Has anyone got any experience of these?
I picked one up at the weekend for a couple of reasons:
1) I'm sick of lugging a heavy head and 4x12 cab to gigs
2) I can tell the difference between a valve and solid state amp really easily, but from the videos I've seen this amp sounded pretty nice to me.
I decided to go for the Blues Cube artist, mainly because I want to gig the amp and have it for home use as well.
First impressions Really easy to pick up. Having thrown my back out a couple of years ago trying to carry a Mesa Lodestar classic 2x12 up a flight of stairs I've always had an aversion to heavy amps. This one however weighs absolutely nothing and should be really easy to carry around for gigs.
tone wise, it's really easy to get a nice sound pretty quickly. I record this video to demonstrate a lead tone I was playing around with. No tweaking was necessary really, this was recorded pretty much straight out of the box.
Roland are really pushing this amp at the moment, by saying it's pretty much the closest you can get to a tube amp sound from a solid state amplifier. I'm not sure that it sounds exactly like a tube amp, but it's certainly not far off, and at gig volumes the audience probably wouldn't be able to tell.
Comments
Should be working now!
How are you getting on with the blues cube now? Have you gigged it? What's it like with pedals? I really only use a clean tone on an amp live - how does this compare to the classic fender amps do you think?
It's got loads of headroom and the clean channel sounds awesome.
I recorded this video on the amps clean channel with a bit of boost:
In terms of pedals it seems to take them well, it's hard to describe but after a while you just forget that it is solid state. In all of these videos where I'm demoing the pedals, they are all going through the blues cube.
It does remind me of classic fender amps but you can also change the amps feel with the tone capsules. I'm probably going to get the Eric Johnson one which supposedly changes it to more of a Marshall type setting.
My feedback thread is here.
It doesn't have anything like the versatility of the Katana, but I never used most of the different models and effects in the Katana anyway. The blues Cube gives a cracking basic tone, very easy to set up to get some good sounds out of it straight from the box. I'm not a keen tweaker and fiddler with settings and knobs, I've always just wanted something that I plug straight into and get some nice sounds from it without thinking too hard about it, so suits me fine. Onboard reverb and tremolo on the Artist version are excellent too IMO, so there's two less pedals you need on your board.
Word of warning, if you like your higher gain stuff it's definitely not the amp for you. The 'crunch' channel is very much just that. Cranked to the max it can get into classic rock territory, but won't give any more dirt that. Does seem to take pedals well though, but I'm not really a high gain kinda guy so have never tried putting a high distortion type pedal through it to test that out.
My feedback thread is here.
Virtually none available new or second hand.
No Beat Retreat has a solo with Crybaby into Timmy. Bubbling Under is a Kokko tubescreamer into Kokko delay. Deep Thing is El Capistan plus Sub n Up mostly.
https://m.soundcloud.com/paul-conway-6
I use the amp live with a twelve-fourteen piece horn band. Not as pokey as valves, but the advantages outweigh that.
Replacing the speaker with a Celestion Neo Creamback reduced the weight by a useful further 3kg.
With the Robben Ford Tone Capsule, it sounds lovely. I liked so much that I bought the Artist model (with a slightly bigger cabinet), but on balance I preferred the sound of the Stage model, so the Artist (which was a little more ‘boomy’ and perhaps less focused) is now gone.
It’s supposed to take pedals well, but I do find myself wondering which input to use (low or high)?
Also to get that Robben Ford sound I have to completely dime the gain on the crunch channel - from a previous post above on this thread, I now understand that’s normal for this amp...