Best Micro Guitar Amp - 2023 Shootout!

welcome back to hton TV welcome yes today we are looking at some little amps. If you're not familiar with this channel, we do Gear reviews every day, really, um, and yeah, be cool if you want to stay up to date, like it. And subscribe and hit notification Bell, um, right, how would you describe this category of amp practice? Maybe yeah, they're pretty much the smallest hyper-portable travel amps, travel practice amps, so these are the ones called near-field amps, so they're designed to be pretty close to you in a small room or something. so just to touch um really very popular Black Starfly is probably the oldest of the three and has been super popular uh newx is pretty similar Kind of an enclosure for the Black Star, but with a few more features in an app and then the positive grid Sparkk Go is the smallest of the three, but with the most complete features, well, yes, the newest and most complete feature set we have.

We're going to shoot them, they're super popular, they weigh about 100 pounds or so. We're using a slightly different

micro

phone technique than we would if we were making a big amp, so we're just going to use these two

micro

phones here to try to emulate a kind of room sound and then whichever of these three you're listening to, We'll place it in the middle so the microphones pick it up consistently. Let's start with this one because we are connected correctly, so I like it and size wise it looks really good. It comes with two different grills here. It has Bluetooth.

It's super easy. Put it in your pocket. It's a pocket. This is the one where we'll put all the specs on the screen about how it works in terms of power and charging and all that kind of stuff. What you're seeing on my phone now is the super cool Spark app that this one and it's two older brothers, the spark and the original spark and the spark mini um, they're all used and you can see and this is very different how Blackstar does this, There's no app for Black Star and there's a slightly less pretty app on the new one. so let's look at the application now that uses the full spark range, so this particular amp has a couple of Bigger Brothers.

If you're not familiar again, there will be links to those and videos below or maybe even up there, yeah, but all. It uses the same basic app, so check this out, it's cool and visually intuitive. You can see now if I go back to my main page. I have this platforming concept right, so each of these as I scroll down. now it's a different combination of amps, pedals, all that kind of stuff, so it's like having your own virtual studio full of gear, so this particular one that we've decided to use uses this blackface Duo amp, I can, it's a bit.

It's actually complicated on a phone, probably a little easier to see on a tablet, but by moving my finger up and down you can see that I'm adjusting the knobs that my fingers are on if I move the device to the left and to the right at the top here it highlights an effect I want you to see I have a pedal that you know anyone can use oh that's a compressor pedal that's a drive pedal it's easy if I want to turn the drive pedal on and off , I press the switch that you would expect to change if it were a pedal it's cool, yes, even I can figure it out, yes, plus a bunch of

guitar

amps and pedals that you can use to build your rigs that we'll demo in a minute. uh you can stream music through this in fact there are a lot of videos that you can watch in the positive grid app and then you can do crazy things within the videos like cut sections and loop them so you can learn to play your favorite songs, as you can see now.

I have no idea if this is going to record me when in camera mode. Maybe not, but you can film yourself playing and then continue using the sounds here in the something else, I guess you can see the settings section now. I have some songs that I can save. I can link them to my Apple Music or Spotify accounts. I have a tuner. All that kind of stuff. A metronome here. Very, very good, but let's have it. Listen to some of the sounds that Pete has chosen and that he likes, so here's our first rhythm sound.

Did you change anything to St? I just put in the booster and a little delay. You are not going to bother anyone with the volume level that comes out. This is because it's not super loud, but it's ridiculous if you allow the room to get quiet and you kind of accept that this is designed for a room where we're in a fairly large room. As for the studio here, I think if it was in a slightly smaller room, this was sitting looking at me and me playing the

guitar

. This results in some epic, epic volumes of the nocturnal type.

Let's try the next one so that again you can save any number of your different amp combinations and and. pedals together, so here's one called a soloist, uh solo, that uses an amp that's designed for an old Marshall type of sound, it sounds great, that volume, um, that's the point, that's the point, you can have Excuse me, can you have headphones. I guess if there isn't really a review of Spark, but in this case, in the smallest of the Spark products, the only way to edit the sounds is through the app, so if you're anti-app, eh, yeah you're an anti-Apper, so yeah, maybe this isn't for you, but what's pretty cool is that once you have your four basic presets that you can see here, I have them on this screen, they're actually remembered. on the phone and using this little gold button here and these four LED lights here, you can cycle through your different presets without having to have the phone connected.

I'd like to quickly say that there is an equalizer there. my personal opinion on this, I'll show you the equalizer here and that's your friend, uh, in any of these little ones, if you can have an equalizer in any application scenario, it will help you get a little bit more bass and a little bit more. more kind of presence within the sound, so playing the violin is a good thing with these things and that's just what I like to do. You know, I think the other thing to say about these three really small ones is that the maximum volume is not pleasant. place to be, everything starts to ring a little and sound a little like it would if you had a little Bluetooth radio and you used it at full speed and it's not a criticism, I think it's just if you plug it in and discover that you need a little more EQ, it's your friend, so let there be something else to do here, which is again the presets here and there are millions of other presets that we could have looked at, but this is crazy.

It's called crazy, and again, see if you're familiar with the whole Spark thing. I can upload my presets to the cloud. I can find other PEs, other Spark users who will have uploaded their sounds and I can copy them. There are millions, millions and millions. there we are, that's what it sounds like and next we're going to try the new X, yeah, okay, so here's the new X again. Now we will put the specifications on the screen, a small red sticker on the front, here you can just peel it off. You can see it's quite a larger enclosure than the positive grid, but it's still super small and powered by a USB battery.

All that sort of thing is small, isn't it? We're running this on the mains right now and unlike the Blackstar, uh, newx comes with its main supply, okay, so let's look at the app now, it's kind of a follow-up to a similar concept to the positive grid, but like I said before, it doesn't look that good, so the presets can be seen at the top 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 here we go um the second row down shows me the um effects that are used in the chain to make that preset um the rating ones are the ones that are off but again it's easy to turn them back on Again, if you want, below are the settings for each of the effects blocks so you can see that they're changing as I use the Crazy effects blocks functions here, if you want you can load your own IRS into it.

I'm completely sure that at this price anyone will come close to that, but you can if you want. The Newx has a built-in drum machine, which I really like. I have been using this at home recently and make it myself. uses the battery quite a bit, you can stream music to it, you can stream music to all three via Bluetooth, but one of the things you can do through the Mighty Light app is upload tracks so they're stored within the app had a few others in there when we made the video, right? Then what you can do again is create loops within those tracks, so if you're just interested in learning the solo of a song over and over again, you can cut the solo out of the song and just have it spin and spin and spin and turn and finally here we have the settings page, the only thing that's desperately interesting is tuna, you can see it's quite a nice tuna, um and then interestingly, on the USB side of things, if you want, you can have the USB as audio interface output there, so it goes into your laptop and you can use it to record.

Whatever you're playing, you can use it to re-amp, you can take a dry output if you want anyway, that's when the IR charger comes in handy, isn't it? It's quite sophisticated, for what is ultimately a small diddy amp, um. without the app connected, unlike the positive grid, at least you have some things you can do without the app, so gain volume, tone, you can adjust the reverb delay level, you can start the drum machine if you want and uh this green button here is how you cycle through your preset so you see it every time I press it and the red one of course is the loudest so the headphone jack obviously has an Orcs too so yeah You don't have Bluetooth and you have an old CD player that you need to, you know, to plug in headphones, but you can do it.

Anyway, let's listen a little to some of the sounds. Here's our clean jazz sound. There are already more complete sounds, a little bigger. It definitely sounds louder and is a heavier duel rectifier. Do you want to play some drums with this too? Here we go uh wait on the master volume. I don't know what it was about, but I thought it was in one key and It was in another key, there are a lot of different drum patterns here, different styles, there's also a metronome, if you prefer to just replace the drums with a metronome. I love it, that's great, isn't it another high level quick game, just you?

I know how to replicate a different guitar amp. I remember this super Reverb One from previous demos had a nice cleanliness to it. I mean, there are a lot of effects working well and speaking of which, let's quickly show you how I would adjust it to make it easy. change the reverb there, so look, I'm going to click on that purple square that says R RvB underneath. Reverberation. I only have two controls for Reverb Decay, which is the reverb amount and the level, which is its mix. and I can just drag my finger down and make it less.

I can turn off the delay completely, that's the little on and off switch here, look, turn it back on but adjust maybe down in the mix, so while I don't think it's as visual as it is as attractive as the app that comes with the positive grid. I don't think it's any less easy to use, it's very easy to use. I mean, visually it looks better than this in my opinion. Plus, you like the look, just the visual aspect. Yeah, well, but how much is the next one, the Spark mini, the next size up because it's more like this size?

But it's more money, probably a little bit bigger, still, I mean, about 120 pounds for the next one up to 200 pounds for the biggest. of 250, so you're talking about a lot more than this anyway, so yeah, okay, okay, I mean there's a couple more presets here, but actually, these I think are for that one, it's not one that is gain, but the last one is actually acoustic. one you can for these and these use acoustic guitar or bass you can play the guitar through this it will sound like this actually I'm not sure um so that's the new powerful light.

I can actually turn off my phone recording now. because the last one was very Borat style, introduction because Black Star doesn't have an app so change, but it does have Bluetooth so you can stream your music, okay, Black Star Fly, quite a wide range of products within Blackstar. flight range, this is one of the middle ones, so you can have this amplifier without Bluetooth and it will be the cheapest of the three, you can have it with Bluetooth, which makes it about the same price as it actually is. the same price as the other two here or you can have it rechargeable and with Bluetooth and that will make it more expensive and you can have a cabinet sorry, you can have the right cabinet so you will have two of them.

I think this is not a scam,is the wrong word but it doesn't come with the power supply and it costs £35 for the power supply so you'd better buy a rechargeable one n n well I don't know I mean it comes with batteries but I think you have to go through a lot of battery packs before it's cheaper to have a power supply that says yes. I sold one of these to a friend of mine two or three years ago, who was learning how to play guitar and was playing this at full volume, yeah, and he called me like the day after he got it to say, oh, it sounds like if it was defective like that and anyway I heard it and said no, no, the batteries have. he just ran out so he literally got like a day if you use the batteries similarly when he had a black star flying uh.

He used to run it on batteries too, but he used mine at a quarter volume and used to get like six months on the same mass. I have the same batteries in mine anyway, so the Black Starfly has no programming, no app, or anything, so it's very much like a conventional type of guitar. If I want to introduce distortion I have to press the overdrive button and turn up the gain, and if I want to introduce the only effect it has is a delay like an echo effect and again I just have to dial it in, but it's not a bad sounding little amp as it is, so here we go, we'll find a little profit. now, and if you want to introduce a little bit of delay, the big knob at the end here marks the time, so how much space is there between each repeat and the little micro type of knob?

Here is how loud itap go is, it sounds good. well yeah I quite like it, to be honest I wish there was a until I got until I got my new X version of this. I was super happy with my little black star that I used to make. I say I used to. I still do it. a bunch of crap where I'm sitting at home and playing on Instagram with my little daughter, she has this pink Jackson guitar and this matching little pink Blackstar M and I use it like an iPhone to record myself playing in the bedroom and I used to get a lot comments about the great tone, what amp you're using and so, you know, it's like, I think for what it does, it sounds good, so it's still good after all this time, yeah and In fact, the other thing that Blackstar has fact is a bunch of different color versions of this edit and lie graphic.

Oh yeah, if you watch the video, we played a hundred of these, you can see it there too, so I guess we probably always always do that. I said this in videos, what a great time to be alive. You know, when we were young exactly. Any of these three are an amazing sounding little amp to take with you or have in your room, whatever. Forget about any of these three, they all have Bluetooth so you can stream music from a phone or tablet or any other type of Bluetooth enabled playing device through these and I think that's where most of the fun comes from, just playing. with your favorite guitar tracks, the specs are obviously slightly different on each one, so I hope you get an idea of ​​that as we've reviewed each of them, priced at £99 less for this one if you don't want Bluetooth, eh no.

Don't forget that you have to buy the power supply separately. This £99 also comes with the power supply. This also carries the batteries here on the back so you know you can use them for batteries absolutely so you know you're pretty. There's a lot of features here that you don't get on the Black Star, yeah a bit of positive grip, one is £129, you'll find throughout the year that positive grid will do little price promotions on these things, so I think right now, like us. We are filming this video and possibly for the run up to Christmas

2023

it will be at 109 but the regular price is $1229.

Check the links below to see that, it's obviously rechargeable so if you want to run it on the net electric, do it via a USB charger, but actually I think it gives you nine hours or 10 hours or something like that. Yes, everything is rechargeable. Amplifiers are always volume dependent, so at high volume you get a lot less playtime at low volume, but there you go. I think so. I'll end this video with a little recap, maybe just a few back-to-back plays to get you going. I can see the relative difference in sound between the three, but honestly, all three perfectly good amps, tiny amps.

You know that especially, I think if you're just starting to learn how to play guitar and the amp you got in the package is one of those like Wasp a Jam Jar sounding little 10 watt amps, it's definitely worth upgrading to one of these three. I mean, if you're just traveling, have one of these, put it in your car. Great, that's great, thanks for tuning in, until next time, like and subscribe, woo to oh oh.