 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 talking about cab choices inside the St. James plugin and working out which is the right cab for which situation. Now if you've got access to the St. James plugin you'll already know that inside cab rig there's a bunch of different options. So this is actually configured as a stereo cabinet setup but what I've done for today is I've muted one side so we're only actually going to talk about one speaker. These as default come pan left and right but I've center panned just this speaker here so we're only going to be talking about the left side today. You can use this information to mix and match cabinets to get your own sound but we're going to talk about which applications are best for which cabinet type. So we're going to go through the list and we're going to talk about the cabinet in grouping. So we've got one by 12 cabs, we have two by 12 cabs and we have four by 12 cabs. Now there are different uses for each of these types and it all comes down to what type of tone you're chasing or trying to record or what style of music you're looking to play. So we're going to start at the top with one by 12 cabs. So one by 12 cab is a much smaller sound than a bigger cab. So as the general rule the bigger the cab, the bigger the sound, the more it accentuates certain frequencies. A smaller cab such as a one by 12 it's going to have a real focused mid range and very prominent highs but not a lot of low end. So this is great if you're recording clean guitar or you want something to just really cut through and you want a really cutting guitar sound with lots of presence. If you've ever played a combo amp you're probably fairly familiar with the sound of a one by 12 cabinet because most combo amps are built into one by 12 cabinets so that's what we're going to use here. So there's a couple of different ones in the St James software. There's the HT Club, the Artist 15, the St James and also the Artisan. Now you can see there's a slight different description for each one of those which means they're all going to have a slightly different tone. The HT Club is a great one if you want a really punchy sound. The Artist 15 is a little bit more open sounding. That's really good for cleans. The St James is a really good all rounder. If you've played a St James amp you'll know how good those speakers sound in real life. And the Artisan is a really warm sounding one by 12. So if we just compare the sounds of some of these cleans. So I'm going to start on the HT Club 40. This is how it sounds clean. So there's a lot of presence here. It's a very bright sound, great for chimey cleans. If I go to the Artisan 30, you know for instance which is this cabinet. There's a very different mid range there. This is actually a little warmer sounding, not as pokey in the top end. The St James one by 12 is going to have a really good all round sound. So you can hear that one actually shaves off a little bit more low end than some of the other ones. The same is true if we go to an overdriven sound. So let's go with the EL34 St James on the overdrive channel. Here's how the St James cab sounds. It's got that very typical small boutique amp sound. I'm going to quickly jump back to the Artisan one by 12. Now what you do get with different one by 12 cabinets is because there's only a single speaker, you're actually pushing that one speaker much harder, which means you get a little bit less speaker efficiency out of it, which means you actually get to that edge of breakup and beyond much sooner. So the Artisan 15 one by 12 cabinet is going to break up much lower than something like the St James which is perhaps voiced a little bit louder, especially if you then look at the Artisan 4 by 12. The one by 12 is going to break up much sooner than the 4 by 12. The HT club one by 12 again, like I said, is a very punchy sound. And the only one we haven't looked at is the Artist 15, which is this one. Now even just in those four one by 12s, there's a huge tonal variation. The Artist and the Artisan ones have a little bit more of that kind of mid-pushed sound, so a little bit more British voiced. The St James and the HT club are a little bit more scooped sounding. So like the St James, for instance, doesn't have as much mid-range as the Artist 15 cab. That's more of a real kind of twangy American sound than if I just go back to the Artist 15. This is much more prominent in the mid-range. So it's actually quite a bigger sound. Now where one by 12s do fall a little bit short is when we start playing with higher gain. So they can do it, but this is not really where they're at their most happy. Now that's a great guitar tone, but what that lacks is the depth and body of a bigger speaker cabinet. Same for the HT club 40, it's great with higher gain but it's very pokey. Now let's take a quick look at the St James one by 12. Again, great sounds. That would be a really good high gain sound if you put that in a mix. It doesn't have enough low end sound for you to use that as a high gain tone on its own, but you could use that paired with other things, the Artist 15 one by 12. That's a much bigger sounding cabinet straight away. Now the next thing is a two by 12. So the advantage to a two by 12 in the real world is that it's louder than one by 12, but easier to transport than a four by 12. And it also has a bit more mid-range push than a one by 12, but a little bit more low end. So if you don't want the huge sound of a four by 12, but you want a bit more low end punch, the two by 12 is the way to go. Now in the St James plugin, we have the Artisan 32 by 12 and the St James 2 by 12. Now both of these are going to give very different sounds. The St James again is going to be slightly more American, more of the pronounced high end, less mids. The Artisan is going to have more of that mid pushed British vibe. So let's start with the St James and I'm going to go back to the clean tone. This is how the two by 12 sounds. Now a two by 12 is a very balanced cabinet. It doesn't have too much or too little of anything. The two by 12 is actually my favorite cabinet size for gigging especially. I just love the sound of a two by 12 personally. The Artisan 2 by 12 is going to have a much warmer sound. Now you can hear from those two by 12s that they've got a lot more low end. There's much more depth and warmth in the lower end. If I go over to a crunchy tone and I do the same thing, we're going to have similar sort of boutique crunches as we did with the one by 12s but there's going to be again that additional body and mid focus to them. So that's a really nice sound. I like the sound of an overdriven two by 12. The Artisan 30 has got a great mid push to it. The St James 2 by 12 is going to be brighter and more open sounding, very chimey. Now we're going to compare the high gain sounds. So again a two by 12 is better for high gain than a one by 12. So if you are looking to play high gain styles of music, you're probably going to want to start with a two by 12 as your first kind of point of call. So here's how the St James 2 by 12 handles high gain. So that is a much better starting point for high gain styles of music because again we have that mid focus but we have that low end that the one by 12 is missing. The Artisan 32 by 12 also handles high gain quite well but with a bit more mid warm. So the Artisan 30 feels a little bit more boutique with the high gains but it still works great. Now what you could do is when you actually use both sides of cabaret you can blend these together to get some interesting results as well. And now finally we're going to look at the four by 12s. Now a four by 12 is where you would go when you want a big bold sound. The four by 12 has more of everything. So more volume for a gigging musician. This is especially useful. More projection so when you're recording you probably can get away with putting the mic a little bit further away. Capture a bigger sound. More lows, more mids but not as many highs because the lows of a four by 12 kind of overtake some of the higher frequencies. So with a four by 12 you get a real big fat sound. And this is where it works especially well with high gain styles. Now we've got three different cabs to choose from here. We've got the studio one four by 12 angled. We have the artisan four by 12 angled and the series one pro straight cabinet, the base cab. There's a long standing debate between guitar players as to the difference between angled and straight cabinets. Many guitar players prefer straight cabinets for recording because straight cabinets have a little bit more low end to them, a bit more push in that region. So they're great for recording high gain styles of music. Angled cabs are perfect for gigging because of the angled speakers. You get a little bit of a wider spread and a bit more mid-range projection. So there will be some slight tonal differences between the series one angled and the series one straight as well. So I'm going to start with the angled and I'm going to start clean. So four by 12 like I said is going to be a bigger sound. The highs aren't going to be as sparkly. There's going to be a much more focused rounded sound from this. Then when we go to the artisan four by 12 again that's going to completely shift the sound into the artisan vibe. And finally the four by 12 straight cab and this is where you can hear the difference between the angled and the straight. Now they give a real balanced sound so if you're playing clean four by 12 is a great balanced sound. If you want a really sparkly clean sound like I said the one by 12s or the two by 12s are where you're going to be a little bit happier. Now where a four by 12 really comes alive so we start putting some crunch into this. So I'm going to go back to the angled cab now and go on to the crunch voicing. Now you can hear that's much bigger sounding. Now let's go to the artisan four by 12 and finally the straight cab. Four by 12 is really coming alive when you put some overdrive into them. You can really hear that low end bloom. Now I'm going to go back to the angled four by 12 and go to a higher gain sound. Now that really to me is the epitome of where four by 12 works great for recording is higher gain stuff. That's a real focused sound great for capturing those low end chunky notes. Now I'm only in standard tuning as well so if you're drop tuned this is really going to work well. Now the artisan four by 12 works great for high gain because it's got such a focused mid-range. This would be a great high gain recording cabinet. That's a great sound for high gain recording and then we have the four by 12 straight cab. So there are some differences between the three main cabinet types and why and how you would choose each one for your own purposes. Now in summary one by 12 cabinets have less lows, bit more mid-range and more top end. Great for focused tones so if you want something that's really going to cut through a mix one by 12 is fantastic. Also great for sparkly cleans. The four by 12 and the other extreme end of the spectrum has more lows and a bit more of that low mid. Great for high gain and rock sounds. Works great for cleans but the cleans are a lot warmer and then right up the middle you've got two by 12 which are the most balanced of the two. They've got a real good even spectrum from low to high so they're a bit of an all-rounder cab. If you can only pick one cab for a purpose then I would go with the two by 12 but you can hear from this video each of the cab types has their own application and their own use. Let me know down below in the comments what your favorite cab type is and why you chose that cab and if there's anything else you'd like to see us do with the St. James plug-in let us know as well down below in the comments. 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 head over to musicteacher.com check out their network of great teachers all around the UK waiting to help you guys out. Thank you so much for watching as always I'll see you very soon.