Re: What do you know about Blackstar amps ?
Well here's the deal. Most of the time people offer opinions on Blackstars, their experience is with the low wattage models. They are really great by the way, but you don't hear as much about the 60-100w combos and heads, nor do you hear much about the Series One or Artisans.
I have an HT100 that's been with me for over a year. I've been lucky enough to have been able to play the Series One 100, Artisan 15 and 30. First off, the Series One is just incredible and a cut above everything else. The Artisan series is also very good but not going to have that kind of versatility. A Series One head can sound good at all volume levels because it has this great power reduction features that lowers it all the way from 100 to 10 watts.
The Series One has a great sounding natural overdrive that has some overtones between a Marshall JCM 800, Vox AC30, and even a DSL when you make it real overdriven. It would be wrong of me not to mention how great the clean tone is also.
The Artisan series kind of reminds me of Vox amps, and I find that they have to be very loud to get really great tone. The Artisan 15 is pretty good at lower volumes but it's a huge combo for a 15 watt amp. They have awesome clean and classic rock sounds right out of the box.
The HT100 I have is a great sounding amp. People say the cleans are great and all that, and they pretty much are, but it's not on the level of Mesa Boogie or Fender. To stay really clean you have to leave the voicing off which gives you a dry kind of clean that's not really fluid and doesn't feel alive. It's better with the voice switch on but it's clean like a plexi is clean when it gets loud.
It has 2 overdrives. The first one is very versatile from anything to classic rock to heavy metal, but it's not real fluid for solos because like the clean channel, it feels kind of dry. It makes and incredible rhythm channel and is great for blues leads. OD2 is kind of like a DSL in that it has a nice saturated and fluid overdrive with more presence than OD1.
It's a dark sounding amp by nature, but there are enough controls to give you a ton of flexibility. It's supposed to go from a British sound to a Mesa Boogie sound with the ISP dial, but it sounds British both ways to me.
It has great definition and nuance that you usually find in boutique amps, but it doesn't have the natural brightness and aliveness you get in boutique amps. For the price you pay, it's an incredible deal and believe me when I tell you that you can drop them and abuse them and they will still work.
Then you have the low wattage Blackstars which are just really great sounding all the way through. They don't have the power or punch that the high wattage models do, but they're good as far as the volume knob lets you go.
