About a year ago, I reviewed the Positive Grid Spark Mini and didn’t find it worth keeping. There were a lot of things to like about it, but it seemed like a larger-than-necessary package for such a low volume device. I was looking for an electric guitar amp that could be used in small acoustic guitar jam situations, for home practice sessions, and anything beyond that would be gravy. Positive Grid must have read my mind with the Ultra-portable Smart Guitar Amp & Bluetooth® Speaker because it meets all of those requirements and adds a bunch of extras. To be honest and clear, there is nothing in the Go firmware or software that is different from the Mini. The difference is that the Go fits in a pocket of my guitar’s gig bag and does everything the Mini does, maybe better.
I, sadly, didn’t figure this out on my own. I was down enough on the Mini that it wouldn’t have occurred to me to try an even smaller Positive Grid amp. Lucky for me, a much smarter friend brought a Go to my home to show off a couple of weeks ago and I was almost instantly sold. After playing with his for an hour or so, I ordered one from Sweetwater and it arrived a few days later.
The controls to the Spark Go are incredibly basic. The top of the amp contains the 1/4” guitar input jack, the guitar volume control (the ring around the input jack), a 3/5mm headphone/aux out/Line out 1/8” jack (using this connector disables the Go’s speaker), Music +/- volume buttons (Bluetooth is the Music input), a Preset select switch and LEDs to indicate which preset you’ve selected (4 are available).
The right side of the amp hosts the remaining USB3 port, a power switch and power LED, and the Bluetooth indicator. The power switch is a little hard to find in good light and almost impossible to find without good lighting. I’m going to paint a white dot on mine. There is a strap button on the left side of the amp.
There is a rudimentary guitar tuner bult into the preset/Select button setup. Bluetooth setup is pretty obvious and basic. I love the guitar volume control and, since it is an infinite rotary control, it beeps at you when you’re at max volume. The chassis is wrapped in a removeable black rubber-like sleeve that is easy to grip, but does disguise some of the buttons in poor lighting. The back of the amp is brilliantly covered in an even more rubbery base which nicely couples the amp to a floor or table, restricting the speaker disbursement by half (hemispheric) and providing a theoretical 3dB boost over leaving the amp suspended or even on edge. I like to put the amp at my feet when I’m playing with friends (who are mostly on acoustic guitars) and full-up the amp is pretty much a perfect match, volume-wise, with the other instruments in the room.
Positive Grid has been fairly aggressive about firmware updates, including the one I downloaded and installed today (10/15/2023, the 2nd update in the month I’ve owned the amp). Updates are installed through the USB3 port via either Windows or Mac OS. So far, all of the updates have been seamless and none have caused problems (imagine that Microsoft and Apple?). The software, either on Android or iOS, is excellent and easy-to-use (essentially Bias 2). As I demonstrated in the Mini review, is insanely flexible, although you can only load 4 presets at a time you can load a lot more than that through “favorites” on the app while playing. You have 33 different amps and 43 different effects to play with and the effects range from (in this order of signal flow and grouped as described): noise gates, compressors (5) and wah (J.J Legendary), drive and overdrive (14), amplifiers (40), modulation (11) and EQ (2), delay (6), and reverb (9).
The part of any amplifier review that matters is “how does it sound?” Obviously, there isn’t a lot of bass from a tiny speaker and a passive radiator, but there is enough to create pleasant, musical guitar tones if you aren’t greedy. I wasn’t impressed with the default sounds, but it didn’t take long for me to come up with 4 that I like a lot and at least a couple dozen in my favorites pile to fall back on for other situations. As a direct-to-recording interface, the latency is close to zero and while I usually need to brighten-up the output (especially distorted amp setups) I’m pretty happy with the Go as my recording electric guitar interface, too. For $120, that is a lot of function for the buck and I’ve really upped my guitar practice time as a result.
Postscript: This past week I tried using the Go as a guitar interface for recording and online music (Sonobus) and it was terrific. I'd read some complaints that the sound was dull or artificial, but I didn't find that to be true at all. I have a couple of emulation pedals and I think the Go is at least as good and a lot more flexible.
