 With the Blackstar Venue Series Mark II, it's more versatility, more tone, more fun to play, more portable, more is more. I'd like to walk you through one of the amps in the line and it's the HT Club 50 Head and HTV 112 Cab that it's sitting on. But I know that some of you are thinking, well yeah, 50 watts overpowered for any gig that I do because I only play at home in Madison Square Bedroom or I do a church gig or I play smaller clubs and I don't really need 50 watts of firepower. Well the great thing about the Venue Series Mark II is that there's a single button that reduces the power down to 10%. So this 50 watt amplifier next to me can be reduced with a button push down to 5 watts. All of a sudden now it's the perfect bedroom amplifier. All the way to the right we have a clean channel and Blackstar went back and rebuilt this clean channel from the ground up and there's two distinct voices in this. The first one is a classic American clean and that has all the top end sparkle and low end roundness that we love from the cleanest of clean amplifiers. But if I push the voicing switch on the five button foot switch at my feet I now have access to the classic British clean channel. What's great about that voice is that if I dime the volume on that particular channel I'm starting to get into some of those really hard to find edge of breakup tones. Now some amplifiers go really clean or really really dirty and it's hard to get that middle ground that's truly comfortable. But those edge of breakup tones are in that classic British voicing and they're so easy to get to and really enjoyable to play whenever you don't want high gain tones. If we move to the left of the panel now we're going to go to the overdrive channel and that has two distinct voices as well both of which have been reworked from the ground up for the Venue Series Mark II. The crunch and the super crunch are both classic black star tones but now the crunch has been given a little bit more dynamic response and it's a little bit more enjoyable to play than even the award-winning Venue Series Mark I. Here's what that sounds like. From the five-way foot switch now I can select the super crunch voice of that overdrive channel as well and that one also has been rebuilt to be a little bit more articulate and have a higher gain structure than was available on the Series I amps. So the Venue Series Mark II is not just about more tone it's also about more functionality and more versatility for all kinds of players. If I flip the amp around you're going to see a handful of new features as well. You have the normal speaker outputs that allow you to plug into any number of speaker cabs be it a 112, 212, 412 or 2 412s for a full stack but you also have some direct out options. There's an XLR based balanced out as well as a quarter inch line out. Now those give you the convenience of all of your great amp tones silently. There's a cab emulated output on those and you get to choose between either a 112 or a 412 cab emulated out so you don't actually need to play with the speaker cab and have all the volume. You can go direct to the front of house, to a direct box, to a different PA or even into earphones if you want to practice silently. Something new about the Venue Series Mark II is now a USB out. What a USB out allows you to do is get amazing recorded guitar tones silently by plugging your HT Venue Series Mark II directly into a desktop or laptop computer. And what that means again is that you're able to get all of your favorite guitar tones without the volume that's associated with a cranked amplifier. In addition to the way it sounds and the way it functions they've also made it a little bit easier to move around as well. The entire Venue Series Mark II has been shrunken down a little bit so it's a little bit more of a convenient grab and go rig. That's one of the reasons I have this 50 watt head sitting next to me on a 112 cab because you get all of the resonance of a half stack with something that actually fits into a compact car pretty easily and it doesn't weigh 500 pounds either. So that's the Venue Series Mark II. More tone, more versatility, more black star, more is more. For more information on the Club 50 or any of the other amps in the Venue Series Mark II go to blackstaramps.com