I FINALLY Play the Positive Grid Spark...But Should You Buy One?

So what exactly is

spark

? Is it a practice amp? A Bluetooth speaker. An audio interface. Multi-effects unit. We are having a great day today, we have a

spark

in the studio, this is one of the most requested pieces of equipment so let's go through it with a fine tooth comb to find out if it's worth the money, so this is Le I'll give the spark a little spin so you can get a general idea of ​​the size of the cabinet, but it's very small and very light, which is good for a practice amp now, before we get into the nitty-gritty. details and review, you already know some of the features.

I have to say I like the way they designed the cabinet to look like an amp head but without any of the knobs on the front so it has a very clean look and I think it would look great in any room that is also nice for a practice amp because you want to walk past your amp thinking I

should

practice, you don't want something that ugly, you know you have to hide it in the corner of the basement and you never see it like that. This can really fit any room. I think it looks great and it's a good reminder to practice properly, so let's turn the amp over and take a look at the controls, so let's zoom in and take a closer look, so there are a couple of different ways. you can use the Spark firstly, you can use it as a traditional practice amp and use the physical knobs on the unit, secondly you can connect your phone and your tablet and really unleash the potential of this unit, which we will show you in a second, but physical. knobs, basically we have your main selector so you can plug an acoustic guitar into a dock and then for the electric guitar settings you have, you know, clean, bright, crunchy, high gain and metal, secondly, you have a control of profit, okay?

I can really turn it down clean or turn it up just by using that gain control like any other amp. Then we have our three band EQ, so bass, mid, mid and treble and you can see I actually have most of the bass dialed in. of this amp, which is pretty amazing because it's a pretty small amp but it produces a lot of bass and I actually find myself cutting lows on most patches, so you know something you

should

know, it has a pretty big full range.

play

again we'll hear it in a second so we've got our master okay and this is not the master output but it would be like your master amp controlling the main output is right here and that controls, you know, the master volume of the unit, so from the master volume, we have our modulation delay reverb and as I mentioned, the main output, you can use this just like you would with any type of practice amp, really cool now, right on the top side, here you can see.

Well, it's probably a little more than your standard amp. You have a tuner and a tap tempo for the delay, so if I want a slower delay, I can give it a little touch and you go faster there. delay and go, that's really cool and you have your three, your four different presets, excuse me, so if you just want to go to the preset, one preset, two, three and four and these are also built in, so you know that we will do it. go to editing in the future, but if you just want to use it, you know, as a standard practice amp type situation, you have your four presets from there, you have the music volume, which we'll talk about in a second. and headphone output and of course the main input for your guitar, so the Spark clearly does a lot of things, including the fact that it's a Bluetooth speaker, so if it's in your family room, in your living room living room or on your back terrace, you can connect your Llévalo by phone and listen to all your music.

You can put it under your TV and use it as a soundbar, so it's really flexible that way, but the main focus is the fact that it's a practice amp with some really smart features. So today we will test them in real time and find out if they work well and if they are worth your money. Today I'll be plugging into the spark with my Paletti T style guitar. Let's plug it in and check it out. Some of the tones now, as I mentioned, you can use Spark, you know, just a normal physical practice amp, but where you really unleash its potential is by connecting it to a phone or tablet.

Let me try this again because it works with bias. amp engine which is pretty phenomenal and you know when you plug it online you can get like 10,000 different sounds which can be a little overwhelming but they make it really easy to get started so it's amazing so here you can see that We have our pedals. on the top, the amp and the cab and when you click here you can see the four different channels that are built into the amp right now, so channel one, two, three, four, which are programmed into the physical unit , you can see the hardware is fine and then we can change that and make them our own and there's a bunch of different genres you can choose from, but here, if we're into a crunchy tone, let's open that up so we have a kind of ac30 tone. to the bridge pickup on my tele and to change a parameter you can just take it, maybe add a little more treb and some gain.

I love it so let's try to add some delay let's turn that on that's really cool let's leave it on and we could add a drive pedal in front of it and again there's a lot to choose from so it's really cool you can customize any of your sounds and then when you click up here, you can override this so it's always on channel two or you can save a new patch that you know or whatever, you can share it or you can save it to the hardware, so if I want the channel 2 always be on my hardware, I don't want to charge my phone or tablet, that's how you do it so it's really cool, let's check out some of the other channels, let's go clean just see how that one sounds.

I'm going to go to the neck pickup here and I should mention that I'm going to go back to something with gain here. let's go to high gain there's also a gate built in and it works very well so since I'm on single coils I'll go back to my bridge if I turn off the gate I don't know if you guys can hear any of that and it's gone so it works very very okay, okay, so we don't want the verb there and we probably don't want the delay to appear either. Let's check that, oh, we're on a Marshall, let's turn that bass down a little bit, let's turn the mids down. maybe a little bit of treble that woke it up a little bit so you guys get the idea and then there's the metal too.

Let's try some of the other features of this amp because let's go back to the high gain because there's some really amazing stuff here. now when you go to your profile i'm not logged in but this is the ringtone cloud this is where there are 10,000 different sounds so if you want to know just conveniently search like nom david gilmore you know you're going to get that ringtone if you want hendrix you can get that tone or clapton or whoever uh it's all there so it's really cool that's here and then the music tab is the other area where this gets very very clever and something absolutely surprising for a practice amp, so it's smart. jam and then there's just a bunch of preset genres, so if we just go blues here and there, you control the volume here with the little knob on the top, so it's got drop ups, there we go, I'm turning the volume down. my guitar, so it has like drums and bass so you can

play

and play that and then there's a bunch that you can scroll through within that genre, very, very cool and the way you basically play with that is you control your guitar with the main output and then the music with the other knob and is designed to be an amazing practice tool.

You can see the chords, so if you want to practice the rhythm you can, if you want to solo you can and if I want to turn down the volume on my guitar. I just use that main output, I just turn it down a little bit and so on, very cool stuff, uh, let's go back to the main music tab, let's try a different genre, let's try some rock, there it is, so if you want to practice a little. of your chords and again you can scroll across the top and you can practice your chords so it's much more than just a practice amp it's almost like guitar lessons which is crazy so let's press play again so basically drums and bass are cool things to Sure now when you come down here there's a bunch of different genres built in so if you want to try, I don't know, some kind of ballad, it doesn't matter, let's try the first one, a youtube pops up and Also I have the chords, so again I haven't played this, but anyway we'll try it so awesome, and then you come back and you can try some other, I don't know, let's try some shuffle rock, classic blues. rock guitar, let's move on here to see if this will dampen, so there you have it and again you can mix your guitar separately from the music, which works great.

Let's try a couple of other real time features for you guys so anyway there's so many different ones like it's amazing so it's amazing let's go back oh no let's try the smart jam here it is so there's a couple of different features from smart jam, let's try them there are Dave and Sharon. Dave loves rock and pop. Sharon plays funky beats. so let's jam, okay, so I don't know, let's try this, let's go one, two, three, four, okay, start, okay, listen, please play up to eight bars of music, smart generation, oh , it will analyze your interpretation, okay, uh, let's restart that, what am I? let's play, let's just play some chords, let's keep the tempo, sure, okay, so let's see what he does with that, okay, he's got the tempo and the chords, so he was just playing a G, so he's got it, but kind of changed it to like some kind of funky calypso, oops, well there you go, it's got the wires, uh, I didn't quite get the feel of it, but it's very interesting stuff, let's come back here and look at some of the other things, so It's like he doesn't.

I don't know, let's see some rock tones here uh, there's an orange again. I haven't used this. I'm just doing this in real time. I hope to give you guys the raw experience of what it's like to use this so here's the orange amp let's get rid of some of that verb alright let's try another ah metal oh here we go table okay thank goodness we have a door because again, I'm still on my Telecaster, that sounds pretty good for a tele. Well again, let's bring out the mids a little bit more, maybe give it some of this action that sounds pretty good, especially in a mix, it may sound a little weak right now, but you have to think that if you had a bass and a drum fantastic, now let's go. see if this works, like in the real world, so a lot of times people put a tube amp or some kind of low gain overdrive in front of their high gain amp, and that was fine, so yeah, it totally works like in real life. that's awesome, so basically if the overdrive pedal is off and you just have the amp, it can get a little loose and you know, putting this overdrive pedal on just tightens things up, so here it is, now I like that tone, but if you put it on I don't know if they'll be able to hear it, but the whole error is gone so it's great, it works exactly like in real life.

Anyway, those are some of the main features. There are so many different genres and once. You say I don't know the cloud of tones, it's endless, like there are so many different things. I guess I didn't show you, maybe some of the pedals, let's go back to our crunch and go to the drive pedals. Anyway, there are a bunch of different drive pedals just added, you know, you don't have to buy extra ones, everything is included, so we don't talk about that kind of stuff about modulation, but they're all there too, so let's try it this. univibe that's cool and then a bunch of different amps here we go so, yeah, I mean, I wish I could show you all of this, but the main thing you know these online things is the ability to play backing tracks instantly to I have built-in drums and bass, all that for practice, so it was just a quick look at the spark and I wanted to keep it raw and real time so you guys know what to expect if you buy this amp.

I didn't want to do any fancy editing or cuts or anything. I just wanted to show you in real time what it's like to use the software and the amp together and I have to say it's pretty smooth and there's a lot of stuff. I didn't show you the voice control and all kinds of different features, but the main kind of user experience is that you know how to plug your phone or tablet into the amp and basically create custom patches, download them, and know if you want to play along. downloading a specific song like I said, if you want to sound like Gilmore or if you want to sound like whoever, you can download it and have it at theInstantly, you can program four into the unit itself, so if you go to your friend's house to practice, you know it's good there and I must say this amp is loud maybe we should find out how high we go now.

I have to say that around 100db is pretty loud for me, the amp was about five feet from the tablet when I was measuring and everything was absolutely on and I have to say it wasn't even failing which was also pretty impressive so I think which could go beyond a practice amp to become a small rehearsal amp, as long as you just had maybe a few people get together to go over some songs, uh, if you have a metal band and your drummer has double kicks and the bassist has a six-string bass or something and dropping down-tuned guitars and all that, it may not work for that, but if you only get a few people together or if you play a genre where you know the drummer has a reduced kid or are playing a cajon or something, you have acoustics and keys, this would be absolutely fine for small rehearsals beyond just a practice amp, so the Spark will sell for around 300 dollars and we have to ask ourselves if it is worth it and for To really evaluate that you have to think about what practice amps were like, especially when I was learning, you know there was no way to make them sound like your guitar heroes and with the spark you just download the tone you want for a specific song and you're done. there, you just have to learn the guitar part, which of course is the goal of a practice amp to inspire you to play, and the old amps sounded terrible, although the verb sounded horrible if you tried.

You know, you turn up the overdrive knob, it sounded like you were pushing a phone book across a table, I saw that horrible hum, you know, they took the pedals terribly, so even if you bought a good pedal, those old practice amps just won't work. They sounded good and with The Spark it's like a completely different ballgame. You can find any tone you want and it sounds good at least in my opinion, even if you didn't like the tones I was using in real time you just modify them and save them to your unit and that's it, so I think this is absolutely the amp Which most people should buy if you're not playing in front of big crowds you don't need a monster amp so this thing is small and light I think it looks good.

Sounds good and talks about crazy flexible, so here are my recommendations. If you're looking for an amplifier, take a look at the Spark because it goes far beyond just being an amplifier and is a legitimate learning tool, as I showed you, that you can listen to. to a youtube video and break down the chords and show them the chord shapes like it's a learning tool, it shows them how to play this song great and it does it seamlessly in real time, like I showed you, there's no editing, I just played. the video, the chords came out and off we went, so cool stuff and you know, backing tracks to learn scales, drums and bass, there's a built-in metronome and tuner that I didn't show you or if you know, we'll buy it. an audio interface, well this is an audio interface so you know you can buy the amp for 300 bucks and save a ton on an audio interface especially if you just want to record guitars so you know I didn't test that feature , there's a lot.

I didn't there are so many but what I tried you guys saw worked great so yeah if you are reviewing an amp I would do this and the only downside I could find to this entire amp was that I don't really like the size of the music knob. I would prefer something larger like this just for ease of use. That's literally my only complaint. The box looks great, feels good, feels solid. It sounds incredible. There you have it. Thank you very much for watching, I know you. guys have been requesting this since they came out on nem and hype and marketing and all that kind of stuff other than this amp it sounds good and if you know bias effects or have used bias effects you will like this amp so anyway If you are in the market, check it out.

I'll link all the things in the video description below. You can see it there. Have an excellent week.