Guitarist review

Nick Guppy (Guitarist) December 02, 2014, 12:01 UTC

For the last 20 years or so, Thomas Blug - the brains behind the BluGuitar Amp 1 - has been in the enviable position of carving out not one, but two successful careers.

As an amp designer for Hughes & Kettner, Blug has helped produce some of the best-sounding and most feature-packed amps to come out of Germany; as a professional musician, he's won many awards, including the coveted 'Strat King of Europe' prize, and played with many of rock's A list. Blug recently started his own manufacturing enterprise called BluGuitar, and its first release is the much-anticipated Amp 1 head. Complete review

ACADEMY OF TONE

AMP1 Custom Control Tone:

When you turn the CLEAN TONE anticlockwise, you’ll get the typical “Californian” clean sounds for country and funk, with plenty of fullness in the Mids. This works particularly well with single coil pickups. If you’re using a guitar with humbuckers, use it in “split coil” mode or turn the CLEAN TONE clockwise to increase the Highs. 
Again, if your guitar has humbuckers and you want pearly clean tones, use it in “split coil” mode or turn the CLEAN TONE clockwise. If you want clarity and shimmering highs from your humbuckers, back off the CLEAN TONE. With the Clean Tone turned all the way down, most humbuckers will deliver balanced, warm, rounded jazz tones.

If you turn the Classic Tone control anticlockwise, you’ll get classic sounds, while turning it clockwise will result in more modern tones. I would advise you to turn these down slightly if you’re using single coils, or up a bit if you’re using humbuckers. MODERN TONE is a totally extreme control, which will give you two completely different – and seemingly incompatible – tonal options. Turned down, you get creamy, warm, singing Classic Lead Sounds that don’t grate at all – in the style of Gary Moore or Eric Johnson. Turning it up gives you the exact opposite: the world of metal, featuring ultra-modern metal sounds with extreme amounts of bite and dry bass that’ll make classic rock fans’ hair stand on end, but will bring a massive smile to the faces of metalheads. Here, you must show your own colours! 


 everything as much as possible without losing character or making the sound lifeless. 

Home & Recording

At home, what you want is as vibrant and full a sound as possible at living room levels. With AMP1, a single 1x12 cab will do the job (the upcoming BluGuitar Nano CAB or FAT CAB, for example). If you just love the punch and overtones of a howling tube amp, you’ll need a PowerSoak to tame the volume levels. Using the REMOTE1 foot controller, you can operate AMP1’s integrated PowerSoak within the home from anywhere between 150 mW and 2 Watts. If there’s no guitar speaker available, you can connect your headphones or home stereo to AMP1’s Recording Out port. Be careful with the volume levels, though! The Recording Out simulates the sound of a guitar speaker with a very elaborate 7-stage analogue filter circuit. In contrast to digital solutions, the signal is never converted, and therefore has a super quick response, with no latency.

Recording
There are many options available to you if you want to record with AMP1. The simplest is to use the Recording Out and, at the mixing stage, use a few effects to position the direct and dry guitar sound perfectly in the mix. This works fine even without a connected loudspeaker. When you do use a loudspeaker – even if it’s only at room volume levels – the sound from the Recording Out will be that little bit more vibrant and punchy because of the “current feedback”. This current has an effect on the sound, since it allows the power amp and speaker to work together in tandem. With REMOTE1 and the help of the PowerSoak, you can bring the amp into saturation while reducing the power. This lets you keep the volume level bearable and you will also get more overtones and punch from the amp for your recording.

Of course, you can also position a microphone in front of the loudspeaker for recording. In that case, I would record both the microphone signal and the direct Recording Out signal. In your recording software, after you have recorded you should make sure you compensate for the time lag differences from all signals, to make certain they are all in phase with one another. Later, when you get to the mixing stage, you can still make any necessary adjustments to the mix ratios.

Miking up – an art in itself
Anyone who has ever tried to record a guitar amp with a microphone will have had the following experience: through the microphone, the signal sounds completely different to what you hear when you’re stood directly in front of the amp. So, how do you mic up an amp correctly? Here are a few tips from my experience. Put the microphone really close to the speaker – this is also known as “close miking”. If you were to put the mic further away, then power and presence would be lacking. Sure, if you have a large recording space, you can record the amp with multiple mics. The different amounts of time it takes the sound to reach the mics can result in so-called phase shifts. The time differences, though, can be compensated for with modern recording software. Here, the craft of the sound engineer begins. In the studio, but also live, close miking – without any ambient sound – is almost always used. If a certain sound space is required, it is conveniently supplied by the mixing desk. In live situations, the picked up guitar sound is sent back through a PA system into sound spaces with sufficient reflections. Therefore, in these cases, close miking is the right solution. The decisive factor is always the quality of the direct – close miked – signal. Naturally, a miked guitar speaker offers up the most authentic solution. But the placement of the mic in front of the speaker is an art, because every centimetre you move it alters the sound radically, making a balanced sound very hard to find. I’ve spent hours in front of a speaker, moving the mic around and finding the best position and angle, in order to to find and then mark my own “sweet spot".
The sound of the recording is one thing, but the playing feel also has to be right. The sound also has to be big and powerful, otherwise you won’t ‘feel’ it.

Mixing
Regardless of whether you’re recording with a mic or through the direct Recording Out signal, a little post-production – with echo (even just a bit, so it’s almost inaudible), reverb, and minimal EQ and compression – will make you sound vibrant and natural, and will deliver professional sounding results.

There are three different types of reverb that help me with this: Plate, the good old plate reverb, which can be heard on early Van Halen albums. Their sound simulates larger rooms, like sports halls. During mixing, I use plate reverb to define the depth of the room in which the guitar is being played. The reverb time is between 1.5 and 3.5 seconds. Room – a small room can get the guitars to sound particularly wide. You can also use this effect in conjunction with short delays. Nowadays, I also like to use short convolution reverb IR Responses for this. In the 80s, the ‘Eventide’ Chorus was particularly fashionable.

The simulation of a real genuine space, in my opinion, is very well suited for giving a sound real height, as well as depth. It’s also worth trying out mixing the various miked and Recording Out signals.
Trying out a mix with all of these effects is worth it – mainly because you need to check the different volumes against each other. Often I only use very little of two of these effects, but the third one very prominently. If I were only to use one of the effects, though, something would be missing.
It’s also worth lightly EQing and compressing the guitar and reverb signals again. This is because every instrument needs its own space in the mix, and everything you take away somewhere gives other instruments more room. Here’s the motto: slim down