Its 38-watt output, powered by a quartet of EL84 tubes, is designed to provide lots of headroom and response for discerning players.
The original idea behind Jet Black was to bring the Black Cat’s trademark sound to players who needed more volume. With a second pair of EL-84s doubling its output, common sense suggested it’d be louder and tighter, but no one was quite prepared for the tones the Jet Black would unleash.
Unleash Your Creativity with the Jet Black
The Jet Black offers guitarists an unrestrained and visceral playing experience. Its 38-watt output, powered by a quartet of EL84 tubes, provides awesome headroom and response for discerning players. With two channels, tremolo, FX loop and reverb, the Jet Black is an ultra-versatile tool for shaping your sound.
Channel 1: The revamped first channel is bold and clear, making it perfect for clean tones and harmonically rich edge of breakup sounds.
Channel 2: The second channel is versatile and fresh, suitable for a wide range of rock-oriented tones. It successfully captures the essence of classic and modern guitar sounds, boasting its own unique character and swagger.
3-Band EQ: The new 3-band EQ allows precise control over your tone, with a pronounced mid/high response that cuts through the mix, unlike traditional "British Voice" amplifiers, the Jet Black carves its own niche in the sonic spectrum, ensuring that it shines in a two-guitar band setup without contributing to a volume war.
Reverb and Tremolo: Rarely found on rock-oriented amps, meticulously tuned reverb and tremolo circuits are included to complement the amplifier's ultra-wide range, delivering lush and noise-free effects with adjustable depth and speed.
FX Loop and Line Out: The Jet Black features a transparent FX Loop for connecting external effects without hassle. A line out simplifies the use of external impulse responses or re-amping. The amplifier also offers various speaker outputs to accommodate different setups.
Footswitch: The included two-button footswitch provides convenient control over the tremolo and channel selection.
Availability
The Bad Cat Jet Black amplifier will be available from, November 21, 2023, through select Bad Cat dealers and online retailers.
For more information, please visit badcatamps.com.
A few highlights from day 4 of NAMM.
The Rivera RockCrusher Recording Power Attenuator is a full-featured option with cabinet
emulation and 11-band graphic EQ.
Making your amp work for you in any situation.
So you've found your dream amp—kind of. It sounds like a million bucks when it's cranked to its sweet spot, but everyone always tells you to turn it down. And you really want to capture your amp's glorious tone when recording, but you don't want to invest in microphones and preamps, and you don't have an acoustically perfect space to track either. It's an old problem: Guitar amps can be unruly beasts, hard to tame and difficult to mic live and in the studio. Luckily for guitarists, there's a bevy of devices designed to control, capture, and sculpt the tone of any amp.
Load boxes. When using a tube amp, a speaker is usually connected. The speaker dissipates energy from the amp as sound. But what if you want to use your tube amp with no speaker(s) connected, perhaps for late-night silent recording or practice?
You must always have a load of some sort connected to your speaker-out jack, or you can severely damage the amp. This is where load boxes come in: They safely load your guitar amp and allow you to use it in numerous ways with no speakers. Examples of load boxes include the Suhr Reactive Load, Koch Dummybox Studio/PA, and the Two Notes Torpedo Live.
Think of a load box as the most basic form of attenuator, one that lowers your amp's output to line level. Also called “dummy loads," such devices let you take that line out into a computer-recording interface so you can capture and process your amp's sound.
Because guitar speakers are an important component of guitar tone, you usually want to add speaker simulation. Some load boxes have onboard speaker simulations, but if not, you can use an analog speaker simulator like the Palmer PDI09, or a software plug-in that hosts impulse responses. (Such impulse responses digitally mimic the sounds various speaker/microphone combinations.) There are large libraries of IRs on the market, and you can find many more free online. Good IRs sound startlingly close to the real miked cabs.
A load box can also send the loaded-down line-level amp signal to a second power amp, giving you total control over your tone and volume. Crank your amp to the sweet spot, knock it down to line level, add effects if desired, and then “reamp" the whole thing to any volume through a power amp and cab of your choice.
Reamp devices. Some devices let you load down an amp and then reamp it with a second power amp—all in one unit. The Bad Cat Unleash, Fryette Power Station, and Two Notes Torpedo Reload are all good examples. The Unleash and Torpedo Reload perform the reamp function via solid-state power amps, while the Fryette unit features 50 watts of all-tube power. All three units are designed for sonic purity and tonal integrity. But anytime you such introduce devices into your signal chain, tone and feel changes can occur, so try before you buy.
Attenuators. Attenuators passively reduce your amp's volume by absorbing some of the amp's output and passing the rest on to the speaker cabinet. Some attenuators also function as load boxes and feature a output that sends a line-level signal to a recording interface or another power amp for reamping. Examples include the THD Hotplate, the Jim Kelley Power Attenuator, and the Rivera RockCrusher. The RockCrusher load box/attenuator even has a sophisticated analog speaker-simulator with line out, and a graphic EQ to fine-tune the simulated speaker's tonal response.
Reactive versus resistive. When a speaker—let's say in an open-back 1x12 cab—is connected to a tube amp, it has a unique relationship with the amp. Think of it as a back-and-forth conversation between the amp and speaker/cab. Your particular amp, cab, speaker, and what you play influence this dialog. This is called the impedance curve, and it's a measurable variable. Take the same speaker and load it into a closed-back 4x12 cab, and that impedance curve changes. The amp reacts differently than it did with the 1x12. So multiple things affect the tone and feel: amp, cabinet, speakers, and impedance curve.
A reactive load or reactive attenuator lowers or completely loads down an amp's output while maintaining the impedance curve, making the amp feel, sound, and respond similarly to when it's connected directly to a cabinet. Resistive attenuators and loads eliminate that impedance curve. As a result, the tone and feel of the whole rig changes. Most players find that as attenuation increases on a resistive attenuator, the tone is affected, usually becoming more compressed and dark. Transparency is a big plus for me, so I'm a fan of reactive attenuators.
I hope I've helped clarify some of the uses for and differences between load boxes, attenuators, and reamp boxes. Until next month, I wish you good tone!