This New Practice Amp is so Stunning, You'll Want to Display it in Your Living Room
Positive Grid's new Spark Pearl – a limited version of their best-selling smart amplifier – delivers both brilliant looks and tones
Picture this. You've just come home from a long day at work. It's time to kick back, plug in, and let off some steam while playing your guitar.
How do you typically play for fun while at home? Lug out your half stack? Grab that tin-y sounding practice amp from the closet that you purchased 20 years ago?
With Spark Pearl, there's a way to practice, jam and record in style – right there in your living room – and sound great while doing it with access to an endless well of inspiring tones. Positive Grid's brilliantly limited version of one of the industry's most popular desktop amplifiers, Spark Pearl offers all of the same crowd-pleasing smart features of the original amp, like Smart Jam, Auto Chords, and access to over 10,000 tones.
Plus, with its snowy white tolex, gold piping and contrast-stitched custom strap, you'll proudly display it in your living room or home studio. (I mean, just look at that thing!) Spark Pearl is a Bluetooth speaker too, perfect for streaming your favorite tunes to liven up any social gathering.
On its own, Spark Pearl offers seven high-quality amp settings to choose from, including hi-gain, clean and crunch. These sounds can be customized further with bass, mid and treble tone stack controls, plus mod, delay and reverb effects. Users can also save up to four tones directly to the amp for later use.
However, Spark Pearl's inspiring tone creation capabilities go way beyond the amp itself. With the companion Spark app, players can access the same tone engine that put the original Spark on the map. Here, guitarists can craft tones virtually using 30 tube amps and 40 effects powered by Positive Grid's BIAS technology, for perfecting that signature tone of their favorite player or discovering a unique sound of their own. They can also share their sounds using Positive Grid's online ToneCloud, which is home to over 10,000 tones created by famous guitarists, session players, engineers and producers from around the world.
Most pieces of guitar gear are designed with one person in mind -- the guitarist. As a result, thousands of amps and pedals have suffered the fate of being banished to basements, home offices and other designated practice areas. With a compact design highlighted by custom white tolex and gold piping, Spark Pearl looks like it could be a piece of modern home décor just as much as a guitar amp. So whether you want to jam in your living room, bedroom, kitchen, or anywhere else in your house, take comfort knowing that you'll look good in the process - so much so that you'll finally not get yelled at for leaving your gear sitting out in the living room!
Watch Spark Pearl’s premiere here.
An extremely limited quantity will be available in late April, and customers can take advantage of special pricing for early orders. Learn more about Spark Pearl at www.positivegrid.com/spark-pearl/ and sign up to be notified when it's available for purchase.
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Boris announces Amplifier Worship Service Tour across North America, performing all songs from their first album. Featuring two drummers and Starcrawler as support, tickets on sale April 26th.
This fall, Boris will trek across North America performing all of the songs off of their beloved first album, Amplifier Worship. Featuring two drummers and an extended backline, this will be a Boris tour not to miss. Starcrawler will support all shows and tickets go on sale Friday, April 26th at 10am local time— a complete list of tour dates can be found below.
Boris has been in constant pursuit of their own ideal “heavy” since their formation in 1992. From the outset they became like a chimera, evolving at a rapid pace, establishing a unique style with extreme down tuning and mega volume. Their broad sense of “Heavy Rock” swelled grotesquely, as it engulfed powerviolence, ambient and drone, with a trance component of krautrock and so on.
From Tokyo to the world, Boris spread out from the underground community to have their name become more widely known. Five years after their formation, Boris went deep into the beyond of heavy music to make their first album, one that can be said to be a palace constructed in unexplored realms. However, the album by no means serves as a peaceful "end" or resting place/"gravestone" for those compositions. Rather, it was a map to the “beyond” that Boris drew up at the time, a blueprint pointing to the future. 25 years after the release of Amplifier Worship, that guidance has been revealed: a full length tour for performing all of the songs on the album in a double-drum-format Drone Set.
As a pioneering effort in Drone Metal, a palace under the name of Amplifier Worship was constructed and revealed as both a point of departure as well as a destination. Amplified oscillations and volume, going from anguish to pleasure and back, being in fear as well as in awe at what can be called heavy— we venture into this palace of worship together.
For this tour Boris are taking along Starcrawler, a band that "...intensifies the prayer of rock 'n' roll. This only takes us further into the beyond, embarking on this worship service. Welcome to the ceremony!" comments Boris.
Look for more exciting news from Boris to arrive very soon.
For more information, please visit borisheavyrocks.com.
Boris, Amplifier Worship Service Tour Dates:
September 25 San Diego, CA @ Music Box
September 26 Los Angeles, CA @ Belasco
September 27 Pomona, CA @ Glass House
September 28 Fresno, CA @ Strummer's
September 29 San Francisco, CA @ The Fillmore
October 1 Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall
October 2 Seattle, WA @ Showbox
October 4 Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Hall
October 6 Denver, CO @ Bluebird Theater
October 8 Omaha, NE @ The Waiting Room
October 9 Minneapolis, MN @ Fine Line
October 10 Milwaukee, WI @ Vivarium
October 11 Chicago, IL @ Ramova Theatre
October 12 Indianapolis, IN @ The Vogue
October 13 St. Louis, MO @ Delmar Hall
October 15 Grand Rapids, MI @ Elevation
October 16 Detroit, MI @ St. Andrew's Hall
October 17 Cleveland, OH @ Beachland Ballroom
October 18 Pittsburgh, PA @ Tunderbird Music Hall
October 19 Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
October 21 Boston, MA @ Paradise
October 22 Hamden, CT @ Space Ballroom
October 23 New York, NY @ Racket
October 24 Baltimore, MD @ Soundstage
October 25 Carrboro, NC @ Cat's Cradle
October 26 Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade
October 27 Birmingham, AL @ Saturn
October 29 Dallas, TX @ Granada Theater
October 30 Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live Midtown
November 2 Tucson, AZ @ 191 Toole
November 3 Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre
Introducing the new Gibson Dual Falcon 20 2x10 Combo amplifier, paying homage to Gibson's legendary past with vintage tone reimagined in a modern two-channel design.
Two-Channel Flexibility
The Dual Falcon features two channels with identical Volume, Tone, and footswitchable Reverb controls, plus footswitchable Tremolo. Players can also select between Full, Half, or Low power modes on each channel, giving you tons of tonal flexibility without needing pedals.
Effects Loop
If you do use pedals, the Dual Falcon takes them beautifully. A buffered series Effects Loop gives you more processing options, helping you get exactly the sound that’s in your head.
Gibson Falcon Amps: Tube-fueled Icons Soar with New Wings
The Dual Falcon joins the Falcon 5 1x10 Combo and the Falcon 20 1x12 Combo. Inspired by vintage Gibson amps and reimagined for today’s players, Gibson Falcon amplifiers are handcrafted in Petaluma, California, and focus on great sound, simplicity, and ease of use.
For more information, please visit gibson.com.
A spacious reverb that spans low-key plate and demented, enormous cosmic reverb colors is a gas to use and easy to own.
Fun to use. Wide spectrum of sounds. Nice build quality at a great price
Can be hard to remove high harmonic content at all but the least trebly tone settings.
$129
Walrus Fundamental Ambient
walrusaudio.com
With variable voices, accessible prices ranging from 99 to 129 bucks, and slide controls that evoke old synths and vintage Jen pedals, Walrus Audio’s Fundamental series effects are functional, stylish, and dish a lot of awesome sounds at a nice price. The newest addition to the Fundamental series, the Ambient, will be good news for budget-constrained atmospheric musicians that otherwise settle for less-durable pedals at the market’s most inexpensive extremes. Some of those pedals are pretty cool, but the Walrus’ construction quality, sense of substance, and function—which is flat-out fun—make it a substantial alternative to those entry-level artifacts for a minor additional investment. It puts a super-wide range of sounds at your disposal, too.
Though few may use Ambient in subtle applications, it is capable of nice sounds on that spectrum. By using the lowest mix, tone, and decay settings, you can create an appealing facsimile of studio plate reverb that isn’t slathered in cloying top-end harmonics—particularly in the deep mode (which adds low octave) and the sustain-rich lush setting. At advanced mix and decay settings, the Ambient can sound colossal, alien, and unreal in ways any serious sound designer would be happy to explore. Haze mode, which uses sample rate reduction to create grainier, fractured, lo-fi pictures, is its own awesomely weird animal. You can fashion outsized dream-pop textures, or, at the most extreme level and mix settings, use the tone slider in crossfade fashion to conjure scuzzy VHS horror tones that, frankly, freaked me out as I was playing them.