Shane’s got his hands on a Hagstrom Super Viking. Does he like it? Let’s find out.
I loved the tone he got for the opening track, and indeed throughout the demo. I thought it’s one of the best sounds he’s had on the channel to date.
And I’m not surprised. Hagstrom did a demo evening at my local guitar shop AStrings, and every single guitar that night sounded fantastic. They were really nice people to talk to afterwards too. If you’re looking for guitars that’ll go head-to-head on sound with the top-dollar gear, Hagstrom should be on your list.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Shane’s video.
Shawn Tubbs has posted a short demo of Digitech’s Looking Glass overdrive pedal.
In this demo, Shawn does something that I wish more demos did: he plays a Strat, a Tele and a dual-humbucker guitar too. It really gives you a flavour of what this pedal might do for you.
I do own a Looking Glass myself. Right now, it’s in the pedal cupboard, waiting for me to have the time to spend on it properly. Easter weekend can’t come soon enough!
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Shawn’s video.
Fluff has just posted a demo of Positive Grid’s new Bias Amp 2.
Bias Amp is guitar amp emulation software that you run on your computer. You plug your guitar straight into your audio interface – no real guitar amp required. If you don’t want a real amp, it’s definitely an option to consider.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Fluff’s video.
Mary Spender has recently been over in Norway visiting Frog Leap Studios, and while she was there, she recorded a cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car.
Love it!
There’s been quite a few videos now where Mary’s singing into the Shure SM7B microphone. Each time, I’m impressed with the end results. If you’re looking for a vocal mic for your home studio, it’s worth adding to your list.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Mary’s cover.
Ever wondered what the Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl HiFI pedal sounds like in a professionally-produced track? Henning has you covered:
I love these kind of demos. It’s very useful to hear someone try a pedal out by itself – that mimics us Home Tone Chasers noodling at home. It’s also great to hear what a pedal can sound like in a recording, for those of us who like to try our hand at creating our own tracks.
The pedal itself? I’m looking forward to the full demo, to see just what it can do.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Henning’s video.
Paul Davids (and … er … Paul Davids) is back with a video comparing his first rig to his current rig.
We don’t learn how old his Squier is, so please don’t refer to this when trying to decide whether or not to buy a brand new Squier today! These kinds of videos are meant to be a bit of fun 🙂
Hopefully Paul will post a follow up where we hear both guitars into the Tone King.
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Paul’s video.
I promise that I’ll stop posting about the PRS Silver Sky soon. Before I do, I have to share with you John Mayer’s own thoughts on his new guitar.
He’s not pulling any punches here. He tackles the guitar’s Fender heritage, why he went to PRS for this guitar, what makes it different from a Fender Strat, and where the time went on designing the Silver Sky. If you want to understand how he sees this guitar, it’s compulsory viewing.
The key thing I took away from this is that this all started with tone. He wanted something that looked like a Strat, and played like a Strat, but that addressed some of the things he didn’t like about the Fender Strat sound. Paul Reed Smith is all about tone in a way that few other guitar builders are. And things evolved from there to become the Silver Sky that we’ve all been talking about.
Whether you like John Mayer or not, he deserves credit for putting out a video like this. It’s not some slick PR video. It’s just John talking into his phone on a livestream. How many other mega-artists would do this?
Sadly, he doesn’t post directly to YouTube, and I don’t know where the original video was posted. I couldn’t find it on Instagram or on Facebook.
Yes, you read that right. JHS has taken the ubiquitous Boss DS-1 and made some crazy mods to it. And then they asked Mike Hermans – one of the top demo guys – to show what this thing can do.
It starts out with an upgraded drive circuit, complete with a three-way toggle switch for different clipping types. That alone would be a great mod in its own right.
Then, they added 3 different synth circuits that you can switch in and out independently … just in case you’re bored with overdrive sounds. Or you just want something that’s batshit 🙂
Please head over to YouTube to leave a like and a supportive comment if you enjoyed Mike’s video.
Back in January, my wife bought me an 8 ohm Two Notes Torpedo Captor as a birthday present. (It was going to be a Christmas present, but Two Notes can’t make these things fast enough to keep up with demand!) And last week, I added a second one to my rig, to go with my ridiculously-overkill Synergy Amps dual-amp pedal platform setup.
Two Notes Torpedo Captor
What Is It?
The Two Notes Torpedo Captor is both a reactive load box and a fixed-level attenuator. There are three different models available: in 4 ohms, 8 ohms (the one I have) and 16 ohms.
As a reactive load box, the Two Notes Torpedo Captor allows you to run your amp without having to have a speaker plugged in at all.
The -20db fixed attenuation allows you to turn your amp up to get the power tubes cooking and have a (slightly) quieter volume level coming out of your speaker cabinet.
The Captor is a completely analogue device. Unlike the Torpedo Live or Torpedo Studio, there’s no onboard computer to run impulse responses or power amp simulators. If you want to use it for silent recording, you’ll need to run a plugin in your DAW on your computer.
Why Is It Important?
It’s the first affordable reactive load box to hit the market, that I know of at any rate.
Before this, there was the Suhr Reactive Load (currently £399, twice the price of the Captor) – extra software required! – then the Torpedo range (starting from £560 for the Torpedo Reload and then the Torpedo Live at £680).
That’s a lot of money to spend on a reactive load box for a single amp setup. For a dual-amp setup, you effectively had to budget for a third amp, and then spend that money on a pair of Torpedo units.
Priced at £199, the Captor is a game changer.
Why Is It Useful?
Those of us playing and/or recording at home often want silent recording – the sound of our amp on 10 into our computers, but not coming out of a speaker cabinet at the same time. And that’s where the Captor comes in.
Valve amplifiers need to be connected to a speaker cabinet, so that the signal generated by the output transformer has somewhere to flow to. If you forget to plug your amp into a speaker, you’ll blow the output transformer (if you’re lucky).
A load box like the Captor allows us to run a valve amp without plugging in a speaker cab.
Buy the Captor that matches your amp’s required output impedance, and plug the amp’s speaker out into the Captor. Now you can safely turn your amp on without blowing anything up.
From here, you’ve got a couple of choices on how to get the sound out of the Captor.
As An Attenuator
I originally got the Captor to use as an attenuator.
I’ve been making my own Kemper profiles, and I wanted to crank the amp as much as possible so that the source signal sounded as good as possible. Power tube saturation plays an important role in the overall quality of the tone, and to get it to kick in, you have to turn the Master volume up.
However, my little home project studio The Hermit’s Cave is just an ordinary room in an ordinary house. A cranked amp – especially my Blackstart HT-100 – will wreck my hearing in here. Not to mention the problems inflicted on my family and my neighbours!
That’s where an attenuator comes in.
An attenuator takes the cranked signal from your amp and bleeds some of it off. What comes out the other end is a quieter signal, to save your hearing and your marriage!
More expensive attenuators offer variable power soak levels. The Captor offers a fixed -20db attenuation. To put that in context, that’s roughly the difference between 2 and 4 on the HT-100’s Master volume control.
Which is just enough to get the power tubes cooking nicely.
The end result? A big difference to the quality of the tone captured by the Kemper Profiler – without a louder volume coming out of the speaker cab. There’s more definition to the tone, with the power tubes filling out the mids nicely. And that’s exactly where the Kemper’s internal algorithms seem to work the best.
However, I’m not ready to sell off all my pedals and stick exclusively with the Kemper just yet. Which is where my new Synergy Amps dual-amp setup comes in … along with the Captor’s other useful function.
For Silent Recording
Right now, I’m using a pair of Captors for silent recording.
I’ve just built up a dual-amp setup: a pair of Synergy Amps SYN-1 enclosures, with different modules in each, running into the two channels of the Synergy SYN-5050 power amp. I’m running that in stereo mode, with each channel running out into an 8 ohm Captor.
There’s no speaker cab plugged into either Captor. Instead, I’m using the XLR line out to run a mono signal from each Captor into my Apollo Twin unit. With two Captors, I can run two mono signals, and effectively have a dual-amp setup for blended pedal tones, a la That Pedal Show’s usual setups.
The only noise? The fan on the SYN-5050 power amp, and (if I crank the power amp too much) some sympathetic noise from each Captor. The noise was annoying when I had everything out on top of a speaker cab. For now, I’ve bundled them under a desk and out of the way, and that’s cut down the noise just enough to be able to ignore it – most of the time at any rate.
Both channels at the Apollo run into my DAW (I use Reaper – it’s excellent). There, I record onto two separate channels – one for Channel A, and a different one for Channel B from the SYN-5050. I have different impulse responses loaded onto each channel, chosen to match both the preamp module and the guitar I’m using.
The Captor comes with a license for Two Note’s highly-regarded Wall of Sound (WoS) impulse response plugin. I’m actually using something else – mixIR and the Redwirez BigBox collection.
I’ve been using the Redwirez BigBox for the last 4 years, so I know it well and I’ve had a lot of practice getting the results I want from it. It has great, phase-corrected impulses that suit all the Synergy preamp modules that I’m using. I’m really happy with it.
The end results are excellent.
I found that I got the best results using the XLR output of the Captor, rather than the TRS Line Out. You need to be able to provide phantom power – which the Apollo Twin does.
The Line Out doesn’t need power to operate. I struggled to get a signal that I liked from the Line Out. The output volume there seems to depend on how loud you run your amp. The Captor is rated for 100W amps, and my amp is 50W. Even cranked, I found I was having to crank the preamps on my Apollo Twin too. The end result was too noisy for my tastes.
Your mileage may vary.
What’s The Competition?
The Captor is the entry-level model for Two Note’s Torpedo line of units. There is nothing entry-level about the results you can achieve with it.
On one of the forums I hang out on, someone else posted that the Captor sounds identical to the more expensive Torpedo units. If you don’t need the features of those units – and at home, you probably don’t – then the Captor is an excellent choice.
Almost any other competitor – the Suhr Reactive Load, or Fryette’s Power Station – still relies on impulse responses running in your DAW. You might prefer how these units affect the tone. Each load box uses a different design to bleed off the power, and each design has a different effect on the end tone. We all hear things differently, and which unit you ultimately prefer will be a subjective matter of personal taste.
The only way you’ll get a substantive improvement over what impulse responses offer is to use a proprietary modelling solution like Universal Audio’s OX amp top box. If you want to know more about that, here’s a recent blog post comparing it to the other options.
Final Thoughts
I’ve only just finished wiring up the dual-amp pedal platform. It’ll probably be Easter weekend before I have the time to sit down and really explore what it can do. I’m excited for the possibilities.
There’s no two ways about it. I wouldn’t have been able to build this before the Captor came along.
Because there’s no software running on the Captor – and therefore no software drivers to worry about as time goes on – not only is the Captor cheaper, it should also outlive its more capable big brothers.
If you’re recording at home with valve amps, and you don’t have anywhere to run a real speaker cab at volume, the Captor + impulse responses should be on your list of options.
