 Good evening everybody out there. Thank you for tuning in to the webinar this evening. I'm Steve at Blackstar and tonight's webinar is really all about IDCore. It's our brand new range of amplifiers that have hit the market recently and what you're looking at are three models. They're all feature stereo speakers. So we have a stereo 10, IDCore stereo 10, IDCore stereo 20. You can see this one is the amplifier that I'm currently using and then we've got the 40 at the back here. Now they're all entry level price point but as with everything that we do here at Blackstar we try to innovate, we try to be different. These are a general guitar combo to look at with a hidden two speaker system inside and they're full range and they all feature super wide stereo. Now we've obviously got a couple of mics set up here on the 20 for you to get that experience so one thing I'd recommend is some headphones to watch this because you'll really get an essence of the super wide stereo but essentially what it gives you is if you're using things like reverb, modulations, delays especially, it will not sound like it's actually coming from the combo itself. It'll kind of sound about three foot either side and give you a real sense of a wide sand. I've heard people say when I've been travelling around visiting dealers in the UK that it makes them feel like they're playing in a stadium and obviously we want you guys out there and you girls to play more and to enhance the experience this is what IDCore is all about so it's not just a beginner's product. Tonally it will impress all of the seasoned pro guys and the pro enthusiasts. I come from a long history of music retail myself and for the first time in a long time it's a product that I would actually be so excited to take one of my customers, one of my regular guys comes in, I'd take him straight up to this and say check this out, look at the price and have a listen. So let's run through some of the features. We've got a camera on top of the Core 20 just to show you what's going on so I'll run through everything that's happening on there. You can see we've got a few cables connected at the moment so the first things that you see on the left here you've got an emulated line out which doubles as your headphones socket. Now this can be used to go to an external source as well like a mixer or a digital audio workstation for recording anything like that so that's a very cool, a PA, things like that. We've got our MP3 input which currently is coming out of my headphone socket of the laptop. Obviously this is my guitar for the input, USB connectivity. Now this is really cool. Our ID range was the first product to really enhance this but ID core has been very successful in its connection with recording so you can actually connect this to any digital audio workstation and you can actually reamp through the compatible insider software thereafter but importantly the latency is very very slim so for recording with all the popular things like Cubase and Pro Tools and that kind of thing this is your digital audio interface so it's not just an amplifier which is great for the money that they're at. We've got six individual Blackstar voices and if you're familiar with the ID series it'll mirror that so there's two cleans, two crunches and two overdrives. The overdrives importantly both feature a built-in noise gate which is great for you high gain players out there but you can turn it off of course via the insider software if you don't need it. So yeah six voices. We've got a manual and a preset mode so you can actually store six of your favorite presets to each voice. When you connect to the insider software it gives you the capabilities of saving as many as you want which is cool and you can share and download and stuff but we'll come to that in a moment. On the actual controls of the amplifier we've got a gain stage, a volume stage and our EQ is our Blackstar's patented ISF infinite shape feature so it allows you to move your tone stack around. Somewhere in the middle there is about right for most guitars, humbucking guitars, single coil guitars, it will be roughly somewhere sounding sweet but you can shift that tone stack to be a more mid-scooped American style tighter sound right through towards a more open woodier British style tone and importantly the ethos of Blackstar is to find the sound in your head so you could find that this position here around about 10 o'clock would be your ideal EQ position which is very cool. Now just to put your minds at rest if you're thinking wow I'm not I'm gonna I'm gonna lose my bass middle and treble control when you connect to the insider software if we can just take a look at the screen there you'll notice there's a bass a middle and a treble EQ stage to adjust as well so that's important to let you guys know that so there is a full EQ on there. Coming to our super wide effects stereo section we've got four types of reverb so we've got room hall spring and plate we've got four types of delay so we've got a linear like a digital delay analog tape echo and multi tap all the tap tempo feature and an overall level and then we've got our modulations consisting of a phaser, a flanger, chorus and tremolo which you can get a slicer effect and also a rotary style effect in there as well so it's packed full of great tones great sounds all usable sounds that most guitarists will will need to produce a good tone so if we just go to manual mode at the moment on the front panel of the amp everything's pretty much flat at the top I've got no effects so what I'm gonna do is just simply show you how the amplifier sounds by itself and I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised to let you know what's happening with the guitar I'm gonna be switching from my humbuckers to a series and parallel switch here so I'll be able to get those single-core sounds as well but ultimately you the choice is yours we've got guitars you have but both single calls and humbuckers sound great but the first sound I'm gonna show you is a clean warm sound so I'll just play through some basic chords and go through each of the stages clean warm on to clean bright now nice and sparkly on to my bridge pickup on to crunch so you can see where we're going with this it's a really nice sweet just slightly overdriven now for the next one super crunch I'm gonna just push the gain a little bit and switch to the humbucker so it gets the point across a little more but I'll stay in single call and then I'll change just so you can hear it's not a massive amount of difference so super crunch a bit more gain let's turn the volume down a touch on to humbucker kind of cool so a nice super crunch there to play your rock stuff with rock and roll the only one you'll notice if I just let the guitar breathe a little bit nice and silent so for the guys that are really into that staccato style stop-start play riffage riffage you can basically get a really nice quiet tone when you're muted but you can turn that off remember by the software so you can probably tell that's more of a harsher harsher sound you know on to OD2 this is a slightly different voicing for an overdrive but again gated nice very versatile so six voices to choose from and that will suit most of you players out there now storing presets on here I've actually got six of my own but I will show you how to store if we take the amplifier out of manual mode we're now in preset mode so the LEDs off here let's just go to crunch for the moment I mean my my original preset on here is a semi-driven crunch tone with a little bit of tremolo just for a nice kind of indie vibe bit of reverb on there's a room reverb but let's take the modulation off so if I just press twice on there and that will take my mods off so now it's just a reverb tone so if I wanted to store that particular preset and I'm happy with it let's just adjust the EQ a little bit maybe more of a British vibe if I'm happy with that and I want to store it all I simply do is go to the manual switch if I hold it for around about five seconds you'll see it flash and then that's stored until further notice and that's how easy it is to store your own sounds on there if you're storing via the insider software it really opens up a whole new kind of way of storing you can name your patch you can give it a description a genre put yourself as the author and then you can share it and it's pretty cool to see other people downloading it and enjoying your sounds that you've created equally you can download other people's as well now what's very cool and surprised me when I first tried the ID core out is that I created some sands on ID series that I really liked and you folks out there have been downloading them under my name black star product trainer which is very cool thank you and you can actually download those as well to the amp so it's not just core sounds you can download other people's ID versions of their tones as well which is pretty cool by the end of this evening I've created my six presets that I'm going to launch on the insider website or software should I say so if you have a login to the online community just search under black star product trainer and all the patches I'm going to upload the six will have a brief description and also you'll know their mind because at the end of the name will be IDC for ID core so that way I can tell if I'm choosing to upload them to a core I know which ones are I prefer on the core and if you like so let me show you some of those presets obviously the crunch we've just stored but we'll come back to that in a moment clean warm I've actually called this one if you look at the the laptop screen I've called it wide dance delay IDC and I have a lick that I wrote for my band that kind of suited it quite well but at the same time I've tried other little licks with it and it seems to work for a few things so see what you think so this is a wide dance delay nice and ambient onto clean bright and one thing that I really love about this amp is if I just bring the the actual gain level down bright clean is really based on like a boutique clean so it's got an earlier breakup one thing I really love about this product is you can really drive that gain stage on the cleans as well so it's kind of like you've got a an old old-school clean amp cranks which really breaking up and pushing the those pre amp valves really hard so kind of single coil sound it sounds really cool for that snappy indie sound or that Stevie Ray Vaughan kind of vibe so see what you think when I crank that gain up just really loads of feel I mean that's just the second voice thing it's great that's one of my favorite voices on that onto crunch this is the one we just heard so we've stored it bit of a room reverb kind of nice onto super crunch for this one I've pretty much gone for a classic lead high gain sound but with a really spacious delay so I'll stop and start with some lead stuff so you can hear that super wide through through your cans or through your decent PC monitors so onto OD1 just to give me some some ambience to the tone but definitely OD2 a lot of chorus there for that nice kind of Zach Wilde Ozzy Osbourne no more tears so there you go pretty cool the Insider software is free to download for PC or Mac we've just done a brand new update as well this evening so make sure that you get yours updated if you use Insider the first two things that you see on screen we have an extension of the amplifier for deeper editing so not only can you adjust things on here so for example if I just move my gain control you should hopefully see it moving on screen with me but also you can take your mouse and you can adjust things like your EQ and to let you know you've actually adjusted it internally the white markers on the dials will turn red and you can get really close to the pedals you can change them a fraction at a time like any guitar player would like to if they had the physical pedals in front of them just to get that perfect tone for the for the song if you like so that's the first two things that you see we then have an audio section which I'm going to come to last but essentially it's a phrase trainer and you can import any mp3 music any digital files from your computer and it will play back and you can slow it down in real-time pitch you can select an A and a B point to loop as well so if you're trying to nail that licky that that really tricky solo or that riff you can just concentrate on that segment and you can see I've got quite a lot of tracks on there to choose from and that's what you need to do just click it and it appears in the retro looking cassette tape deck there's also a metronome here as well so you can hear that's just a standard kind of click you can adjust the sound of the click the BPM all the things that you would expect a metronome to let you change and then we're on to our library the library is a place where you can store all of your presets you can see there's only six in the amplifier that's available to store so you can see my wide dance delay there my SRV clean sting and so on and I'm going to upload all these this evening if you've if you've liked what you've heard so far but you can see all of the ones I've created here schools out that's a Tommy Henrickson artist patch from the online community which is also very cool you can get artist exclusive artist patches from the likes of Tommy and Gus G and all our endorses the online community I'm not currently logged in but simply it gives you the chance to have a username and a password and just enter the online community and share and download as we've talked about nice and easy you can see there username and password and then we have a really nice on-screen clear tuner which mutes your sound as well it's chromatic and also you can access the tuner from the front of the amplifier by simply holding the tap and the manual switch simultaneously your voicings become your strings so clean warm clean bright will be your low e and your a for example and then the tuner will be your mud delay and reverb delay being in tune so let me just check my tuning for the moment make sure that we're in with these new strings always remember to tune up to pitch kids never tuned down because you need to give your string tension so just if it's above pitch like that bring it down first and then back up just a simple lesson these cool there's our e so back down and then back up now one really cool thing that you can do with this as well and I've tried it myself with the emulated line out it is a full stereo emulated line out so if you connect an ID core to a PA system for example you could take a 3.5 millimeter stereo cable out of here into two quarter inch mono and you could go into two channels on a desk and you could pan hard left and hard right and then of course depending on the power of your PA you can get it really cranked quite loud which is a great thing to be able to do and you get the full super wide stereo effect through your PA which is insane to listen to and play to it's fantastic the foot switch capabilities are only on the ID core 20 and the ID core 40 this is the FS 11 foot switch now speaking from a guy that used to work in a store this would be the conversation that I would have with you the buyer or the purchaser when you're a kid growing up and you're playing guitar when our own lad I remember getting your first pedal is hugely important I remember getting my first fuzz distortion and learning my guns and roses licks when I was a kid playing along with appetite for destruction for example then learning when to actually press the pedal for the lead break and getting it in time that kind of thing so to give you guys a one-way on off switch just isn't good enough for our entry level range we've given you something that's going to be inexpensive it's an optional extra FS 11 that's a little bit more intuitive there's actually two modes on the pedal that you can adjust via the software in your settings the first mode which is called default mode will simply allow you to choose by the software two of your favorite presets so for example I've already preloaded clean bright and super crunch is my favorites and then this second pedal second switch will turn the effects on and off on that particular preset preset respectively so if there's a delay on the clean bright it will turn that off if there's a reverb on the super crunch it will turn now which is very cool a little bit more to think about if you're a beginner especially and then the optional mode will simply less let you scroll up or down throughout all six patches obviously they will change each time you press it and it will go in a circular motion if you keep pressing up so a lot more innovation in a pedal which I think is very very cool and that's something that I'll be talking about when I'm in stores and if any sales guys are out there around the world that sell Blackstar make sure you bring that up because it's a really unique thing so for example we can see I'm on my clean bright there so switching between those two favorite channels and turning the effects on off really cool what we're going to show you which is a little difficult for me because obviously I won't be able to hear the actual speakers because when you connect something to the headphone or emulated out it does mute the speaker so I'll try and play around with some of my presets that are already pre-loaded but we've got the ID core 10 here utilising the emulated line apps so I'm just going to play through some presets on there that I've already loaded up as well and hopefully it'll sound okay but this will give you a good idea of what the headphones actually sound like direct or what it will give you through a PA system let's say so let's just get my cable in there again my my presets so hopefully that give you a good idea of what it would sound like through your PA system or your headphones as well which is pretty cool you get the super wide stereo full on so what I'm going to do now is just play along to a track to finish up on the on the webinar this evening I have actually done my own easy guide for ID core and if anyone out there would like it or if you've already owned one please feel free to email me on steve.marks at blackstaramps.com and I'll be able to send that through to you it's a bit more of an easier way of looking at things explained in my way if you like so I don't mind sending that through but let me just show you again just how cool the oops let's get the mains out there schoolboy or error as Drew likes to say there we go we're plugged back in so if we open the audio section let's choose let's choose a track let's go with some Van Halen for this evening but we appreciate you tuning in and watching whether it's live this evening on the webinar or whether it's on YouTube at a later point remember to follow us on all the social media avenues like Instagram Facebook Twitter that kind of thing and if you have any other inquiries please sending your emails to inquiries at blackstaramps.com so thanks for watching and I'll try not to murder a Van Halen song for you but let's get one of my presets so remember I'm going to load some a little bit later on this evening or tomorrow so keep an eye out for those under blackstar product trainer again remember you can actually slow this down in real time pitch to learn stuff but I'm just going to play it normal with David Lee Roth and the boys and we'll see you again very soon and thanks for watching