It seems to be a really solid sounding unit from all the demos/reviews I've watched, even though I find the Amped 2 to be the more exciting one. Would be interesting hearing a shootout between the Amped 3, BluGuitar AMP1 Iridium and maybe the H&K BlackSpirit Floor. The Amped 3 is about half the price of those two, but it would still be an interesting comparison.
Man, that amp behind you the deluxe reverb head there is nowhere to be found. I was looking to buy one for more than 2 years. All in all, thanks for what you are doing is great. Great content.
The other guitarist in my band uses an Amped 3, it sounds ok. It's not great, it's serviceable I guess. We play fairly heavy stuff. I use the smaller Amped 1 on clean with a Boss OD-200 for a variety of overdrives and distortions. IMO it's a much better option for a fly-rig as the cleans are pretty decent and it saves me lugging a head to gigs and rehearsals. It's half the size of the Amped 3 and allows you to add your own OD pedal.
I bought one earlier this year in an effort to downsize and was majorly disappointed. I sold my Blackstar Series One 104 EL34 to buy it and just couldn't get it to do what i wanted. It is quite loud and can keep up with a drummer even at 20 watt but boy does it get shrill when turned up even in the 100 watt mode. Ended up selling it at a massive loss and put the money towards a 6505+.
So I tried one out for a couple of weeks. It sounded great in the store and terrible outside. The difference was the cabinet and in particular the speakers. The display was with a St James 2*12 for $750 USD, which is pricey and on top of the $720 USD for the pedal. My cabinet at home is a 2*12 with Vintage 30s. The amp sounded harsh and brittle. It's a bad copy of the Bluguitar Amp 1. Then there's the whole fiasco of getting these serviced. You can't. There are zero authorized US repair centers, and I have extreme doubt any outside of the UK. Amp techs will laugh at you for most any Black Star gear as there are very few schematics and zero official ones. So just skip this and get a Tonex 1 and a Quilter Toneblock 202. Get all the sounds you need with something you know will be reliable.
Very cool demo + review ! Thanks Andy! .... but ... but.... WHERE is the Draft Beer Dispenser faucet ? You need to have a good beer when playing guitar !! Its a MUST !
All the cleaner sounds were decent I think, the other channels had that 'blackstar top end' that is something ive found some people can hear and hate, and some it doesn't bother at all. I fall into the I can hear it and don't like it camp lol
I agree it sounds crap , so many better options in this price range, i appreciate your honesty, can't figure why Cameron Cooper loves these so much , maybe he knows something i don't about how to get good sounds out of it but ..this is the last thing i'd drop my hard earned cash on
I'm curious who is after this, personally. Not that it's bad or even unwarranted. It feels like a very unique attack is all. I think you are and have easily become my favourite rig channel if only because you have a mix of talent, personality and a need for balance. You don't say "I love this brand, and this brand did a thing" and this goes wickedly far. It's just forward, does it work, gig or sound good. I love it. You just attack things at sound, and it's glorious. Please do not shift from this, because I know you will gain legs and grow with this.
Thanks for your intelligent and insightful words. I think there’s too much negativity around these days and even the stuff that isn’t perfect doesn’t need to be attacked too hard. I don’t wanna come across as a fanboy but so much gear is great these days, the bar has been raised
Holy shit, the riff you play at 12:27 is exactly something I'd written, but in drop G, way back in '99.. Is that from anything, and I didn't realize it???
Brittle and harsh is good. Think punk 1977. Love this ! - would love to to do a bit of Clash or Sex Pistols. If you did what would you use to get this sound ? Challange ! 😊
I have the Blackstar ID 30 TVP and without connecting it to my PA it's very difficult to get the right tone I'm looking for. So you are not wrong that's its taking you some time to dial in a Tone that's usable I'm very familiar with the struggle. $699.00 nope $299.00 maybe
some amazing extras , great power input , fx loop and 9 volt power outs , am crunch person , why did'nt they tweak the sounds at source re over drive / light gain , love Blackstar gear but not this
I never liked the crunch of Blackstar low budget amps , but at 500 £ definitively they have no excuse, I love the brand BTW, but my experience with Blackstar is not as good as my expectations 😔.
10:49 wouldn't it make more sense to get a DSM & Humboldt Simplifier? Both the MKII and, if you want two amps in one, the DLX are 100 euros cheaper than this, both are analogue, both weight less than half a kilo instead of 2,5 kilos, and both are actually pedalboard friendly not like this ginormous thing haha
Can someone explain to me why I saw the thumbnail and said to myself “haha that would be wild if this was actually that big. Fun photoshopping done right there” and then I click on the video mostly to see how big the pedal actually is and as soon as I see the pedal I’m shocked that it’s smaller than the thumbnail. You know the obviously enlarged thumbnail…. But I’m surprised it’s not that large. wtf is wrong with my brain?!
I don't think you like it because you're not interacting with the master, which I presume it relates to the poweramp section including the powertube options
I must defend Thomas Blug and say bluguitar amp1 mercury is the original and they stole his product into a shitty digital version ...amp1 mercury edition is absolutely amazing...
"What Blackstar AMPED 3 Does Better than YOUR amp" Well, to be honest, nothing. The Amped 3 sounds horrible, my old ZOOM505 sounds the same or even better, oh my godness! PS: Why did you cover the "big G" brand name on your SG?
except for the fact that the gain channels are so quiet compared to the clean and crunch it makes it useless in a live application. i had 2 units and 1 replaced under warranty and the second returned immediately for the same issue. great design but flawed in execution. the amped one was better to run with my helix using it as a power amp mainly. until i fried 2 of them. blackstar isn’t responding to me to replace the second unit.
Didn't they rip off another company all the way to the point of stealing the name for this product. Also why do all the amp techs refuse to work on blackstar amps and say they suck?
I suspect being very dense PCB amps, they're just harder to work on, just like Mesa amps. This thing is probably all surface mount, which is an extra nightmare. But I think a lot of the Blackstar hate isn't deserved. I think some people on some forum somewhere decided a couple decades ago they're not a fashionable brand, and guitarists being guitarists, it just stuck. Marshall went through a period of being unfashionable, that was right around the time Blackstar got started up.
I got a Blackstar St James for cheap and wanted to change the tubes. For context, I have rebuilt or modified 15 amps. Changing tubes is not hard. Their PCB is insane. Multiple trimmers in random spots and no obvious bias points. I did ask Blackstar and they said “users can’t change their own tubes. Please go to a certified Blackstar amp tech.” Pass… sold it. It did not sound great anyways…
That harshness you’re hearing is inherent in digital EQ’s and unfortunately, electronically speaking, there’s no way around it, which is why I don’t like products like this
I don't claim to be a tone or gear savant, but this pedal amp seems pretty uninspiring. All the elements are there for it to be a really useful piece of gear, but it seems like you'll be spend more time tweaking the settings than playing it to get a sound you like out of it. You could get useful (or even good) sounds out of it, but there are other pedal amps with similar features that can get you there faster.
Yikes, those high gain metal tones are cringy ... and don't think the problem is you Andy ... it sounds sterile and processed. Hard pass for me. The clean and crunch though sound quite good, so Amped 1 would be a better option because the high gain channel leaves a lot to be disered.
Class D has a gross amount of intermodulation distortion and harmonic distortion. Pulse Width Modulation should be relegated to industrial motor speed controllers and not for audio purposes. Sure it's light and small and loud but it just sounds like dog sh*t.
Don't believe everything you hear on the internet. Yes, I've seen the video where the bluguitar guy says he saw the Blackstar product and immediately knew they had tried to rip off something from the power amplifier circuit of his amp1 product. That's a bold claim to make without having seen the circuit. Let's set aside that their preamps are completely different, which should really be enough to settle the debate. Blackstar's modeling software is proprietary and has 0 in common with the amp1 preamp circuit. He says they copied something from his power amp circuit but didn't understand it and therefore it doesn't actually work how it was intended to. Ok, so then it's not a "ripoff" of his product if it doesn't do what his product does or claim to, is it? If he has a patent protected circuit design, I'd be happy to compare the two and determine if there is any infringement. Otherwise, it looks more like his feelings are hurt that his product wasn't as successful, which has little to nothing to do with its design. Fwiw, I think the bluguitar amp1 is a superior product from a performance perspective, but the business failed to sell it to a broader market. The Blackstar is a good product for what it is at the price point, but it doesn't appear to be a "ripoff" in any meaningful sense.
I'm still sold on the BluGuitar AMP1s. They're just SOLID.
Me too!
Damn that thumbnail really duped me. I thought it was gonna be massive 😂
I thought the crunch you ended up with sounded really good!
It seems to be a really solid sounding unit from all the demos/reviews I've watched, even though I find the Amped 2 to be the more exciting one. Would be interesting hearing a shootout between the Amped 3, BluGuitar AMP1 Iridium and maybe the H&K BlackSpirit Floor. The Amped 3 is about half the price of those two, but it would still be an interesting comparison.
Man, that amp behind you the deluxe reverb head there is nowhere to be found. I was looking to buy one for more than 2 years. All in all, thanks for what you are doing is great. Great content.
Some might be happier with the BluGuitar Amp1 Mercury Edition, which (allegedly) the Blackstar product imperfectly impersonates.
Bluguitar Amp 1 is the ONE and only!
The other guitarist in my band uses an Amped 3, it sounds ok. It's not great, it's serviceable I guess. We play fairly heavy stuff.
I use the smaller Amped 1 on clean with a Boss OD-200 for a variety of overdrives and distortions. IMO it's a much better option for a fly-rig as the cleans are pretty decent and it saves me lugging a head to gigs and rehearsals. It's half the size of the Amped 3 and allows you to add your own OD pedal.
I bought one earlier this year in an effort to downsize and was majorly disappointed. I sold my Blackstar Series One 104 EL34 to buy it and just couldn't get it to do what i wanted. It is quite loud and can keep up with a drummer even at 20 watt but boy does it get shrill when turned up even in the 100 watt mode. Ended up selling it at a massive loss and put the money towards a 6505+.
So I tried one out for a couple of weeks. It sounded great in the store and terrible outside. The difference was the cabinet and in particular the speakers. The display was with a St James 2*12 for $750 USD, which is pricey and on top of the $720 USD for the pedal. My cabinet at home is a 2*12 with Vintage 30s. The amp sounded harsh and brittle. It's a bad copy of the Bluguitar Amp 1. Then there's the whole fiasco of getting these serviced. You can't. There are zero authorized US repair centers, and I have extreme doubt any outside of the UK. Amp techs will laugh at you for most any Black Star gear as there are very few schematics and zero official ones. So just skip this and get a Tonex 1 and a Quilter Toneblock 202. Get all the sounds you need with something you know will be reliable.
I've heard good stuff about Masking Tape SG's are you gonna review it?
Very cool demo + review ! Thanks Andy! .... but ... but.... WHERE is the Draft Beer Dispenser faucet ?
You need to have a good beer when playing guitar !! Its a MUST !
All the cleaner sounds were decent I think, the other channels had that 'blackstar top end' that is something ive found some people can hear and hate, and some it doesn't bother at all. I fall into the I can hear it and don't like it camp lol
Nice review. Seems really cool. Not sure it is for me.
Good old Blackstar, the company that ripped off Thomas Blug.
Flamps are cool.
Floor amps? Floor heads? If backline cabs are available why haul one?
I agree it sounds crap , so many better options in this price range, i appreciate your honesty, can't figure why Cameron Cooper loves these so much , maybe he knows something i don't about how to get good sounds out of it but ..this is the last thing i'd drop my hard earned cash on
Black star struggle with low to mid gain sounds. Very clean and mushy thrash seen to be their fortes.
My mkiii has the best low gain I've played through. The high gain is a little too hair metal for me but it's not bad.
I'm curious who is after this, personally. Not that it's bad or even unwarranted. It feels like a very unique attack is all.
I think you are and have easily become my favourite rig channel if only because you have a mix of talent, personality and a need for balance. You don't say "I love this brand, and this brand did a thing" and this goes wickedly far. It's just forward, does it work, gig or sound good. I love it. You just attack things at sound, and it's glorious. Please do not shift from this, because I know you will gain legs and grow with this.
Thanks for your intelligent and insightful words. I think there’s too much negativity around these days and even the stuff that isn’t perfect doesn’t need to be attacked too hard.
I don’t wanna come across as a fanboy but so much gear is great these days, the bar has been raised
@@TheGuitarGeek I really feel the same way most of the time.
I’ll wait for the real deal.❤ blug
Just increase the gain on Crunch 1 and thick the tone up. Maybe it helps
Holy shit, the riff you play at 12:27 is exactly something I'd written, but in drop G, way back in '99.. Is that from anything, and I didn't realize it???
Just something I jammed! We are RIFF BROTHERS
Brittle and harsh is good. Think punk 1977. Love this ! - would love to to do a bit of Clash or Sex Pistols. If you did what would you use to get this sound ? Challange ! 😊
I have the Blackstar ID 30 TVP and without connecting it to my PA it's very difficult to get the right tone I'm looking for. So you are not wrong that's its taking you some time to dial in a Tone that's usable I'm very familiar with the struggle. $699.00 nope $299.00 maybe
great demo. i prefer the AMPED 2 though. This one just sounds too scoopy
I'll give Blackstar this: their £500 all-in-one sure can do a pretty solid DS-1 sound.
Could be the cab, but there definitely felt like a hole in the mid range which made me not like either the crunch or the OD channels.
Certainly does a better job at stealing technology, than my amps XD
some amazing extras , great power input , fx loop and 9 volt power outs , am crunch person , why did'nt they tweak the sounds at source re over drive / light gain , love Blackstar gear but not this
the chime is now
so I heard how they made a bad copy of the Bluguitar product with the amp thing , is Blackstar just a rip off company ?
I wonder if the crunch with a different speaker would sound like the sound you are after.
Andy! Are you beefing with Gibson? :D
I'm no expert but I feel those Crunch and OD tones would get lost in a band mix with the high hats etc. Far too 'angry wasp'
No, that's just Andy not EQ'ing it for a mix, haha
I never liked the crunch of Blackstar low budget amps , but at 500 £ definitively they have no excuse, I love the brand BTW, but my experience with Blackstar is not as good as my expectations 😔.
What's up with the Warlock behind you? Nice.
You mean the stranger things Warlock that I play in this video? Nice isn’t it!
@@TheGuitarGeek had watched that far when I commented. Lol 😆
Oh! Is this the ripoff of the BluGuitar?
hey what brand is that sg guitar?
Gibson!
😂😂😂😂😂😂
10:49 wouldn't it make more sense to get a DSM & Humboldt Simplifier? Both the MKII and, if you want two amps in one, the DLX are 100 euros cheaper than this, both are analogue, both weight less than half a kilo instead of 2,5 kilos, and both are actually pedalboard friendly not like this ginormous thing haha
Can someone explain to me why I saw the thumbnail and said to myself “haha that would be wild if this was actually that big. Fun photoshopping done right there” and then I click on the video mostly to see how big the pedal actually is and as soon as I see the pedal I’m shocked that it’s smaller than the thumbnail. You know the obviously enlarged thumbnail…. But I’m surprised it’s not that large. wtf is wrong with my brain?!
It fI’m want sound right. It sounds broken or unfinished. Or like a beta prototype. The eq overall, like you said, is not set correctly.
I found them quite harsh no matter what. That's why i sent my Amped 3 back.
Why do you have tape over the Gibson logo?
I’m late!
You’re not the only one
I don't think you like it because you're not interacting with the master, which I presume it relates to the poweramp section including the powertube options
I messed about with the master a lot but not always on camera. I’m satisfied with my verdict but it’s still usable
I must defend Thomas Blug and say bluguitar amp1 mercury is the original and they stole his product into a shitty digital version ...amp1 mercury edition is absolutely amazing...
First impression…. You’re going to snap off those tiny toggle switches if you have this on a pedal board
Almost certainly not
@@TheGuitarGeek dark stage, big feet, late nights. Stomping buttons, yea. Tiny toggles are perfectly safe. 😂
Marshalls are Nasaly and boogies have the bass
"What Blackstar AMPED 3 Does Better than YOUR amp"
Well, to be honest, nothing. The Amped 3 sounds horrible, my old ZOOM505 sounds the same or even better, oh my godness!
PS: Why did you cover the "big G" brand name on your SG?
except for the fact that the gain channels are so quiet compared to the clean and crunch it makes it useless in a live application. i had 2 units and 1 replaced under warranty and the second returned immediately for the same issue. great design but flawed in execution. the amped one was better to run with my helix using it as a power amp mainly. until i fried 2 of them. blackstar isn’t responding to me to replace the second unit.
Didn't they rip off another company all the way to the point of stealing the name for this product. Also why do all the amp techs refuse to work on blackstar amps and say they suck?
I suspect being very dense PCB amps, they're just harder to work on, just like Mesa amps. This thing is probably all surface mount, which is an extra nightmare.
But I think a lot of the Blackstar hate isn't deserved. I think some people on some forum somewhere decided a couple decades ago they're not a fashionable brand, and guitarists being guitarists, it just stuck. Marshall went through a period of being unfashionable, that was right around the time Blackstar got started up.
Exactly, the amped is just a cheap copy of the amp1 and doesnt sound nearly as good
I got a Blackstar St James for cheap and wanted to change the tubes. For context, I have rebuilt or modified 15 amps. Changing tubes is not hard. Their PCB is insane. Multiple trimmers in random spots and no obvious bias points. I did ask Blackstar and they said “users can’t change their own tubes. Please go to a certified Blackstar amp tech.” Pass… sold it. It did not sound great anyways…
Who could say? Not a million miles away from the name of BluGuitar's AMP1 though...and from what I understand, similar design...
Hold my beer, Behringer IT BETTER ALL BE THERE WHEN I GET BACK…
That harshness you’re hearing is inherent in digital EQ’s and unfortunately, electronically speaking, there’s no way around it, which is why I don’t like products like this
32 seconds in Channel 3. All the things the fear about gear like this. Sounds like a Metal Zone in a 5 inch tin speaker. Yuck!
Can of bees
🤣
on crack?
That’s our new band name
So, you're deaf then? Gotcha. You should get some hearing aids, man.
I don't claim to be a tone or gear savant, but this pedal amp seems pretty uninspiring. All the elements are there for it to be a really useful piece of gear, but it seems like you'll be spend more time tweaking the settings than playing it to get a sound you like out of it. You could get useful (or even good) sounds out of it, but there are other pedal amps with similar features that can get you there faster.
Yes BlueAmp
Isn't this the one they stole the design of from Thomas Blug?
If so... maybe don't feature that exact product?
My Blackstar HT Stage 100 MK1 is better
It is somehow sad to see how the guitar industry is being taken over by products that will spend most of their lifetime as electronic waste.
Amped 3 is just a rip off of a great product it hardly competes with : Bluguitar amp1
No thanks.
They ripped off Thomas Blug
Jar of schizophrenic wasps 🧐
Yikes, those high gain metal tones are cringy ... and don't think the problem is you Andy ... it sounds sterile and processed. Hard pass for me. The clean and crunch though sound quite good, so Amped 1 would be a better option because the high gain channel leaves a lot to be disered.
Class D has a gross amount of intermodulation distortion and harmonic distortion. Pulse Width Modulation should be relegated to industrial motor speed controllers and not for audio purposes. Sure it's light and small and loud but it just sounds like dog sh*t.
Better than my amps? LOL ahahahahaha BS
I think it’s better than your amps because they’re not mine so of course it sounds better.
🤣
We found the dinosaur. 😂😂
Sounds like a tin can
This is a rip-off stolen from bluguitar thrash trash
Cheap clone junk.
You should spend a week or 2 figuring these out before making a video
BOOO!!! Blackstar ripped this product off. For shame. Thumbs down.
Don't believe everything you hear on the internet. Yes, I've seen the video where the bluguitar guy says he saw the Blackstar product and immediately knew they had tried to rip off something from the power amplifier circuit of his amp1 product. That's a bold claim to make without having seen the circuit. Let's set aside that their preamps are completely different, which should really be enough to settle the debate. Blackstar's modeling software is proprietary and has 0 in common with the amp1 preamp circuit. He says they copied something from his power amp circuit but didn't understand it and therefore it doesn't actually work how it was intended to. Ok, so then it's not a "ripoff" of his product if it doesn't do what his product does or claim to, is it? If he has a patent protected circuit design, I'd be happy to compare the two and determine if there is any infringement. Otherwise, it looks more like his feelings are hurt that his product wasn't as successful, which has little to nothing to do with its design. Fwiw, I think the bluguitar amp1 is a superior product from a performance perspective, but the business failed to sell it to a broader market. The Blackstar is a good product for what it is at the price point, but it doesn't appear to be a "ripoff" in any meaningful sense.
Can channels with different EQ be stored? or is the equalizer shared? Thank you