Jensen Silverbird 1050
Jensen Speakers introduces the Jensen Silverbird line, consisting in two brand new ceramic speakers: the Silverbird 12 and the Silverbird 10.
Jensen Silverbird 1270
Following up to the recent introduction of the highly successful Blackbird 40 “Reinforced AlNiCo” 12” and 10” speakers, Jensen developed the Silverbird line, aiming to transfer the unique voicing of the BB40 in a more affordable platform, with a specific attention to the top end response, carefully tailored to make the Silverbird speakers greatly suited to overdrive and high-gain applications.
Both the SB12and the SB10 share a new 1 ½” (38mm) aluminum-wound voice coil with a Kapton former, designed to retain the trademark clarity of the Jensen clean tones, paired with a smooth, progressive contour of the top end response, so critical to achieve a detailed yet controlled tone with lead tones. The medium-sized Ceramic magnets provide the necessary strength to have generous yet tight bass, while the new cone membranes, with a specific treatment on the paper surrounds, deliver a balanced response in the midrange and “presence” zone.
The SB12-70 is of course fatter and fuller sounding, while the SB10-50 has a more focused and present response with the typical immediacy of the best 10” speakers. Versatile enough to deliver an open, airy response in open back cabinets, both models can morph into powerful rock’n roll tone machines in closed back enclosures.
The Silverbird line will be available worldwide in the sprinf of 2024, and the prices will be:
Silverbird 12 - C12/70 SB: MAP $93.95, MSRP $144.50
Silverbird 10 - C10/50 SB: MAP $117.95, MSRP $181.50
- Jensen Speakers Releases the P10R-F ›
- Jensen Speakers Unveils the Jet Raptor ›
- Jensen Speakers Introduces the Jet Raptor ›
Strong midrange-focused personality. Particularly vowel-ly and vocal sweep. Feels controlled.
Some players will miss silkier, hazier bass-range sounds.
$249
Dunlop Mick Ronson Cry Baby
Park and fly with this mid-focused but very vocal wah honoring Bowie’s right-hand man.
Dunlop Mick Ronson Wah - MAIN by premierguitar
Mick Ronson—lead ripper, lieutenant, riff-dealer, and arranger in David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars—was such a cool amalgam of ’60s British guitar voices. He had Keith Richards’ sense of rhythm and hooks, Jimmy Page’s knack for evil-sounding ear candy, and a preference for loud, simple rigs: Les Paul, Marshall, Tone Bender, Echoplex, and, most critically, a Cry Baby wah. You know the sound of this Cry Baby. It’s everywhere on early 1970s Bowie records—“Queen Bitch,” “Moonage Daydream,” and “Width of a Circle,” to name a few—and it put discernible fangs and venom in his playing. There are many such sounds in Dunlop’s excellent new tribute, the Mick Ronson Cry Baby.
Ronno was not a wah player in the “wocka-wocka” sense. He primarily used the pedal in a fixed position or with subtle longer sweeps. His favorite wah for the job was an early Cry Baby built in Italy by Jen. These wahs were notoriously, shall we say, “unique” from specimen to specimen. And without Ronno’s original on hand for comparison, it’s hard to know how close the tribute gets to nailing it. But there is an unmistakable mid focus that mirrors and invites Ronno’s biting phrasing—particularly in Bowie’s live recordings from the time. The new pedal’s sweep starts out squawky at the heel-down position, where my other vintage-voiced wahs just sound foggy. That midrange emphasis and presence remains through its sweep, suggesting the Ronson Wah’s singing range is narrow. On the contrary, the many distinctly different vowel sounds within that range color the base tone more strongly than many wahs with a smoother, bassier taper. That profile lends itself to great control and multiple bold, distinct sounds—particularly when an angry gain device is situated upstream.
Very diverse slate of tones. Capable of great focus and power. Potentially killer studio tool.
Sculpting tones in a reliably reproducible way can be challenging. Midrange emphasis may be a deal breaker for some.
$199 street
Bold-voiced, super-tunable distortion that excels in contexts from filtered boost to total belligerence.
Whitman Audio calls the Wave Collapse a fuzz—and what a very cool fuzz it is. But classifying it strictly as such undersells the breadth of its sounds. The Seattle, Washington-built Wave Collapse has personality at low gain levels and super crunchy ones. It’s responsive and sensitive enough to input and touch dynamics to move from light overdrive to low-gain distortion and degenerate fuzz with a change in picking intensity or guitar volume. And from the pedal’s own very interactive controls, one can summon big, ringing, near-clean tones, desert sludge, or snorkel-y wah buzz.
The Wave Collapse speaks many languages, but it has an accent—usually an almost wah-like midrange lilt that shows up as faint or super-pronounced. It’s not everyone’s creamy distortion ideal. But with the right guitar pairings and a dynamic approach, the Wave Collapse’s midrange foundation can still span sparkly and savage extremes that stand tall and distinctive in a mix. There’s much that sounds and feels familiar in the Wave Collapse, but the many surprises it keeps in store are the real fun.
Heavy Surf, Changing Waves
The absence of a single fundamental influence makes it tricky to get your bearings with the Wave Collapse at first. Depending on where you park the controls to start, you might hear traces of RAT in the midrange-forward, growly distortion, or the Boss SD-1 in many heavy overdrive settings. At its fuzziest, it howls and spits like aFuzz Face orTone Bender and can generate compressed, super-focused, direct-to-desk rasp. And in its darker corners, weighty doom tones abound.
The many personalities are intentional. Whitman Dewey-Smith’s design brief was, in his own words, “a wide palette ranging from dirty boost to almost square-wave fuzz and textures that could be smooth or sputtery.” A parallel goal, he says, was to encourage tone discoveries in less-obvious spaces. Many such gems live in the complex interrelationships between the EQ, filter, and bias controls. They also live in the circuit mash-up at the heart of the Wave Collapse. The two most prominent fixtures on the circuit are the BC108 transistor (best known as a go-to in Fuzz Face builds) and twin red LED clipping diodes (associated, in the minds of many, with clipping in the Turbo RAT and Marshall Jubilee amplifier). That’s not exactly a classic combination of amplifier and clipping section components, but it’s a big part of the Wave Collapse’s sonic identity.
The BC108 drives one of two core gain stages in the Wave Collapse. The first stage takes inspiration from early, simple fuzz topologies like the Tone Bender and Fuzz Face, but with a focus on what Dewey-Smith calls “exploiting the odd edges and interactivity in a two-transistor gain stage.” The BC108 contributes significant character to this stage. The second, post-EQ gain stage is JFET-based. It’s set up to interact like a tube guitar amp input stage and is followed by the clipping LEDs. Dewey-Smith says you can think of the whole as a “fairly” symmetric hard-clipping scheme.
“The magic of the circuit is that those gain stages are very complimentary. When stage one is running clean, it still passes a large, unclipped signal that hits the second stage, making those classic early distortion sounds. Conversely, when the first stage is running hot, it clips hard and the second stage takes a back seat—mostly smoothing out the rough edges of the first stage.” Factor in the modified Jack Orman pickup simulator-style section in the front end, and you start to understand the pedal’s propensity for surprise and expressive latitude.
Searchin’ Safari
The Wave Collapse’s many identities aren’t always easy to wrangle at the granular-detail level. The control set—knobs for bias, filter color, input level, and output level, plus switches for “mass” (gain,) “range”(bass content at the input), and “center” (shifts the filter’s mid emphasis from flat)—are interdependent in such a way that small adjustments can shift a tone’s character significantly, and it can be challenging to find your way back to a tone that sounded just right five minutes ago. Practice goes a long way toward mastering these sensitivities. One path to reliably reproducible sounds is to establish a ballpark tone focus with the filter first, dial in the input gain to an appropriately energetic zone, then shape the distortion color and response more specifically with the bias.
As you get a feel for these interactions, you’ll be knocked out by the sounds and ideas you bump into along the way. In addition to obvious vintage fuzz and distortion touchstones I crafted evocations of blistering, compressed tweed amps, jangly Marshalls, and many shades of recording console preamp overdrive. The Wave Collapse responds in cool ways to just about any instrument you situate out front. But while your results may vary, I preferred the greater headroom and detail that comes with single-coil pickup pairings. Humbuckers, predictably conjure a more compressed and, to my ears, less varied set of sounds. I also found black-panel Fender amps a more adaptable pairing than Vox- and Marshall-style voices. But just about any guitar or pickup type can yield magnificent results.
The Verdict
Though it’s hard to avoid its filtered midrange signature entirely, the Wave Collapse is a pedal of many masks. Once you master the twitchy interactivity between its controls, you can tailor the pedal to weave innocuously but energetically into a mix or completely dominate it. These capabilities are invaluable in ensemble performances, but it’s super enticing to consider how the Wave Collapse would work in a studio situation, where its focus and potency can fill gaps and nooks in color and vitality or turn a tune on its head. Pedals that stimulate the inner arranger, producer, and punk simultaneously are valuable tools. And while the Wave Collapse won’t suit every taste, when you factor together the pedal’s sub-$200 cost, thoughtful design, high-quality execution, and malleability, it adds up to a lot of utility for a very fair price.
The New ToneWoodAmp2 is smaller, lighter, rechargeable, and offers foureffects simultaneously, along with a mobile app and much more.
ToneWoodAmp has released the second generation of its popular accessory that brings a wide array of special effects to acoustic guitars without needing to plug into an external amplifier.
The ToneWoodAmp2 has been redesigned with portability, ease of use, and enhanced performance in mind, featuring a lighter and more compact design while adding more features and capabilities. The new ToneWoodAmp2 has a powerful DSP, a rechargeable battery that lasts for more than 10 hours, and it provides more creative tools as well as the ability to play with up to four simultaneous effects. A new smartphone app allows users to operate the device from either their phone or the device itself.
Reverb Basics | ToneWoodAmp2 Effects Guide
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.The upgraded product is also a fully professional preamp. In addition to the built-in effects, it includes a powerful EQ, compressor, “Feedback Assassin” tools, and more. “While the firstToneWoodAmp provided a breakthrough technology in how acoustic guitar players experience their guitar playing mostly off-stage, the new ToneWoodAmp2 doubles as an on-stage professional pre-amp device with many new capabilities, a perfect tool for performing musicians who need a professional set of tools in a very small footprint package,” says Ofer Webman, CEO of ToneWoodAmp and its inventor.Like the original ToneWoodAmp, the ToneWoodAmp2 attaches to any acoustic guitar via an innovative magnetic X-brace. A new and unique guitar attachment system, called the LiftKit, allows the second-generation device to attach to any acoustic guitar, even a guitar with a curved back.
TonewoodAmp2 features expanded capabilities by its new smartphone app: With its built-inBluetooth®, guitarists can now connect the ToneWoodAmp2 to a free smartphone app for extended control, intuitive adjustments, preset management, and on-the-fly tweaks. The new app is compatible with all modern iOS and Android devices.“The new device is a massive improvement from the original ToneWoodAmp,” says MikeDawes, the U.K.-based guitar player who has twice been named the Best Acoustic Guitarist in the World Right Now by MusicRadar and Total Guitar's end-of-year poll. “This thing is not only reverb or delay or chorus on your guitar it’s everything and more at once. The reason why this is so good is that it’s reducing every barrier that I would have to creativity.”The new ToneWoodAmp2 is available for $300.
For more information, visit www.tonewoodamp.com.
Paul Reed Smith also continues to evolve as a guitarist, and delivered a compelling take on Jeff Beck’s interpretation of “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers” at the PRS 40th Anniversary Celebration during this year’s NAMM.
After 40 years at the helm of PRS Guitars, our columnist reflects on the nature of evolution in artistry—of all kinds.
Reflecting on four decades in business, I don’t find myself wishing I “knew then what I know now.” Instead, I’m grateful to still have the curiosity and environment to keep learning and to be in an art that has a nonstop learning curve. There’s a quote attributed to artist Kiki Smith that resonates deeply with me: “I can barely control my kitchen sink.” That simple truth has been a guiding principle in my life. We can’t control the timing of knowledge or discovery. If profound learning comes late in life, so be it. The important thing is to remain open to it when it arrives.
I look at what’s happened at PRS Guitars over the last 40 years with real pride. I love what we’ve built—not just in terms of instruments but in the culture of innovation and craftsmanship that defines our company. The guitar industry as a whole has evolved in extraordinary ways, and I’m fortunate to be part of a world filled with passionate, talented, and good-hearted people.
I love learning. It may sound odd, but there’s something almost spiritual about it. Learning isn’t constant; it comes in stages. Sometimes, there are long dry spells where you can even struggle to hold onto what you already know. Other times, learning is sporadic, with nuggets of understanding appearing here and there that are treasured for their poignancy. And then there are those remarkable moments when the proverbial floodgates open, and the lessons come so fast that you can barely keep up. I’ve heard songwriters and musicians describe this same pattern. Sometimes, no new songs emerge; sometimes, they trickle out one by one; and sometimes, they arrive so quickly it’s impossible to capture them all. I believe it’s the same for all creatives, including athletes, engineers, and everyone invested in their art.
Looking back over 40 years in business and a decade of preparation before that, I recognize these distinct phases of learning. Right now, I’m in one of those high-gain learning periods. I’ve taken on a teacher who is introducing me to concepts I never imagined, ideas I didn’t think anyone could explain—things I wasn’t even sure I was worthy of understanding. But when he calls and says, “Have you thought about this?” I lean in, eager to absorb, not just to learn something new for myself, but because I want him to feel his teaching is appreciated, making it more likely that the teaching continues.
“Learning isn’t just about accumulating knowledge; it’s about applying it, sharing it, and evolving because of it.”
Beyond structured teaching, learning also comes through experience, discovery, and problem solving. We recently got our hands on some old, magical guitars, vintage pickups, microphones, and mic preamps. These aren’t just relics; they’re windows into a deeper understanding of how things work and what the engineers who invented them knew. By studying the schematics of tube-mic preamps, we’re uncovering insights that directly influence how we wire guitar pickups and their electronics. It may seem like an unrelated field, but the many parallels in audio engineering are there if you look. Knowledge in one area has a ripple effect, unlocking new possibilities in another.
Even as I continue learning, I recognize that our entire team at PRS is on this journey with me. We have people whose sole job is to push the boundaries of what we understand about pickups, spending every day refining and applying that knowledge so that when you pick up a PRS guitar, it sounds better. More than 400 people work here, each contributing to the collective advancement of our craft. I am grateful to be surrounded by such a dedicated and smart team.
One of my favorite memories at PRS was at a time we were deep into investigating scale lengths on vintage guitars, and some unique pickup characteristics, when one of our engineering leaders walked into my office. He had just uncovered something astonishing and said, “You’re not going to believe this one.” That excitement and back-and-forth exchange of ideas is what keeps this work so rewarding.
As I reflect on my journey, I see that learning isn’t just about accumulating knowledge; it’s about applying it, sharing it, and evolving because of it. I get very excited when something we’ve learned ends up on a new product. Whether lessons come early or late, whether they arrive in waves or trickles, there is always good work to be done. And that is something I just adore.
