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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To hear Phil Collen tell it, he joined Def Leppard almost by accident. He had loaned the band one of his amps, and when they asked him to play some leads on their upcoming record Pyromania, Collen thought he was just doing his friends a solid. The rest is history.
He and Shifty talk through Collen’s formative years on guitar, where he soaked up the scorching playing of classic guitar heroes: Jimmy Page, Ritchie Blackmore, Mick Ronson, Michael Schenker, and Gary Moore all played a hand in Collen’s high-flying fretwork.
Collen’s solo on “Photograph” is a perfect example of the sort of “ear candy” that producer Mutt Lange encouraged the band to chase in the studio—and yes, he did record individual notes to build a single guitar chord on Pyromania. But there weren’t many tricks to Collen’s sound on the solo. His Ibanez Destroyer and a 50-watt Marshall were all he needed to get the job done for the slick, Blackmore-inspired solo. Tune in to see how he worked that two-piece setup to record one of the most influential guitar solos of the ’80s.
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editors: Dan Destefano and Addison Sauvan
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
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
David Gilmour's first album in nine years, Luck and Strange, will be released on September 6, 2024, featuring the first track "The Piper's Call."
Luck and Strange was recorded over five months in Brighton and London. The record was produced by David and Charlie Andrew, best known for his work with ALT-J and Marika Hackman.
Of this new working relationship, David says, “We invited Charlie to the house, so he came and listened to some demos, and said things like, “Well, why does there have to be a guitar solo there?” and “Do they all fade out? Can’t some of them just end?”. He has a wonderful lack of knowledge or respect for this past of mine. He’s very direct and not in any way overawed, and I love that. That is just so good for me because the last thing you want is people just deferring to you.”
David Gilmour - The Piper's Call (Official Music Video)
The majority of the album’s lyrics have been composed by Polly Samson, Gilmour’s co-writer and collaborator for the past thirty years. Samson says of the lyrical themes covered on ‘Luck and Strange’, “It’s written from the point of view of being older; mortality is the constant.” Gilmour elaborates, “We spent a load of time during and after lockdown talking about and thinking about those kind of things.” Polly has also found the experience of working with Charlie Andrew liberating, “He wants to know what the songs are about, he wants everyone who’s playing on them to have the ideas that are in the lyric informing their playing. I have particularly loved it for that reason.”
The album features eight new tracks along with a reworking of The Montgolfier Brothers’ Between Two Points and has artwork and photography by the renowned artist Anton Corbijn.
Musicians contributing to the record include Guy Pratt & Tom Herbert on bass, Adam Betts, Steve Gadd and Steve DiStanislao on drums, Rob Gentry & Roger Eno on keyboards with string and choral arrangements by Will Gardner. The title track also features the late Pink Floyd keyboard player Richard Wright, recorded in 2007 at a jam in a barn at David’s house.
Some contributions emerged from the live streams that Gilmour and family performed to a global audience during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021; Romany Gilmour sings, plays the harp and appears on lead vocals on ‘Between Two Points’. Gabriel Gilmour also sings backing vocals.
The album’s cover image, photographed and designed by Anton Corbijn, is inspired by a lyric written by Charlie Gilmour for the album’s final song "Scattered". Of working with his family on Luck and Strange, David says, “Polly and I have been writing together for over thirty years and the Von Trapped live streams showed the great blend of Romany’s voice and harp-playing and that led us into a feeling of discarding some of the past that I’d felt bound to and that I could throw those rules out and do whatever I felt like doing, and that has been such a joy.”
Luck and Strange will be released on September 6, 2024 on Sony Music.
For more information, please visit davidgilmour.com.