 Hi, I'm John Fadaruso from the band Zara's War and this is the Blackstar ID 100. One of my favorite things about the ID 100 is as far as recording goes, it has an emulated out in the back which allows you to go directly from the amp right into Pro Tools. If you got a gig, unplug it, your sounds are stored in and you're up and out the door and you're ready to play live. As far as writing and recording with the ID 100, I prefer setting it up on the KT-88 tube setting with the overdrive to crunch because we're a heavy band and we like it crunchy but if we ever decide we want to go outside the box and experiment, I don't have to go out and buy a bunch of different amps or pedals, I could just dial in my sound with the effects on here, change the tube setting, change the crunch and the possibilities are endless of what you can do as far as writing and recording on this. The ID 100 does everything I needed to do live, does everything I needed to do in the studio, I have my effects, I have all my sounds, I don't need a ton of pedals in front of me, I don't need a bunch of different amps to try to get different sounds, I've tried tube amps, I've tried modeling amps, I've tried solid state amps and this by far crushes everything and if I had one of these when I first started it had made my life a whole lot easier and I would recommend the ID 100 to anyone starting out, anyone who's been doing it for a while and is looking for an easier way to go, this is your amp.