 Hey everybody, Steve here at Blackstar HQ in Northampton, England and I'm very very very excited this evening to welcome you to this webcast and to show you and talk about the new range of amplifiers from Blackstar called the Artist Series. Now we have an artist 15 which is here and an artist 30 which is here. The artist 15 of course is 15 watts and it's a 1 by 12 combo. The artist 30 is 30 watts and it's a 2 by 12 combo. This is a really momentous occasion for us as for the past 2 to 3 years we've been concentrating on the digital products. So to get a Valve product again is very very very cool for us. And I'm really really excited to show you about it and take them around to show people in stores. Now Blackstar rose to fame with the Artisan range of amplifiers many years ago which were a hand wired boutique style amplifier. Really a good pedal platform and a very very popular amp around the world for tone connoisseurs if you like. And since then there have been many many products in the range of Blackstar and the majority of those concentrate on multi channels, clean and specific crunch and overdrives. Whereas really the Artisan range just concentrates on a single platform if you like for pedals. Now the design team behind Artisan have put a lot of hard work into this new range of amplifiers and they've carefully distilled that heritage into the artist range. So we've got a very very pretty looking product that has that classic vibe about it with a modern twist if you like for flexibility. So we have things like Blackstar's ISF feature which won't be on the Artisan range and the hand wired range which again allows you to really pinpoint your tone stack. There's two channels on here both of them clean but the second channel when you push it hard will be a classic overdrive. So again reiterating a perfect platform for pedals. Again more modern features include effects loop, channel switching. So we have that old school vibe with a new twist which is really really very cool. Important things to know added features like the metallic fret. So when the stage lights hit these they look very very cool as you can hopefully see on screen now. We've got a beautiful leather embossed Blackstar strap here and also we're using Celestion V type speakers. In the preamp stage we've got ECC83s and then a couple of 6L6s in the power amp stage. So a 6L6 is renowned for giving you a lot of headroom very very good for clean and very good to handle anything that goes in front of it. These products love stomp boxes. At the moment I'm going through channel one on the Artist 30 and I've got one of our Blackstar LT drive pedals going through. So I'll switch between so you can hear a stomp box, a classic drive going through the front end of the clean channel on here. Before I carry on actually it's worth mentioning to you that I do have a series and parallel switch here. So I'll be switching between single coil settings and humbucker settings. So that will hopefully appeal to most of you guitar players out there but we'll start on the humbucker. So as guitar players we always generally look into the past at classic amplifiers from the 60s from the British side of things and also from the American side of things. We really feel that those characteristics and that vibe is within the artist range. So it's perfect for the fans of that kind of tone. Also it's worth mentioning to you the timber that's used here is a birch ply cabinet. So very very good quality but also lightweight. So it won't be too strenuous to take to the show. So let's look back at the amplifier here on channel one which I was just using with the stomp box. We've simply just got a volume and a tone control. Onto channel two now which is still fairly clean unless you really drive it quite hard and it becomes a classic overdrive. But now we have EQ, bass middle treble and also black stars patent ISF feature. The infinite shape feature which allows you to pinpoint a point in the EQ tone stack where you'd like it to sound for your ears. The sound in your head. You know you can find it in here. The palette of clean tones on here is just wonderful. We've then got a master volume and also a reverb built in. The reverb circuit is digital but it's a very very nice sound. So let's look at the clean side of channel two and then I'll push it a little harder. Let's go for humbucker. The ISF incidentally is over on the British side there around about four o'clock. Now pushing the gain stage on the humbucker. A traditional sound for an amplifier. Let's turn the ISF to the US side and revert back to single coil. And what I want you to try and notice as well is if I'm using any volume control and listen to how beautiful it cleans up. Great sound. Let's stick the stompbox through channel two now just to see how well it handles that even if the amp channel is driving harder. So we'll start off again with the natural sound of the amp and I'll make it pretty obvious when I click on the pedal for you. Just a superb tone and you can do anything with that. We've got an LT drive pedal going through there now from Blackstar but if you put a boost through there. A wah. If you're using modulation, delays, reverbs you can put them through the loop which typically wouldn't be on a boutique amplifier of this type. For example the hand wired artisan range. It's just straight plug-in away you go but the fact that it's got all those modern features on here is really really very cool. Let's take a quick listen to the Artist 15 as well. Okay so now we're on to the Artist 15 which is a really really great option for somebody who's looking for a single combo, one by twelve. One thing I didn't really mention before actually is the fact that we have a master volume as well as the channel volume which is very very cool. So at the moment on here I have my channel one which is the first step of clean if you like. The volume's up full here and the master's set accordingly. So at the moment I'm on a random bat twelve o'clock on the master so it's a clean but it's a pushing clean. So on a single coil we've got this. Touch a reverb on there with the pedal LT drive. Beautiful sound man. Beautiful. On to the second channel now. Again we have our gain and volume EQ ISF. Let's see how this is rocking. The gain's up pretty much all the way here. I want to scream it sounds really really good. Let's maybe try more reverb so you can see the length of what you can go to with that. So we'll start on channel two back off the gain a little bit. We'll start with the reverb off so you can hear it dry because throughout this little demonstration on the webcast I've had a touch of reverb on just for ambience. This is dry. Halfway. This is the reverb full. So it's not an over exaggerated reverb or anything like that it's just really really useful. Super excited about these coming out and hitting stores seeing them on stages using them myself really can't wait. So I hope you've enjoyed this webcast this small introduction to the amplifiers. If you're watching later on YouTube. Hi there thanks for tuning in and watching this little session on the artist range. We hope you like them. We absolutely love them. Make sure you follow us on all the social media feeds. YouTube of course. Facebook. Instagram. And of course you can get us at inquiries at blackstarambs.com. I've been Steve Marks here in Northampton UK. Peace. Keep it loud. Introducing the black star artist. A new classic.