool could have it home maybe I could record with it I have actually gigged with one of these for my sins I play in like a corporate band from time to time just for some extra pocket money and very much like I spoke to you about earlier mic in front emulated line out at the back same features as the bigger venue stuff two signals coming from the amp crank it up through the PA it sounds amazing so let's just get this baby on okay so we need to get a mic in front yeah yeah um let's go for a let's go for a mic in front I'll be great through you please welcome on stage mr. Drew McDonald UK sales manager cheers man it's a little wet there so we'll bat the reverb off a little for you we've got one single tone control and one volume for the clean a case of finding your sweet spot on that the thing with this is if you crank that volume it starts to break up just right for a boutique you kind of feel your volume off of course on to the overdrive channel we now have our three tone stack bass middle treble and our ISF infinite shape features so we can really get some wonderful sounds anything from bluesy crunch right through to super high gain so we'll start with the with the gain fairly low switch that channel on sit there play for hours so there's so much to the venue range and the little baby brothers and sisters HD 1 HD 5 this beautiful amplifier at this side is the 5210 it's basically a HD 5 with a 2 by 10 speaker speakers in there sounds pretty much exactly the same as this but it's got more of a more depth to it these are beautiful I've bought one of those myself and very gigable if you if you did what I said earlier about the emulated line out mic in front as well even just the emulated through PA sounds amazing but you've got a lot more depth there so if you like a more bass response to your cab the 2 by 10 is really worth looking at but lovely lush reverbs same as this one it's all digital so we've really come to the end of our webinar now I hope you've enjoyed it thank you very much for watching and any questions that you have please fire them to inquiries at blackstaramps.com of course we've got some really cool things happening over the next few weeks I'm gonna ask the question now for the HT 1 just to remind you if you've tuned in a little later this is signed by our good friend Gus G from firewind and Ozzy Osbourne's band he's got a very cool solo album just coming out check out he's new tune on YouTube HT 1 the question is if you've been listening what does ISF stand for it's a patent to blackstar we've talked about it a few times tonight and it really helps you find the sound in your head so what does ISF stand for title the email Gus G reference and hopefully we'll announce one of you lucky watchers tomorrow as a winner and you'll get yourself a very cool amp now this time of year is very important for us at blackstar we've got a big show in LA called the Nam show it's the biggest trade show for musical instruments and we've got some very exciting products coming to fruition and the guys have worked very very hard on them and I'm gonna play some stuff through that amplifier all that series of amplifier now for you to check out but of course I can't show you so it's a sneaky listen see what you think we had a YouTube video go live today so check it out on there as well just to give you a another sound bite but remember to add us on Facebook like our page on Facebook blackstar find us on Instagram subscribe to our YouTube channel so you can keep up to date and that's about all I've got to say for this evening but thanks for watching I'm gonna plug into our new series of amplifiers now see what you think okay so again thanks for watching I'm just gonna play a few sound bites for you and we'll see you very very soon