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I decided to stop being a prick and just grab it. If there was ever a friggin amp that you could turn on that does exactly what you think it will do, it’s this animal.
Throw a dart at the settings: beast mode. Turn another knob randomly: beast mode.
I got about an hour and half with it last night before my ears started bleeding. Early impressions:
- Clean channel is surprisingly good. It actually does pristine cleans relatively well and works great with pedals into the front. Hit it with a little clean boost and the dirty cleans are tasty. The clean mode can also…. get nasty AF. It’s comically awesome how even the clean mode can drop the hammer.
- In between tones are very solid. Crunch mode CH1 does some great hard rock tones. It can also gallop to the dark side with an OD, but with a touch of restraint it gets nice snappy rock tones.
- Channel 1 ultra mode is where thrash lives. Channel 1 is basically an amp within itself, with its three modes. You could stop there and it would cover so much ground.
- Channel 2 is nasty mf’er. What’s interesting is that despite the massive amount of gain in the Uber/Crunch/Ultra modes, it doesn’t do that thing where some amps start tapping out as you pile it on. It just gets mean, meaner, meanest. lol
- The U, Hair, Hair + switch seemingly allows you to shape the frequency range of the Presence knob control. Very badass.
- I need to find a manual to figure out what the Metamorph control is doing. It all sounds good, but seems like some sort of tight/comp control.
- ODs, this thing eats up an 808 perfectly. I don’t think the SD1 is a good pairing. It thins it out a touch and then adds in some high end content I don’t like.
- When the tubes get glowing in the amp, mixed with the red background lights, it’s a beautifully evil amp. Bulge inducing aesthetic.
Only minor thing is some of the control modes and settings have some big volume swings so you can’t really easily A/B, which normally isn’t too much of an issue on amps because you generally dislike one of them. Everything here though I’m like “this rocks to me”. Might need to run it into the daw to get a critical ear on each option.
My wife walked in at some point while I was drooling over it and said “It’s cute how excited you are about that”. I explained to her to never use the word “cute” again in reference to gear, but it was a good summation, this thing really makes a killer a first impression. I was jacked the F up playing it.
If it can survive the honeymoon period, might need to look at flipping a Friedman cab for Ubercab.
