 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're going to be using the Blackstar Amped 2 to dial in a basic metal tone. So if you're a metal guitar player this video will give you a basic tone you can use as a starting point to designing your own metal tone. This can be tweaked to your own preferences and we can also go between a British and an American style metal tone with a very simple EQ adjustment. We're primarily going to be focusing on more of a traditional or classic metal sound rather than a modern metal sound. So if you're a fan of 80s metal bands like Metallica or Iron Maiden or any of those kind of bands this will be a great starting point for you designing your own metal tone. All the tones you're hearing in the video are coming straight from the Amped 2 and running out of the cabrig output straight into my audio interface. The guitar I'm using is this Chapman guitars ML3 Pro X. For this video I'm exclusively going to be using the bridge humbucker because we don't really need any single coletones for metal. Okay so starting at the amplifier section I am using a 6L6 response for this because we want that slightly scooped mid range that's great for metal because a 6L6 response gives you a really tight low end and a really present high end but it slightly scoops the mids out. I'm using the classic voice here. The USA and UK voices have less gain on tap than the classic voice so I've gone for that one which as you can see here the gain is completely dimmed. I've got the bass and the treble set to around 130 to 2 o'clock and the mid I've got dialed back to about 10 o'clock. Now this is where we can go between a British and an American sound. So in the current state we've got pronounced lows and highs but not much mid so in that case we're going to get a bit more of a scooped metal sound so this will give you more of an American sound. So that's a great tone to start with if you're playing American style metal. If you want to make that into a more British sound you just push that mid control up to about 2 o'clock and now we're transformed to more of a new wave of British heavy metal sound. Once you've got your amp sound dialed in you can then add a little bit more gain and tightness to it by using the drive section. So I'm using the overdrive selection here on the three position toggle switch. You notice I've got the drive set to zero the level all the way up and the tone I've got just over half where you can set the tone to taste but what this is going to do is it's not really going to add a ton of extra gain but it's going to hit the amplifier circuit that little bit harder and it just tightens it all up and brings it all together. Using an overdrive is a really common thing for high-gain players to do because it just impacts the amp slightly and it allows you to shape that tone a little bit more. You can hear the way that using an overdrive just tightens it up and it adds a little more presence to the sound as well. This is something you can tame with the tone control if you want that to be slightly darker but it's great for adding some pick attack to your rhythm playing. We can also combine the drive which is boosting the amp with a very very subtle chorus. So I've got the time and depth set very very low because you don't really want this to be very audible and I've got the mix set to somewhere around about 10 o'clock just for a slight blend. What this will do is the chorus will create a doubling effect which will give our rhythm sound a sort of fake double-tracked feel. Use that chorus very subtly because you don't want an audible chorusing effect you just want that slightly detuned thickened sound. If you want to thicken up your metal guitar solos you can use some delay. So I'm using the linear delay here which is the digital delay so it's very very clean repeats. I've got the time set to 10 o'clock but you can change that to taste obviously whatever the tempo of your own song is. Feedback I've got quite low because I don't want many repeats and the level is also very low. So repeat-wise there's very little going on here it's kind of just one really audible repeat and then one very faint repeat. So if I'm playing a lead line without delay sounds like this and if I add that delay in it's gonna thicken that line up and then if I want to go for the ultimate 80s lead cone and add that chorus back. Every tone you've heard I've also had the plate reverb on as well with quite a low time and the level at about 10 o'clock. Everything was typically recorded with plate reverb in the 80s that was a very go-to reverb type in most of the studios and when you're playing metal you don't want a ton of reverb but you can use it just to add a little bit of ambience to your sound. So there you go there are some tips on how to dial in a basic metal tone with the amps too. Let me know down below in the comments how you got on with these tips and if there are any other genres or even artists you'd like to see us make these kind of videos about using the amp too let us know down below in the comments as well. As I said earlier on in the video you can use this tone as a jumping off point for your own metal tones so set your amp to up this way and then tweak it until it's perfect for what you need. Don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more videos just like this and if you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please head over to musicteacher.com check out the music teacher database over there there's a huge network of teachers all around the country just waiting to help you guys out. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you very soon.