But you also get some pretty handy Marshall, Vox and American metal emulations thrown in for a bit more diversity. There are 12 amp models on offer here, with classic Fenders like the Bassman, ∥7 Deluxe, ∦5 Twin, Princeton, and ∥7 Champ unsurprisingly taking the lion’s share of the action. The 100 factory presets are a great way to get a feel for the scope of sonic possibilities this amp represents, nearly all being quite useable and covering a wide variety of genre-appropriate sounds. Getting started is a no-brainer plug in, turn it on and turn up the Master Volume, but not too far or you’ll give yourself a hell of a fright – 100 watts is not to be trifled with in a small room. You can even make your own multi-track recordings via the Ableton Live Lite 8 Fender software, a real deal-sweetener I reckon. This opens up deeper editing of the amps and effects via an excellent graphic interface, allowing you to store unlimited presets, sort and play along with MP3s and also accesses the community website where you can download free presets from Joe Blow or even Johnny Marr or Jeff Beck. There are two balanced Line Outputs left and right, a Ground Lift button and an FX Loop Send and Return.Īnd being a digital amp there is the now mandatory USB port, this one for accessing Fender’s Fuse software. There’s an 1/8 inch Auxiliary Input jack socket for a media player and a headphone input, while the back panel features inputs for the 2 or 4-button (or both) footswitches, the former (included) allowing you to step up or down through the 100 presets, while the 4-button has a Mode switch allowing you to group presets into Banks and step up or down through them, or alternatively switch Modulation, Stomp or Delay effects on or off. The amp modelling and digital effects section is simplicity itself, both visually and operationally, consisting of nine illuminating push buttons, a rotary knob and a reasonably sized LCD screen. There’s the familiar silver-flecked grille cloth that has graced thousands of its valve ancestors, and a very clean and simple front panel consisting of Gain, Volume, Treble, Middle, Bass, Reverb and Master Volume knobs. It sits nicely in the middle of the range and is likely to give a good indication of what we can expect from Fender’s foray into the digital realm.ĭue to the absence of valves and transformers the Mustang III is a very compact (52 cm x 45 cm x 27 cm) and lightweight (16 kg) unit for a 100W amp. The version well be looking at this issue is the 100W combo ( Mustang III, version 2) which comes loaded with a single 12 Celestion and an rrp of just a snitch under $700. No, not the stylish six-string Fender axe so beloved of callow, shoe-fixated youths, but a five-model stable of digital amps consisting of 20 and 40 watt basic models (1 and 2), 100 and 150 watt combos (3 and 4), the latter being a 2 x 12 stereo version, and the 150 watt stereo head and 4 x 12 cabinet (5). As they got better they began to gain a solid foothold in the lucrative average Joe market through brands like Line 6, Peavey and Vox, to the point where a large and seemingly unassailable corporate entity like Fender had to sit up and take notice, and eventually embrace the technology or risk being left behind.Įnter the Fender Mustang (cue pounding hooves and snorting). While valve amplifiers still remain the holy grail for most professional musicians, digital modelling amps have been with us for well over a decade now and very smart designers have been steadily ironing out the sonic bugs that made it easy for valve-snobs to be so dismissive of them. But time, as the Rolling Stones astutely pointed out, waits for no-one, and, to quote another legend and survivor of the ’60s, the times they are a-changing. Fender are pretty good at what they do best and have been for a long time now – building industry-standard valve amps and classic electric guitars by the thousand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |