Re: Roland Cube 30x and 60 - I'm curious about them!
So I went down to Robb's Music and tried out a Roland Cube 60 today. I spent about 1/2 an hour with it. Should have brought my own guitar. The Strat I played was a '62 Relic and fine but I didn't like any of the humbucker guitars they had readily available. Compared to my 335 a poorly set up Epiphoney Dot didn't cut it.
It was hard for me to imagine this really being a 60 watt amp. I didn't have my 22 watt Deluxe Reverb with me to compare, but I'm almost certain my Deluxe Reverb is louder.
I didn't get the feeling the Cube 60 would be quite loud enough for me to gig with a bass, drums, and another guitar or piano.
Maybe at church. But not at a bar.
But I did like the amp. I thought for $345 it was a lot of amp for the money.
Of all the amp simulations, I liked the clean channel which is a Roland Jazz tone. It was simply the most beautiful sounding setting on the amp, and a really great clean tone. The presence control adds some nice sparkle - it's a nice control to have.
I also liked the preselected tones of all of the effects. The reverb, delay, chorus, phase shifter, and vibrato all sounded very good. I especially liked the vibrato which can be set to a much slower throb than my blackface Fender amps allow.
Moving to the amp simulations: I didn't think the Vox, Blackface Fender, Tweed Fender, or Marshall actually sounded very much like the real amps that I have owned, but the tones were still very good and very useable and pretty cool.
For overdriven tones, I liked the classic and metal settings best and Aceman is right about the presence control. It's a HUGE PLUS in getting the right faux-Marshall tone and it comes on the Cube 60 but not on the Cube 30.
I wasn't crazy about the Vox tones. To grainy or something. Maybe if I spent more time with it. Just didn't sound anything like the Beatles or Brian May and those are the two tones I want from a Vox amp.
I liked the cleaner Blackface and Tweed tones. I didn't like the overdriven tones here as much as the faux-Marshall overdriven tones but they were still good. The Blackface setting seemed to be cleaner and clearer than the Tweed.
Doing a riff like Little Wing, I preferred the tone of the clean channel of the amp over the clean setting of the blackface emulation.
I am not a metal player. I'm a blues, r&b and rock player. But I get the feeling most metal players would want to use an overdrive or distortion pedal to get the super saturated tones I hear in that kind of music.
I didn't try one, but I suspect a nice TS-9 or TS-808 would sound good with the way this amp is voiced.
I was hoping I'd hear the more saturated tones from this amp than I heard - but I still really liked what I heard for the most part.
I dunno that I'll get one anytime soon - but like the way Roland voices their products and I liked this amp a lot.
I'm going to look at a Micro Cube next.
