How many guitars, pedals, and amps do you need? Enough to make you happy. But window shopping alone has its own benefits.
I just got back from the NAMM show, and I am suppressing the nervous twitch of desire. My eyes and ears were flooded with all kinds of great gear, from cutting edge software plugins to microphones to—my favorites—pedals, amps, and guitars. With so much new gear around, G.A.S. was so abundant you could almost smell it hanging over the show floor. (Sorry, I could not resist.)
As you all know, I’m talking about Gear Acquisition Syndrome, the disease for which there is no cure. I have 15 guitars—17, if you count a cigar box and a diddley bow—that cover the sonic waterfront for me and then some. So why would I want more? My tube and solid-state amps are carefully curated so I can recreate all the classic tones I love, and with my quirky playing approach and equally carefully assembled pedalboard, I can put my own spin on every one of them.
And yet … I return with a pocketful of maybes. Maybe that new semi-hollow with the sleek neck and coil-splitting would get me another tone I can’t quite access now? Maybe that pedal would make it easier to accommodate pitch shifting while I solo? Maybe it’s time to add a bona fide high-gain amp, or dive into modeling?
I used to think these impulses were unhealthy. Especially when I was a touring indie musician and had no money to spend on gear. (One of musical life’s great ironies is that club-level working musicians often earn so little that they can’t afford to increase or upgrade the tools of their craft.) But I’ve changed my mind, thanks to my dog.
“You should never pick up interesting things with your mouth.”
Dolly, who is going on 17, is slow … or perhaps methodical … when we go on walks. But every inch of the way she is sniffing, her ears are up, and she stops to spend time looking at and smelling anything that captures her interest, even for a moment. That’s a great way to spend NAMM and to examine gear, with senses and imagination open, considering the potential of everything for your music, prepared to evaluate impulses without prejudice. (But, unlike Dolly, you should never pick up interesting things with your mouth.)
Considering a piece of gear is not the same as buying it, or I’d be broke. And evaluating these flirtations can lead to something good. Let’s say you’re smitten with a brand-new $250 modulation pedal. But after careful consideration and inspection, you realize you can get a similar sound with the chorus or vibrato you already own, and a delay or reverb pedal. The tempting new gear has led you down a path of finding a new, purposeful sound in your current gear. Same with a drive pedal. It’s fresh, it’s raw, it’s low and singing—and maybe with a bit of compression it isn’t very far from the sound you can get with your current overdrive if you just roll back the tone controls on your 6-string. And what about that semi-hollow? Maybe what I really need is a 10-band EQ pedal so I can approximate semi-hollow and hollowbody tones on all my guitars at whim, which would certainly inject a different voice into the solos or choruses of songs in my repertoire. Sometimes looking at new gear reminds us of the full range of our current musical real estate holdings. And that’s great. It’s easy to get in a rut and overlook the potential of gear you already own. (Parallel question: How many of you really make full use of the tone and volume controls on your instruments? I find this to be an oddly neglected zone of exploration, even this many years beyond Eric Clapton’s unfortunately dubbed “woman tone.”)
That said, there’s also not a damn thing wrong with buying some new gear. In fact, it’s great. Guitars, pedals, amps, microphones, plugins, and even accessories seem to get better all the time, which means we probably all have some room for upgrades if we’re able to make them. Same with the tones produced by modern emulations of vintage gear, which ideally get more on the nose with every iteration, while adding improvements to tonality and performance. In terms of consistency and playability, today’s well-made guitars are perhaps the finest ever built, in some cases outperforming the templates that inspired them at much lower cost. And, as the saying goes, every guitar—or pedal, or amp—has new songs inside of it, waiting to be discovered.
Hopefully you’ve gorged on the videos and reports from the NAMM floor that we’ve shared at premierguitar.com with you this month. There was a lot to see, hear, and smell. Well, maybe not smell, but I think you know what I mean. Never be afraid to chase gear temptation, because it can often lead you to interesting places.
Plexi inspiration makes this tiny 50-watt amp a clean-to-crunchy overachiever.
RatingsPros:Excellent high and high-mid detail and note definition in low- to mid-gain settings. Crazy light. Super-small footprint. Intuitive controls. Cons: High-gain tones can be sizzly. Still needs a nice cabinet or cabinet emulation to extract the best sounds. Street: $239 Hughes & Kettner Spirit Nano—Spirit of Vintage hughes-and-kettner.com | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
If you’re an open-minded player, it’s hard to not appreciate micro amps like the 50-watt Hughes & Kettner Spirit Nano—Spirit of Vintage. Some old-school dogmatists scoff at these light, compact, solid-state wonders. But while they don’t deliver all the depth and nuance of the best tube amps, they are capable of great sounds, and an appealing, affordable, and practical alternative for apartment dwellers, city folk, or musicians for whom guitar is a single ingredient in a wider musical expression.
The Spirit of Vintage is part of H&K’s Nano series, which also includes the higher-gain Spirit of Rock and the even more aggressive Spirit of Metal. But after spending time with the plexi-inspired Spirit of Vintage, it’s easy to hear how its wide range of clean-to-filthy sounds could make it the most widely appealing amp of the bunch—particularly at just $239.
Bask in the Glow
H&K is tight lipped about the makeup of the Tone Spirit Generator—the visibly glowing, 20-pin, sealed PCB that is home to the amp’s primary tone-shaping components. But essentially it recreates the topology of a tube amp with solid-state circuitry. That’s not a new idea, but H&K claims to have more effectively replicated the liquid, irregular, give-and-take qualities that make tube amps appealing.
The control set, which consists of master output, tone, gain and a “sagging” knob, is intuitive. The sagging control is perhaps the most beguiling of the bunch. It’s designed to emulate the saturation, compression, and dynamic qualities of tubes at their limit. It accomplishes that to an extent, though it also seems to work a little like a presence control, adding high-mid content as you go. I tended to use it judiciously to let the amp’s appealing high-end breathe a little more readily.
The Spirit of Sass
The Spirit of Vintage impresses most in near-clean and mid-gain settings. The former is a ticket to power-pop and roots-rock heaven, with a Fender bridge-position single-coil in the mix. Here the amp sounds sassy, lively, and exciting. High strings and notes ring with detail and percolate with high harmonics that can be less pronounced in compressed tube amps. If there’s a setting on the H&K that might make you indifferent to the tube versus solid-state question, this is certainly one of them. The mid-gain output is similarly alive. And here again, the amp’s capacity for detailed highs and high-mids really shines.
If there is a shortcoming in the Spirit of Vintage’s performance envelope—and a most-perceptible difference between it and vintage tube amps—it’s that the H&K can sound sizzly at the highest gain and sagging settings. These spikes in the high-mids and high-end can add energy to lead runs, but they tend to render chords pretty messy. Heavy fuzz, like the Sovtek Big Muff used for this evaluation, can also sound a little less silky at high gain settings. That’s hardly surprising coming from a $239 amp that you can hide in a winter coat pocket, but it is surely not a deal breaker.
The Verdict
For such a little amp, the Spirit of Vintage manages to sound both tough and quite cultivated. It can be the amplifier foundation for a small home or apartment studio. You can use it to record with an interface and the appropriate cabinet emulation tools. And with the right cabinet, it’s powerful enough to gig with just about anyone.
The issue of a cabinet, however, is a real consideration that can blunt your enthusiasm for the very nice $239 price—largely because you’ll want one (or a good cabinet emulation) to get the very best sounds out of it. H&K’s own TM 110 is the least expensive of the company’s cabinet options, which, at $349, is 100 bucks more than the head itself. And while there are less expensive options from competitors, it would be a shame to waste the Spirit of Vintage’s virtues on a cheap speaker. What’s undeniable about the Spirit of Vintage is its versatility. It sounds superb in many common applications. And in some settings and arrangements, its liveliness and clarity may, in fact, make it a preferable option to a tube amp.
Be sure to check out our First Look demo of the full range of Hughes & Kettner's Nano—Rock, Metal, and Vintage:
Boss packs heavy-duty DSP horsepower into a multi-effects processor built for busy pedalboards.
RatingsPros:A mind-boggling selection of great-sounding effects and amp sims. Versatile connectivity. Well-engineered and -executed, user-friendly design. Solid value. Cons: Amp simulations could be more realistic. Street: $699 Boss GT-1000CORE boss.info/us | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
Boss requires no introduction among guitar pedal nuts. But while the company has made countless classic compact stompboxes since the late '70s, their multi-effects units have become stage staples in their own right. While it is much more than a simple multi-effects pedal (it also features amp simulations and deep programmability), the GT-1000CORE is the newest addition to that branch of Boss' lineage. And although the company likes to emphasize the CORE's relatively small size and ease of integration with pedalboards, it's hard not to be struck by its deep capabilities.
The GT-1000CORE has the processing power of its big brother, the GT-1000, but fewer onboard functions and no built-in expression pedal. Yet there are 140 unique amp and effects types available as well as up to 24 simultaneous effect blocks—all rendered via 96 kHz/32-bit processing and AD/DA conversion. It also has 250 user and 250 preset memory slots. Needless to say, there won't be room here to discuss every sound, editing capability, and programming function at length, but Boss offers excellent online and user-manual resources to help you navigate this substantive unit.
Selection Committee
The user interface includes five push–button/rotary parameter editing knobs, one selector knob, one master output knob, three stomp switches, and six pushbuttons that take care of additional menu, programming, and navigation functions, which are monitored via a 1.75" x 4.35" LCD control screen.
In theory, almost everything can be programmed from the GT-1000CORE itself, but, as with most such high-functioning processors, it can be easier—and instructive—to edit with your Mac or PC via USB and using Boss' user-friendly Tone Studio editing software.
The CORE has stereo ins and outs (the left output doubles as a stereo headphone out), along with connections for several expression and external control pedals, two sets of loop sends and returns for use with other pedals, amps, or processors, and MIDI connectivity. Since it's usable either as a multi-effects processor or as an effect-and-amp simulator, the GT-1000CORE can be configured for output into a traditional guitar amp or full range flat response rig (with or without speaker/cab-sim IRs engaged). The amp simulations use Boss' new AIRD technology, an impulse-response method that evolved from the Tube Logic system in Boss' well-regarded Katana amps. The unit also works great going direct to a DAW for recording and re-amping. And … phew, we haven't even got to the sounds.
Sounding Off
Tested using several guitars and a variety of connection methods to traditional guitar amps and studio monitors, the GT-1000CORE unleashed a mind-boggling selection of great-sounding effects and realistic amp simulations that can be mixed and matched in what feels like infinite ways. As you might expect from Boss, the effects are the real stars of the show, and many of them that I selected from the very impressive range of Boss favorites and other pedals were practically indistinguishable from their originals.
Boss packed plenty of creative presets into the unit, so it's easy to get up and running—and have a lot of fun in the process—without touching a control apart from the selector. Tweaking and saving your own presets is easy enough, though, and you can create, re-shuffle, and manipulate ridiculously complex signal chains that would be tricky to replicate in physical form.
Amid all this virtual stompbox richness, the amp simulations are a nice bonus. They sound good and pretty consistently replicate the experience of hooking up to the Katana platform. That said, I generally experienced a more satisfying “in the room" sound and playing feel by disabling the AIRD and running the GT-1000CORE as an effects unit into traditional tube amps.
The Verdict
The GT-1000CORE is effectively the stompbox collection of a Boss fanatic's dream—all packed into one very compact, practical, and user-friendly box, with a ton of bonus features for flexible connectivity, editing, studio-quality processing, recording, and performance. It's quite an achievement for the price and size. Players obsessed with the most realistic, responsive amp tones and hyper-realistic IRs may need to consider more expensive options. But for a fly rig, or home recording, the GT-1000CORE offers a whole lot of value.
Watch our First Look demo of the Boss GT-1000CORE: