Video by BluGuitar – Tone Innovation For Guitarists via YouTube
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Academy Of Tone #70: More than Metal – the classic side of the AMP1 Iridium Edition PLUS interview with Paul from The Studio Rats!
On this week’s Academy of Tone, Thomas explores amplifiers – and more specifically, AMP1 Iridium Edition – from a different perspective.
Different guitar players need different tools to best express themselves. Guitarists need to feel comfortable and connect with their gear, from the guitar to the amp and the speaker. To raise the awareness that different players need different tones and amps, Thomas will try to emulate demonstrate a few basic type of players, using different picks and approaches.
Then he will demonstrate how playing style will affect tone and how different amp sounds support certain playing styles.
We can also use the AMP1 amps to showcase these different perspectives. The original AMP1 (now known as the Silver Edition among users) was heavily inspired by Thomas’s vintage amp collection that he put together and used himself for three decades. Next came the Mercury Edition, which was a tweak to the AMP1 by Thomas to provide a tighter low-end response to cater for more hard rock and even metal players. And next came the Iridium, which Thomas tuned to offer up the tightness modern metal players demand.
Because of this, Iridium was initially marketed as being a ‘metal amp’. This let BluGuitar directly attract metal players who couldn’t quite achieve the tones they wanted from the Silver and Mercury Editions.
But if you look at the Iridium from a different perspective, and use more traditional playing techniques and styles, the Iridium opens itself up to so much more than just metal. It has a versatile Clean channel that will go from super pristine to classic cleans. The Vintage channel goes from early Van Halen tones to those of a hot-rodded Marshall JCM 800. The Classic channel then takes those traditional Marshall mods into even bigger and punchier territory, while the Modern channel offers maximum brutality for metal, but also the rich and creamy tones that we know and love from Mesa Boogie, Soldano and and the Peavey 5150.
Thomas will demonstrate all of these settings with classic guitars from his arsenal: a Les Paul, an ESP Superstrat , a P90-loaded Les Paul Junior, and more, and – of course – his single coil Strat! He will switch back and forth between Iridium and Mercury Edition so you can get a feel of the differences of both AMP1 amplifier concepts.
Plus, in the second half of the show Thomas has a fascinating discussion with Paul from The Studio Rats. Paul recently got hold of an Iridium, and he’s done many great videos with it, including one showing us why the amp is “not just for metal players”! The Iridium has become his new favorite amp, and his new portable gigging solution, and Paul is most definitely one of the more ‘classic’ users of the amp. In the interview, Thomas and Paul discuss Paul’s discovery of the Iridium, and why it’s fast become his go-to amplifier…
(Please note, this is a pre-recorded AoT show, because Thomas is on tour this week!)