 Hi, I'm Ian from Blackstone Amplification, I'm the Managing Director and one of the founders along with Paul. I'm Paul Heyhove, Brand Director and Co-Founder. So St James is our hot new product line and we wanted a name that encompassed the personality and what it was all about and the conversation actually happened at Von Elrod's Beer and Sausage Emporium in Nashville and we were talking about some of the cool areas in Northampton UK where we're based and the St James area of Northamptons where our rugby team comes from which is a really, it's the only really successful sporting team we have in Northampton, I probably shouldn't say that. So it's that areas where the rugby ground is, there's also a really huge lift test tower which is like the most iconic building in Northampton. So it felt like a really natural thing and of course within our industry there's tons and tons of really cool Jameses and gyms and jimmies, in fact we worked for one of the most famous gyms in our industry, Jim Marshall. So it was again, it's part of Ian and I's personal history as well as a really cool area of Northamptonshire, not to mention Jimi Hendrix, Jimi Page, Ad Infinite. It's a rock and roll, cool name. So there's an awful lot of innovation in this product, so it's been designed really from the ground up and hence it's been a really long project and we've had making the product lightweight, had a lot of challenges and things, we've done things I've never been done before, we've got a patent around that product, around the product which encapsulates the lightweight but also a lot of the stuff to do with Calbrigg and the way that we have implemented the dummy load. So I'd say it's taken probably over between two and a half and three years which is possibly the longest project we've ever done and a lot of it's been to do with the fine-tuning towards the end as well because we wanted the product to be absolutely perfect. For us we see this as a game-changing product that is going to make people's lives a lot easier, having that lightweight aspect to the product is so important. It's something that we've been asked for time and time again so yeah it's because there's so much new in it every time we do something new that's when it takes longer and because there's more new stuff in it that's why it took so long to develop because I think it's interesting that there were two things that happened which make this product so great and such a step forward for us. One side was the sort of form factor and the light weightness and all the great you know sort of connectivity we've got in there. The other bit was the sonic journey. The sonic journey was very very different than what we'd done before. We really went back in many ways to I wouldn't say back to drawing board the schematics the circuits are very in some ways have a lot of similarity right back to series one but we went into really forensic detail in terms of the references that we'd identified that we wanted to put into these the sonic references that we wanted to put into the two amps. We went into an extreme amount of detail so we went back to identifying some really excellent sonic references. Blackstar references also some vintage valve amps from other manufacturers the obvious ones but the units that we got were really special and there were things about them that we really liked and then the so we so we wanted the EL34 version to be the ultimate pedal platform really and have everything you'd want from a clean or crunch amp so that involved us looking at a lot of American amps look a lot of British amps and also what we'd done before but the the secret was putting that all into one package that was cohesive because getting UK thing and the US thing going and to make it work all together as a package was that was the the real journey that we went on to and then on the 6L6 version we wanted that really beautiful sort of American clean sound but we wanted a high gain 6L6 overdrive but we wanted to go beyond probably what we'd done before you know since series one those probably designed nearly 15 years ago things have moved on somewhat so there's a little bit more of an aggressive edge to them they're very very dynamic react very well to to the plane of touch they do all the sort of detune stuff very well even though it's a 50 watt amp it holds together extremely well but again it was how do you get the most pristine American clean sound in the same amp as a really you know high gain like ultimately kick ass distortion sound and put it all together so that was where the that was where the real challenge was and that's where you know how the journey was different but it's brilliant for us because we don't want to do the same thing over and over and again and we are it's also an amazing thing that we get to the end of this journey and we say ah we've done it but of course we've never done it completely because next time there's always more we can do so we always learn and obviously the main thing that we've used all the way through is the the AB box so you know we've been we've been doing an awful lot of critical listening against our references we're talking hundreds of hours hundreds and hundreds of hours sometimes about to go away and come back to it because you know you listen to something for an extended period then you can you're hearing can after an hour or two you can start to become a little bit difficult to discern the direction so I've done a lot of that and reviewed lots of different guitar players as well so yes that's that's what we were trying to do ultimate pedal platform and get that really amazing clean sound with the high gain stuff in the same amp yeah so we felt that to be able to deliver the whole thing from that pedals platform right through to the high gain stuff really we needed to models because it's a fact we could maybe put that all these things to one amp it would have made the product too complicated something that we really wanted from St. James was really real simplicity plug-in and play you can find your sound so that was a that was a really important thing and we didn't want to compromise you know when we guitarists sometimes something we found is a guitarist who want a pedals platform they want low gain they want crunch the fact that it has a high gain channel on it actually puts them off sometimes we're offering them more than they want and more than they need so we didn't we were very very careful about targeting the products to the use case and not giving people stuff that they didn't necessarily want we wanted to keep it simple but really really focus no compromise pristine delivery of the sonic references that we're after I think so yeah that's that's why there's two amps effectively is that you know to keep it simple for people yeah so with St. James we knew these were gonna be really special amp something that gives people something completely new completely unique there's never been an amp like these and it was really important to us that the looks reflected every aspect of that so we spent as many hours on the look and feel of these houses we did on the sound in a many ways and the lit up logo the illuminated logo harks back the font and styling is to the very first products we did the artisan so the font and styling goes right back to our earliest streets in terms of that boutique hand-wired heritage we kept everything really super simple amazing tone but approachable for any kind of guitarist you can just walk up and dial into it straight away without any fear even though in some ways they've some of the most technically advanced valve arms ever produced but for a user you would never know that you just walk up and it's as familiar as any historic valve you've ever seen I think it's interesting that again I think there was kind of two parts of the journey I think it's fair to say so there was the technology involved with making the product lightweight so that was like initially that was the goal and I think this the way that the really the journey developed was that as we went forward the the cab rig part and the integrated inductive load kind of came along as part almost like it was at first a secondary feature I'd say yeah but actually that's become as fundamental to the concept of St. James as the fact it's lightweight in fact the way that we talk about this product when we when we talk about it to somebody's never heard about it before we describe everything it does which is a lot you know is the it is the most advanced valve amp in the world with all the digital stuff that's in there that's integrated completely sort of off the main valve circuit path so it's a very very pure analog circuit path but you got all this digital stuff as well but we talk about all the great features all the way that it delivers the way it sounds and then only at the end now we say hey you know what and it really doesn't weigh very much you know in a way the main feature becomes like the icing on the cake because it's a it's the best amp we've ever done anyway without compromise I mean it was something as he said at the start it was a these gonna be the lightest 50 watt valve amps in the world but when we started showing them to artists and getting guitarists to plug in and play them it was clear the first thing like wow these look amazing they plug in wow these sound amazing it's like this is really incredible and then at the end he's got yeah pick it up and then it kind of blows their mind that final piece of the puzzle so it kind of the whole concept really in terms of the focus turned around for us it's all about all about the sound and the look and what they do and how they solve problems for guitarists really and the nice thing is you can actually pick it up in one hand and walk off with it so that yeah the the use of an inductive load means that when the valve power amp is driving current into that load the way the valves and the output transformer reacts with the load forms very very important part of the the tone generation like the frequency response but also the dynamic feel so if you only use a resistor then you don't have any of that frequency dependent feel and frequency response so you can model that digitally but what we've done is we've done a really accurate low voltage low power inductive load in resistors and inductors and capacitors built into the amplifier which means that when you drive the current into that load in silent record mode you get all the feel and all the frequency response attributes you would get with a cab in reality so it isn't a model within the amp you've got an actual reactive load which very very accurately represents what you'd have with a loudspeaker very cool so you can drive the power stage at all the stages of the vows flat out without having to have a load on or a very low yeah yeah yeah the really clever thing that Paul Stevens did with this was we realized that to implement inductive load at 50 watts is going to be big it's going to generate a lot of heat and it's gonna be heavy not in keeping with the concept of St. James so what Paul did we already have amazing power reduction on this amp right down from 50 watts to 2 watts with an intermediate sort of sag feature so what it does what the amp does and this is the bit that we're part of the main part of the patent is that when you go into standby mode for silent recording the power amp automatically switches itself down to 2 watts which is the lower power mode which means that you don't need a large inductive load you need us we can use a much smaller inductive load the actual response is exactly the same so there's no compromise there but it just means that we can use a smaller one and it means that there's not so much heat and it's much lighter and then that's what happens is as I think Paul mentioned earlier you can drive the power amp full output and that and that's where the output for cab rig is taken so not only do you get the preamp response but you also get the most important the Shangri-La you get the valve power amp response as well super cool yeah I think that's the amazing thing about the product is that there's so many different use cases for how this this amp can be used so for instance for live work you could use users as standard amp into the lightweight cab sounds absolutely awesome mic it up exactly what rehearsals don't need to mic it up it's way loud enough to play with a drummer I tend to use it into what's when I use it because it's in a in a small rehearsal environment that's actually enough club gig you could use it just as back back line but the really cool thing is that you could also use it for silent stage applications you just you know click in standby then go directly out of front of house you can use a combination of cabs as well so you can have you know you have a combination of four by 12 or one by 12 different mic up you know mic configurations all that silent front of house the other thing as well you use pedals as well yeah which I think is a little bit different days than say the other sort of digital high-end floor mounted devices you know he leads campers that sort of stuff with this you can get your pedal board that you love and that's the basis of your live sound you turn up with that and you turn out especially the 34 head that's all you need you can go direct to front of head house but you've got your pedal board set up as well which I think is kind of unique as a as a concept really really portable gives you the ultimate flexibility I think probably as well I bet the ultimate sound I would have thought is where you might be cab up and use cab rig live I think that is the true pro setup because then you give the sound man the the flexibility of you know a direct signal but also on stage you can have a little bit of live out of a cab which guitarist kind of like and the really nice thing as well as you got the USB out so if that's your sound that you're using live and on a silent stage when you're at home or in the studio and recording into a door that's exactly the sound that you're getting as well so you get that continuity of you don't have the compromise anymore well that's my live sound that's my studio sound it's the same kit that you can use in both applications is really cool it's really fun for rehearsals as well because you could you can read if you got the whole band using this stuff that you can have a totally site effectively a silent rehearsal and you record everything you know a very very high quality and which is a lot better than back in the day where I used to have a little tape recorder in the corner the rehearsal room you can actually get pretty good results just recording live with it now the way that we made the amp live there's several things but the main function is the replacing the traditional mains transformer which are incredibly heavy with an SNPS switch mode power supply which those sort of designs are using pretty much all consumer electronics so whether it's your laptop or your TV they're in those but you can't buy something off the shelf that would work for a valve amp so that's you know probably a couple of years it took a design completely bespoke from scratch an SNPS that works and gives us the exact same dynamic feel as a traditional you know I in core mains transformer so the power supply is not in the signal path yeah the power supply is what turns the valves on and what happens in a normal valve amp is that as you draw current then the power rails will what we call sag so the more current you draw effectively the less power you have because the voltage drops through the through the power supply and that's why Paul designed the sag feature as well so the sag feature allows you to get actually it's almost accentuated that valve sag feel it gives you much softer sort of what can I say more sort of saggy hence the name feel so so the SNPS with the with the sag exactly captures what you'd have from a traditional valve from a traditional mains transformer design and the other extra benefit is the fact that you can plug it in anywhere in the world so the fact that it is lightweight you can take it for a fly geek take it wherever anywhere in the world and you can plug it in you don't need a variac don't need to any special current concerns yeah I think the most important thing is that there's nothing to be scared of with SNPS so it's not like we've digitized the amp all the SNPS is doing is providing the power supply voltages for the valves it's not in the signal path at all so it has all the advantages of being lightweight universal passplike take it anywhere helps us with noise it keeps the noise down because you haven't got the mains home so it has those upsides the downside are none because actually it is just better so I think in in the future we may use this in more designs because it just makes a lot of sense I think the reason why we haven't done it is because it's bloody difficult and it's taken us two years to do it sometimes the reason why people don't do stuff is because it's difficult so we took the time and it's worked extremely well so we're really pleased to be able to offer that as a feature see on the on both the amps actually what we do with the with the tone stack is really interesting so we've got what's called dual gang pots which is like there's two resistive tracks sat behind each other and their different set of values depending on which channel you're on so we switch between two completely different tone stats on the EL 34 one is a kind of a traditionally more of a us tone stack and the other is a more of a traditional uk tone stack but not only do we change effectively the values and the response of the tone stack we also completely change its position in the preamp circuit as well so on the on the us side it's kind of pre the game and on the uk side it's post the game which is kind of you know that's that's how those things are done but it just means you get that extra level of flexibility and authenticity to the sound but that's not all what we also do when we change the channels which we change the output damping so we change the feedback in the paramp at the same time and this is one of those areas where we've gone into loads and loads of detail and listened so we change not only the output damping but we also change the presence and resonance circuits as well so you're getting kind of a different resonant bottom end and that sort of fizzy top end as well so there's a bit there's an awful lot of detail that goes on with the 34 so i think people are going to be really surprised when they listen to the l 34 it's surprising in a good way because on the us side you've got a very very pristine sounding kind of us clean sound and that's because it's the tone stack the position it is and we've really adjusted the damping in a way to get something that you might expect to have a 6L6 amp in a way and then the third on the second channel we actually take the feedback off the paramp so it's actually got quite a chiming sort of class A sound to the second channel so you've got sort of a on the 34 what you what you're going to expect to hear is the best us sound clean sound very pristine clean sound you've ever heard and then this really chiming sort of class A is kind of a hybrid between i'd say between a Marshall and a Vox done in a black star way you could say because it has all that kind of openness of and bell light top end you know with the class A sort of sound but then it's got a bit more of a of a grind of a Marshall vintage old Marshall as well so that's what people it's not exactly what you'd expect from a 34 but for pedals and for that sort of light crunchy sound it's absolutely perfect and something new that's really really exciting in terms like in terms of the concept I think in terms of there was a lightweight aspect there was all this other great stuff but for us it was about simplicity you know we kept going back to that simplicity simplicity simplicity guitarist wants to just go up to product and understand it and we spent a lot of time on the whiteboard taking features off because you know and that's that's hard for us so for instance you'll you'll notice that on these products there is an ISF and that's a tough decision for me Paul because we love that feature and it's really really great for guitars but in this instance we want people just to be able to approach the product and really get their tone straight away and I think that's super important these are the the simplest most flexible amps we've ever made so in short I really hope do you go out and check out our new St James amps and all I'd ask you to do is approach it with an open mind and you use these and not these when you're approaching these amps and I know they look super sexy and it's tempting just to go wow fuck they look great I want to check it out but it's all about sound it's all about creating the tools for yourself and it's true for St James but it's true for everything that we do at Blackstar yeah we're really excited and you know we're confident that these amps are going to take things forward people are going to find new tones a new way to express themselves which is what we are really passionate about let's keep moving things forward and make some new creative stuff happen