Digital Music Reviews

The Mesa Boogie Mark VII is a high-performance guitar amplifier that has gained popularity among professional musicians and hobbyists alike. It is the latest addition to the Mark series, which has been a staple in the guitar world since the 1970s. The Mark VII is a 100-watt amplifier that features a four-channel design. Each channel has its own set of controls, allowing for a wide range of tonal options. The channels are labeled clean, fat, crunch, and lead, and each one can be customized to suit the player's preferences. One of the standout features of the Mark VII is its Multi-Watt power amp. This allows the player to switch between 100, 60, or 10 watts of power, which can be useful in different performance situations. For example, the 10-watt mode can be great for bedroom practice or recording, while the 100-watt mode can provide enough power for large gigs or outdoor performances. Another notable feature of the Mark VII is its CabClone IR technology. This allows the player to c

The CHUG – High Gain Preamp with Gate is a powerful tool for heavy metal guitarists who demand the best. This preamp is designed to deliver a high-gain, high-quality sound that is perfect for modern metal music. The preamp also features a built-in noise gate that helps to eliminate unwanted noise and feedback, making it a must-have for any heavy metal guitarist. Design and Features The CHUG – High Gain Preamp with Gate has a sleek and compact design that is perfect for live performances and studio recordings. The preamp features two channels, each with its own set of controls, allowing guitarists to create a wide range of sounds. The preamp's high-gain circuitry is designed to deliver a powerful and aggressive sound that is perfect for heavy metal and hard rock music. The preamp also includes a built-in noise gate that helps to eliminate unwanted noise and feedback, making it easier to achieve a clean and clear sound. Performance The CHUG – High Gain Preamp with Gate's performa

  Boss Metal Zone Waza Craft: A New Take on a Classic Distortion Pedal The Boss Metal Zone Waza Craft is a modern update to the classic Boss Metal Zone distortion pedal. The pedal retains the same powerful and versatile sound of the original, but with some new features and refinements that make it even better. Design and Features The Boss Metal Zone Waza Craft features a similar design to the original Metal Zone pedal, with a rugged and compact enclosure that is built to withstand the rigors of touring and live performances. However, the pedal now sports a sleek black finish with silver graphics, giving it a modern and stylish look. The Metal Zone Waza Craft retains the same four control knobs as the original, including the Level, Tone, Distortion, and Mid knobs. However, the Waza Craft version now features a three-band EQ with a sweepable mid-range frequency control, which allows for even more precise tone shaping. The pedal also includes a switchable boost function that can be engage

How’s this for a cool idea? An all-tube preamp with a nice assortment of built-in cabinet emulations for direct recording. But’s it’s also a 20-watt amp head fueled by two 6V6 power tubes and capable of driving speaker cabinets. And oh—it’s roughly the size of a toaster and weighs about as much as your guitar. Yup, that pretty much describes the D20 from Canada’s Revv Amplification. It’s an ingenious concept, expertly realized, and enhanced by many clever and useful features. Familiar Feel The amp’s front panel controls are straightforward: gain, treble/mid/bass, and master volume. The gain control employs a push/pull pot, with hotter, more distorted sounds in the out position. There’s also a headphone-out jack with a level control, a switch to lower the amp’s power from 20 to 4 watts, and a rotary switch to select one of six on board cabinet emulations. (More on those in a moment.) To use the D20 without a cabinet, you connect to a DAW or mixing desk via the rear-panel XLR out

Spend some time shopping for headphones, and you’ll quickly grow tired of devices claiming to present music “as the artist intended,” despite sporting vastly different sound. But what if your favorite cans actually could sound like the recording studio where your favorite music was mixed? Enter SonarWorks, a company I’m guessing you’re not familiar with, as it’s best known in audio engineering circles for tuning professional studio speakers. Now SonarWorks is turning its attention to something more mainstream by calibrating headphones to sound like those same studios. The concept is simple. First you tell SonarWorks’ software, called True-Fi, which headphones you’re using; 138 models are supported, at the time of writing. It then modifies your PC’s audio output in order to “flatten” the frequency response into something very close to the neutral sound of a professional mixing studio. And I do mean very close.

The electric guitar pickup has been wound since 1934. 80 years later, we’ve unwound it. Original and totally re-imagined, Fishman Fluence pickups are free from the hum, noise and frustrating inductance issues that plague even the most coveted wire-wound pickups—revealing pure, uncorrupted and musical tone. With a couple of notable exceptions, new electric-guitar pickup technology tends to not fare well in the marketplace. Sometimes it’s because the new designs seem more for engineering’s sake than sound’s. But most often it’s because guitarists are addicted to classic tones achieved using World War II-era technology. “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” is our basic MO. Heck, even many radical experimentalists prefer vintage pickups as starting points for their aural anarchy. So why did revered acoustic pickup and amplification guru Larry Fishman venture into this world filled with, as he put it last year, “too much voodoo”? In a nutshell, because he felt the technology behind