Review: Blackstar ID:Core Stereo 100

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review a very interesting digital combo, which is an evolution of the smaller ID Core range (which are up to 40w, while these 2 larger ones are 100 and 150w) and which have as main difference the fact that instead of having small full range speakers, these ones have 2x10 guitar speakers: the Blackstar ID:Core Stereo 100!

The choice of full range speakers or 10 inches speakers may set somebody off, since the standard for guitar is a 12 inches one, but this is a compromise solution to fit 2 speakers in a smaller, lightweight package (which is almost as small as the size of a regular 1x12 combo) and allowing the player to take full advantage of the "Super Wide Stereo" technology, which lets us playback an mp3 (via Aux) and practice along with it listening in stereo, while most of the practice combo amps, having just 1 speaker, lets you playback only in mono.
This speaker choice targets the amp towards practicing musicians which play more at home along with mp3s than for live musicians, since live there is usually more need of a 12 inch speaker to have all the low end thump, which is less strong in a 10 inch one, but at the same time with 100w there is enough power to stay on top of a live drumkit, also for rehearsals.

Besides the speaker, the amp offers 6 voicing controls, which range from clean to the most extreme hi-gain, a looper up to 30 seconds, 12 effects, a software suite for in-depth editing, usb recording, speaker emulated out and so on, making the ID:Core a Swiss army knife for the practicing musician, and the 100 and 150w versions have enough power to play live with no problems, all in a convenient 12.5kg package.

How does it sound? It sounds quite well! Blackstar Amps, especially for high gain, are some of the best sounding practicing amps, with musical mids and the proprietary ISF, Infinite shape feature, which is a knob that lets you pass from a US type of gain to a British one and everything in between.
The cleans are good and the distortions sounds almost "produced"; in this the amp the tone in general is less raw and "in your face" than a Boss Katana, but it sounds brighter (maybe also because of the speaker choice) and very pleasant, it just has a different grain and you'll have to compare them to find which one is more suited for you.

Thumbs up!

Specs taken from the website:

- 100W (SUPER WIDE STEREO 2x50W)

- 6 Blackstar voices

- Looper with 30 seconds record time and infinite overdubs

- Patented ISF control

- 12 vintage style effects including Octaver

- Store up to 36 sounds

- USB Audio

- FREE INSIDER software

- Stereo MP3/Line In

- Speaker Emulated Line Out

- Stereo Effects Loop

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Pre-count, Pre-roll and auto punch! What are they and why you should use them.

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about three functions, present in basically any DAW, which are fundamental when recording any instrument, and that sometimes gets overlooked: pre-count, pre-roll and the auto punch.

Pre-roll is something that comes from the analog world, it means that the track would start playing, making you hear what you have already recorded, and then the engineer would, by pressing a button, start recording you on the fly.
Today we can automate this function, and order to enable it in Studio One you need to press the O hotkey, or click on the pre-roll icon (the first arrow in the pic).
Then, by clicking on the wench icon (the second arrow in the pic), which brings us to the metronome setup menu, we can simply tick on or off the pre-roll and/enter the number of bars to play before starting recording. 
This way, once you will hit record, first it will make you listen to the previous 2 bars, so you can start already playing along with them, and then it will start recording automatically at the right point.

From that same menu you can activate also the Pre-count, which means that before playing or recording it will first play a set amount of metronome bars, to be ready with the right tempo before starting recording.
This function is used if you're starting your track from zero, so you don't have any part to play as pre-roll.

How does the computer know exactly, especially if it starts from 2 bars before, where to start recording and where to stop?
You need to select the area with the mouse, the recording will start and stop exactly within the selected part of the track.

Auto punch instead is another function that puts you in and out of record, as the track is playing back, meaning that you need to have the record button assigned to a hotkey (in Studio One is by default the NumPad * button), and as you play a track you can press the * key in real time to start recording, and press it again to stop recording, all without stopping the track from playback, which can be useful especially when tracking vocals, if you want to re-do just a word here and there without interrupting too much the flow.

I hope this was helpful!

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Review: Rivera Clubster 25 112

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to talk about a legendary combo produced by Rivera amps in 2009, of which the latest version is still today on sale: the Rivera Clubster 25 112!

Rivera Amplifiers comes from the mind of Paul Rivera, a technician which worked also for Fender before opening his own brand, and today Rivera amps offers a full lineup of tube amplifiers which are known for their uncompromised sound and build quality.

The Clubster serie has several versions, 25w, 40w, with a 10 inches speaker and a 12 one, and the one I'm reviewing today is the 25w, 12" one.
The Rivera Clubster is a 2 channels tube amp, with several push-pull knobs in the eq to shape it furthermore and a spring reverb, but the most surprising thing is the volume and headroom: thanks to its oversized transformer, even the 25w version is more than capable of staying well above a rock drumkit, both in rehearsals room and live, all in a compact combo format.
The amp features 2 preamp tubes and 2 6V6 power amp ones, and immediately after switching it on you can feel the tube tone, which is loud, mid rangey, in your face and full of harmonics. 
The clean channel is really clean and chimey, and it has quite a lot of headroom considering it's 25w (obviously if you need even more headroom you must switch to the 40w version), and the high gain one has a very credible tone: balanced, pleasant and that it sounds almost "mix ready".
The overdrive channel can easily deliver heavier tones for genres such as hard rock without the need of a booster; a booster is necessary if you need the type of tightness used in death or thrash metal, though.
This said, I have seen a band using it also to play Dream Theater style (without a booster), with a 7 strings, and the tone was very similar to the Mesa one used by Petrucci: mid rangey, creamy and with a very loud power-amp roar.

The version currently on sale is the Clubster Royale Recording, which features also a loadbox integrated and speaker emulated output, so that you can record also bypassing the speaker, among the other new features, but the original Clubster soul is still there.

Still today a great, uncompromise sounding amp! Thumbs up!

Specs taken from the website:

- Channel 1 controls: Volume, bass (pull switch for boost), middle, treble, master

- Channel 2 controls: Volume (pull switch for channel selection), treble (pull switch for bright), bass

- Common front-panel inputs and controls: 1/4″ High Gain input, 1/4″ footswitch input, reverb control, presence control, power on/off switch

- Rear-panel inputs and outputs: 1/4″ effects loop send, 1/4″ effects loop return, 1/4″ line output, 1/4″ 

- external speaker output

- Preamp tubes: Two 12AX7A

- Output tubes: Two 6V6GT

- Output power: 25 watts RMS into 8 ohms

- Speaker: 12” Celestion 70/80

- Footswitch functions: Channel switching, reverb on/off (footswitch is included)

- Reverb: Accutronics® 3-spring reverb

- Height: 19.25″ (w/feet)

- Width: 18.25″

- Depth: 12″

- Weight: 38 lbs

- Cabinet material: 5/8″-thick plywood

- Construction: Dadoed joints

- Covering: Black Tolex

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Pre fader listen vs post fader listen

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to check out an important concept which is part of a proper gain staging setup, a simple check that will save us from having unwanted distortion into our tracks, the pre fader listen!.

By default, all the DAWS are set on post fader metering, meaning that if we are moving the volume fader in one channel, the meter of that channel (and the stereo buss) will rise or reduce accordingly.

The problem is that if the volume fader has as consequence the rise of the volume until a track clips, we don't know whether that channel, that recorded track with all the plugins processing it, is really already in distortion (or if it's too low in volume) BEFORE moving the volume fader (in that case we will have to check out whether there is some plugin that is clipping the signal or if the actual track is clipping).

To solve this problem we can choose in the DAW options (basically in every DAW) pre fader listen (something that is present also in many physical mixers), which swaps the position of the volume fader and the meter in single tracks or in the whole mixer.

What does this mean practically? It means that the volume fader still does its job, raising and lowering the volume, but the meter will keep showing us, regardless of the volume we decided, how hot is the audio track before entering in the volume fader, and whether the signal is already in clip or not (sometimes for example it's already in clip because the track is passing through some plugin, like some Compressor which maybe has a little too much make up gain).

By verifying the input and output level of all tracks (and therefore of all plugins on each track) we can make sure no track is clipping, and this is essential to perform a proper gain staging, thus having a perfeclty clear song.

One final note: press only one PFL button at a time, otherwise the meter will show the combination of all the active channels and plugins (in the stereo buss) and you won't know which one is too high or too low.

I hope this was helpful!

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Review: Fender Mustang GTX50

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review a combo amp which came out in 2020, but that actually is (along with the LT50) the latest iteration of Fender's take on digital combos, with presets, amp simulators, effects etc all in the box, all at an affordable price: the Mustang GTX50.

The Mustang serie is the low price digital serie of amps produced by Fender and aimed to the beginners, and even if I don't remember the year the first amp of this serie was produced, I think it was 2010 max, I know several updated versions have been put in the market, and this GTX keeps on building on top of the original one.

In 2020 Fender proposed 2 versions of the Mustang: the LT ones, (25 and 50w), which cost around 100$ less than the GTX and offer a stripped down software with less editing possibilities and it's aimed to the beginner guitarists and the GTX one, which offers a full range of in-depth parameter editing, and many more presets and tools to carve your sound.

I had the chance of trying the GTX (unfortunately without using the app Fender TONE, which is new for this version and allows the player to edit the presets and download new ones from the cloud), and I must say I have been impressed by the amount of bells and whistles this small amp features: bluetooth, fx loop, lcd color screen, 200 presets, usb to turn the amp into an audio interface, aux, headphone out, wi-fi, Celestion speaker and so on, plus the design is quite cute.

How does it sound? Well, it depends on the genre you need: if you like the typical Fender cleans, which are ringing, chimey, with emphasis on the high frequencies, this amp is quite good in recreating them. Moving towards more crunch territories though, the amp starts showing its flaws, which makes it (and its previous iterations) more similar to the Line6 Spider: the distortions sound quite digital, meaning compressed, scooped, scratchy, and the higher the gain, the more the problem is noticeable.

The conclusion is that this is a good bang for the buck if you like clean tones or slightly overdriven, but if you're looking for high gain simulations, there are much better candidates around, for example the Boss Katana or the Blackstar ones, unless you are in for a long and deep tone editing session.

Thumbs down!

Specs taken from the website:

- New models include: Fender classics like the Blues Jr and Vibro King, as well as other amplifers including JC Clean and Silver Jubilee

- New effects include: Models of classic Overdrive, Fuzz, Delay and Pitch Shift effects

- Newly-designed stage-ready cabinet and cosmetics

- 12-inch Celestion® guitar speaker

- 200 onboard user presets that can be modified for any style of music

- All-new Fender TONE 3.0 for iOS and Android for deep editing, preset browsing from the Fender Tone community, preset back-up and restore, and more

- Upgraded seven-button footswitch (optional) features individual bank up and down functions and easy effects selection, as well as a tap tempo and 60-second looper

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Sidechain EQ: what it is and when to use it

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

This time we're going to use sidechain in a different way than the most common one, the sidechain compression that we have already covered in this article: we're going to see what happens when applying the sidechain to an equalization.

With the term "sidechain" we define an interdependence between a trigger event (for example a kick hit) and an effect (usually a compressor that lowers the volume of another track for few instants), for instance in a song in which there is a synth pad, every time a kick hits, a sidechain compressor could lower the pad volume creating an artistic "vacuum" effect on the synth, like in the min. 1.43 of the song "Follow me" by Muse.

The "ducking" effect (that's how it's called), it's a creative choice that's functional to the arrangement of the song, but there are other instances in which a mix engineer would simply need to carve a little bit of room and avoid frequency masking in a very dense mix (for example one that is very fast or with many layers) without producing an effect that would take the attention of the listener away from the arrangement.

In this case, more than a compressor that would affect the whole tone, it's better to use an equalizer or a multiband compressor, because in this case one could clear a little bit of space just in the exact area in which we want for example our kick drum to cut the mix more clearly, without touching anything else.

How do we do it? In the Studio One interface (but surely it's very similar also in all the other DAWs) we need to load the eq or the multiband compressor in the insert of the track we want to affect (usually synths or bass guitar, but it could be really anything) and click on the sidechain button on top (as in the picture in this article), then in the track that should trigger the effect (for example the kick track) we click on the "+" button next to "sends" and there we'll see a menu with all the effects with the sidechain function active.
From there is sufficient to choose the eq or multiband compressor we've loaded on the other track and every time there will be a sound in this "trigger track", the eq or multiband compressor will activate simultaneously in the other, and in this case it will lower the eq in the other track, in the area of our choice, which should be the same that we want to emphasize in our "trigger" track;
for example if the kick track we are using is covered by the bass in the low end, for example in the 100hz area, we can sidechain an eq that every time the kick hits, it will lower 2 or 3 db exactly in that area of the bass track.

This way the kick will be more prominent, but without us boosting it and without ruining the balance of the song.

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The bass dual track mixing technique

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to check our more in depth one of the techniques already explained in our more general "how to mix a good rock/metal bass" article, the most popular one: the dual track mixing technique.

This technique consists basically in having 2 tracks of the same bass take, they can be either the recording of a bass d.i. duplicated in 2 independent tracks, or 2 microphoned tracks, pointing to different parts of the cabinet (one needs to capture the high end and one the low end of the bass tone).

On the individual tracks, narrow down the eq of the low-end track by using a lo-pass filter from 500hz down (you can use also a hi-pass from 40hz up if you feel like you need to clean also some low end rumble), and on the high-end track use a low pass filter from 7khz down and a high pass from 500hz up.

Now that we have our 2 tracks nice and separated in terms of eq we can use any type of distortion we want in the high end track, for example an amp simulator (some also like to use very nasty metal amp sims for guitar to add grit to this track), and in the low-end track we should add a nice broadband compression to start making the low end stable, by reducing 2/3db of gain.

Once the 2 tracks are properly processed it's time to balance them in volume (it's likely that we will have to put the high end track quite lower than the low end one, because of its capacity of be more ear-piercing.

Now that the 2 tracks are well blended together is time to route them into a group track and load in this track an eq to sculpt the sound, if we need it (for example some like to cut a bit around the 300hz area to remove a bit of low-mids mud and to boost a bit around 920hz to add some nasal tone), then we can load a multiband compressor, with 2 bands that should be matching the frequency areas of the 2 tracks, so that we can shave off some other unwanted fluctuation in dynamics without changing the general tone, because if we would use the same compression settings for both tracks there's a chance that what sound good for one of the 2 tracks would have unwanted results for the other.
Bear in mind that the low end track already has a bit of compression, so we should keep it in mind when applying this second compression to the low end track (so let's be less aggressive with the gain reduction than we would if there was just one compressor), and that in the distorted track the gain as well acts a bit as compressor.

Finally we need to make the bass tone rock solid, stable on its railway in which it needs to stay in terms of volume and dynamics, and in order to do so we nee to load a limiter (or a maximizer) and push it until we reach 3db of gain reduction (click here for an article on how to keep the Bass stable with a Limiter).
Once you find the right setting to keep the bass track tamed and stable all the time, you can basically use the output ceiling of your limiter as volume knob, and in order to dial the right level it's important to connect it with the kick drum, as explained in this article.

I hope this was helpful!

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