 Hi Alex here from Blackstar and here to talk to you about the development side of our new Department 10 valve pedal range. So a 2x12 combo, mic'd up with a 57, that's a fairly classic sound and I think we've nailed it there. Department 10 is a Blackstar R&D team responsible for blue sky thinking and design. Our team of engineers are all musicians and have spent the last two years developing the world's most advanced valve pedal. In the critically acclaimed HD range of pedals that we use to launch a company, we set our goal to enhance those designs and to bring some really exciting new features to the Department 10 range of pedals. The valves inside these pedals run at over 200 volts internally, just like a valve amp and integrate into your pedal board with a 9 volt power supply. This means you get genuine valve break up on your pedal board. So first let's check out the boost. This is the most simple pedal in the range, with two extra hot Class A valve stages, meaning that you can push the front end of any amp. With a simple boost, low and high control, you can really dial in your boost sound with this pedal. Let's plug it in and get some sounds. So that was the boost everything halfway. Let's try rolling the boost back a bit, taking some bass out and boosting the treble. Let's try bumping up that boost a bit and rolling back the top end, more of a bluesy kind of thing. As well as being world class valve pedals, the Department 10 Jewel Drive and Jewel Distortion has some really cool added features and I'm going to talk to you about those now. Let's start with the Jewel Drive. This pedal has two footswitchable channels, each channel has an independent gain and volume control and two voices going from fairly clean to really heavy overdrive sounds accompanied with our amp style three band EQ plus the ISF. This really allows you to dial in the mid range that usually wouldn't be available. As these pedals can be used like a preamp, we've included an effects loop on the back of these. This means you can integrate this into your pedal board with absolutely no compromise. So with both dual pedals, you can expand your one channel amp into a three channel amp using your clean on your amplifier, channel one on here for your rhythm, channel two for your solo. Another unique feature of the Department 10 Jewel pedals is the effects loop. This means you can put your modulation's delays and reverbs in a correct place in the chain and still record, practice and play with cabaret. I'm recording the sound via the USB and using the XLR to the active speaker behind me just for monitoring in the room. Another great feature of the effects loop is it's only engaged when you have one of the channels on. That means you can use the channel switches as a global effects bypass. Both dual pedals can be used as your preamp, but also amp replacement in conjunction with cabaret. This means if you have your effects pedals on the end of your board, if you turn up to a gig and your amp goes down or there isn't backline, you can come out of the XLR output straight to the front of house. This sound will rival any mic'd up guitar amp on stage. Check it out. These pedals are amazing for recording and practicing. Simply plug your headphones into the cabaret output on the side and you've got a really immersive sound to practice with. With the department 10 dual pedals integrated into your pedal board, this is the easiest and best way to capture your sound. Use the XLR output, stereo quarter inch cabaret output, or the USB for stereo high quality recording. Myself and the team here at Blackstar, the most exciting new feature on these pedals is cabaret. Cabaret is our next generation DSP speaker simulator that recreates the sound and feel of a mic'd up guitar cab in incredible detail. We've developed this from the ground up. Whether you're using this live for recording, practice, or even as an amp replacement at the end of your pedal board, cabaret offers you class leading speaker simulation and full flexibility and can solve some of the issues that we as musicians can run into when we're using things like IRs. With the accompanying software Architect, you can save three patches of cabaret onto the pedal and you can access them via the three way mini toggle switch in the middle of the pedal. On the side of the pedal, there's a stereo quarter inch jack cabaret output. This can be used for going into a recording interface or can even drive some headphones. On the rear of the pedal, there's an XLR mono output. This is great for running into a mixing desk or even an active speaker. For deep editing of cabaret patches, connect the USB up to your PC or Mac and load up the free architect software. Both dual pedals have the same feature set. They'll have different voicing and more gain on the dual distortion. So I'm currently on the crunch channel of the department and dual drive. I've got the USB connected to this Mac and that's how I'm recording all of the audio for this video. This XLR is connected to the speaker behind me and that's how I'm monitoring in a room with zero latency. So now I'll take you through some of the features of the cabaret and what kind of sounds you can get and all the different features. So maybe let's start out on a 4x12 Classic UK. So this should be fairly big open sound. That's a really good starting point. So let's explore some of the other cabs we've got available. I'll go all the way down to a 1x12 vintage USA. So just in changing that cab, there's a big difference in sound and two really usable things. 4x12 more open, more muted in the top end, more smooth. The 1x12 USA vintage was like a bit more spiky sounding. Really good for that kind of indie stuff, kind of old school stuff. So yeah, two really good choices there. So just pick another one to go to somewhere in the middle, a 2x12 USA combo. So again, another great sound kind of in between those two. A bit more open in the top end but still not tons of bottom end there. So I think that'll be good for using some delays on some reverbs and stuff. It's not going to get too muddy. So we'll stick with that 2x12 combo at the moment. The next thing to do is to explore the microphone section. We're currently on a 4x14 condenser. So this should be fairly open sounding, a lot of top end, a lot of bottom end. Let's move over to sounding a bit warmer. So one to one ribbon maybe. Very smooth in the top end, tons of low end there, but just very smooth across the board. So I like that a lot. Maybe let's try a 57 dynamic. Instantly a completely different sound. Still using the same cab but just changing that microphone. It's a little bit spiky in the top end there. Very characteristic of that kind of 57 dynamic sound. Let's move that off axis to maybe get rid of some of that top end stuff and to smooth it out a little bit more. So a 2x12 combo, mic'd up with a 57. That's a fairly classic sound and I think we've nailed it there. So now I've got that basic sound I'm happy with. I'll show you the room. I've had that muted so far, so I'll just unmute that. This should give you a stereo mic'd up room sound. So blending that in alongside the dry. Just dial that back a little bit. So compared to that dry sound that I had before without the room blended in, it's given a lot of life to the sound. Let's just quickly do an AB between no room and room in. Mute that and put it back in. So that gives a lot of life to the sound. This isn't reverb per se. This is more like emulating the sound of a mic'd up cab in a room with a couple of mics a few feet back. So what you would do in a recording studio set. You have full control over the wet versus the dry so I can blend in that room sound as much as I want. So as these pedals are more like preamps, there's no power amp involved. One thing we need to do is to complete the chain. So preamp, power amp, speaker, microphone. We've added the power amp section in here to do that. So currently I'm on a 6L6 emulation of a power amp. We have EL34 and EL84 as well. We have other power amp features like resonance, presence and dry. So let me go through a few of those now. Let's start on the 6L6. Move over to EL34. So that's compared to the 6L6, that's a much more kind of woody sound, kind of a classic British kind of thing. Take the room down a little bit so you can hear those differences a bit better. Moving over to the EL84. So that's much more of a top boosted kind of thing. A bit more of the top end, a little bit thinner in the bottom. Really good for cutting through a mix. Really good for adding other effects onto it as well. Let's move on to the resonance and presence. The resonance and presence have five settings. So let's go through the resonance first. At five, this is max resonance. Let's go to the minimum. So that's tamed a lot of the bottom end there. So for cutting through a mix for double tracking, stuff like that, this is great. Go for somewhere in the middle. So a good balance between the bottom end being there but not too present. Moving on to the presence, this is all the way up. So really opened up that top end there. I'll move over to the first setting on the presence. This is a really nice setting because it's not taking off a load of treble. It's just taking off that little top fizz that you get especially with some microphone and cabinet choices. You can get a lot of that kind of top end fizz stuff. So to bring that in is a nice little trick. So moving on to the power amp drive. This will react with the volume on your pedal. So the harder you drive the volume, the more that this will take effect. I've just turned the power amp drive all the way up to max so we can hear the difference between minimax. So that's emulating driving a power amp a little bit more into that cap. So it kind of fills out the sound a bit, a little bit of saturation in there. Really nice to kind of thicken up that sound. Moving on to the EQ, which is in the master section. I've had this bypass for now. Let's engage this to see what we can get. So there's a low cut, a high cut, a low frequency, low mids, high mids and high frequency. What we've done is we've really narrowed down the frequencies that you really need when you're EQing yourself. The low cut and the high cut is a really important thing. You'll find a lot of producers do this to sit the guitar in a mix, not have too much low end stuff, not have too much high end stuff. So bringing this in kind of, tail is a low end and I'll show you a bit of that now. Let's take it all the way off. That coupled with the low control can be really powerful. So let's boost this up a little bit and have a little bit more of the low cut. That should give us a nice little bump in the bottom end. So boosting that low, but also taking some of the low cut up, that gives us a nice little bump in the bottom end and that fills out the sound a lot and doesn't give us lows or sub frequencies that we just don't want. The low mids and the high mids are really tuned to guitar specific EQ. So this is very different to if you just grabbed a normal parametric EQ and found the low mid and turned it up. So this is really tuned to work with a recorded guitar sound. Let's try those out. High mids, this is gonna add that bite back in. Let's keep that around zero. Let's boost it high and see what that does. The high end of a guitar signal is always really tricky to get the nice top end frequencies without sounding too harsh. So we spent a lot of time tuning this frequency and tuning this band. I find that using the presence control in the paramp alongside the Master EQ high control is a nice balance between a lot of paramp presence coming through and boosting that high. So if I've boosted this, maybe I'm going for a lower presence. If I turn this presence up, maybe I need to drag this down a little bit. So here I've got the dual-dist and I'll go through a couple of high gain tones on this pedal. That's the Crunch Channel. Let's move on to the OD. Another great feature in Cab Rig is the Randomize function. This Randomize is the Cab Choice and Microphone Choice only. So if you just don't know which one to pick, just tap that and it will give you another setup. I hope that gives you an idea of what Cab Rig is capable of and the tones that you can get from it. I've been Alex from Blackstar. See you next time.