My Slantmaster 50 Story

Back in the early 2000s, I was happily working as a college instructor for a music school in St. Paul. I was the school’s Student AES Club faculty advisor and I was having the time of my life working with brilliant, inspiring, energetic young people who were fascinated with all things audio. Back in my early-QSC Audio days, I’d built a pretty cool ABX tester and, later (after I’d left California and the pro audio business), QSC decided to build a much more sophisticated ABX tester and use it to promote the company’s products. That didn’t work out well and the ABX testers were recalled from the company’s sales force and, I’d been told, crushed to bury the evidence that someone at QSC once thought professional audio people gave a crap about audio fidelity and honest listening tests. I’d been that same dumbasss a decade earlier, so they had my sympathy. Because I’m lazy and that wheel had already been built, I’d bothered Pat Quilter often to see if he could find an unwanted ABX test box that hadn’t died in the garbage compactor.

So, in late 2008 when Pat sent me an email warning me that there was a package coming my way, I thought I knew what would be in it. When it arrived, it seemed almost Amazon-oversized for what I thought would be a 1 rack-space piece. The box was also a lot lighter than I’d expected. I cracked the tape at the top of the box and saw the beige tolex, the leather handle, and the black dust cover and I was confused. I knew Pat was retiring from QSC Audio, so I assumed he’d built a model amp as a memento. When I pulled the amp from the box and saw the Celestion Century 12” I suspected it was more than an empty box demo. I plugged it in, turned it on, and (like everyone I’ve ever show the amp to) said, “Wow!” There is a cool, brief light show from the backlit front panel as the amp powers up that blows everyone away. I spent the rest of the day playing with the amp, which was more guitar playing than I’d done in the past 20-some years.

I brought it to school the next day to show it off to students, employees and instructors, and anyone who was interested. We used it several times in recording sessions over the next couple of weeks. One to-be-unnamed guitar instructor tried to buy it from me, tried to get me to have Pat build one for him, and coveted it so blatantly that I started storing it in the secured record lab area so that it wouldn’t disappear. Over the next year, I used the Slantmaster dozens of times with all sorts of guitars and guitarists and it was universally loved by everyone who heard it. It is kind of sad to admit that the amp has never been used outside of McNally Smith College or my home studio. It has never seen a live gig other than the MSCM’s auditorium stage a couple of times by players who I trusted not to abuse it.

This is what the Quilter Labs website has to say about the Slantmaster 50, “Built to celebrate QSC’s 40th anniversary, the Slantmaster 50 used a linear amplifier to deliver 50 ‘hot watts’ to a simply awesome Celestion ‘Century’ neodymium speaker.

“This was the precursor to Quilter Labs foundation.

“Only one hundred were made and featured a spring reverb! These are very limited, so if you have one you are lucky!”

I have one (#72 of 100) and I am well aware of the fact that I am lucky to do so. I have meant to write something about this amazing gift for nearly 15 years, but a conversation about the Slantmaster in the Facebook “Quilter Musical Equipment Owners Group” about the Slantmaster moved me to finally do the work.

The day I started work at QSC Audio Products in Costa Mesa in early 1983 was the day Pat took his first vacation in a decade. Pat and his mother had booked a tour of Europe on the Orient Express and he’d entrusted me with overseeing the initial production of the first Series One amp, the 1400, without a single unit having yet passed through production. There were . . . problems, but the QSC team of that day pulled together and by Monday afternoon we were cranking out 1400s at a pretty decent pace. The Series One and Three amps were the breakthrough products that put QSC on the pro equipment map and for the next 9 years I was a product engineer, test engineer, manufacturing engineer, manufacturing engineering manager, and tech services manager: 5 different jobs, with a couple that lapped-over each other a bit, in 9 years. Pat and I became friends, partially because I was the interface between his working hours (noon to whenever in the evening) and everyone else and me (7AM to 5-or-whenever-PM). We shared an interest in audio electronics, psychoacoustics, music, guitars and guitar amplifiers, electric vehicles, science fiction and fantasy, literature, and the people we worked with. I quit QSC and left California, after giving notice almost 3 years earlier that I would be leaving when I graduated from Cal State Long Beach, because I could never see myself breaking even economically in southern California and for personal reasons. Pat and I have continued to communicate through email for the past 30 years. I keep his Xmas letters in the same envelope as the letter that came with the Slantmaster.

Product Review: Positive Grid Spark Go

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. 

Placing Bets

The music/audiophile equipment business has been selling snake oil to a gullible portion of the public for at least since Emile Berliner began making 5-inch “gramophone” recordings of chamber orchestras. Connectors and conductors are one of the biggest scams perpetrated on the gullible and wealthy “customers.” Lots of people have spent more energy than I on dispelling the myths and bullshit and I think this paper does it as well as anyone, Mission Engineering’s “Measuring Guitar Cables.” I’ve also spent some energy in my past career and more recent articles on some of this stuff, but I’d old, tired, and more amused than outraged these days. In fact, for the most part I’m now totally on the side of the con artists. The past 40 years of watching the incredibly stupid folks who call the rest of us “libtards” has convinced me that there is nothing unethical about scalping people who want to be scalped.

A few nights ago, I was hanging out with a couple of local musicians and one of them began to explain why his $250 guitar cable was better than a regular cable. He is an electrician, by trade, and I’ve found that those guys are typically strong on the NEC and weak on electrical theory and this guy was no exception. He first started off by tossing out a word, “hysteresis,” that he clearly did not understand as some kind of quality connected to electrical conductors. Then, he went on to try and tag the “skin effect” to how he imagined that his new, grossly over-priced cable could make a passive electric bass guitar sound like one of his active instruments.

Pause here while I explain why I am not rich: I am slow-witted. When people say stuff that either blows me away with insight or astounds me in their stupidity I am equally stumped for an unacceptably long time. Sometimes days will pass before I come up with a relevant question or a snappy comeback. As disappointing as I am in print, I am way slower and dumber in person.

A day later, I realized I could have made some serious money that night. I am not a gambling man (at least not with my money), but this wasn’t a gamble. The next time this comes up in conversation I hope to be ready to bet $1,000 that I can easily setup a test that will prove this dude can’t tell the difference from a $10 Chinese-made cord and his grossly over-priced spread. All it will take is an agreement on what would be “proof” in the test (at least a 75% success rate), a blindfold, a pen and paper, a quiet unbiased witness or two, the two test cables, an instrument (especially a bass), an amplifier, and a dozen cable-swaps and about 15 minutes and I’ll be $1,000 richer.

In case you care, the ONLY things that matter in guitar cables are reliability and shielding quality. Reliability is directly connected to the size and quality of the connectors, the ability of the inner conductors to “slip” inside the outer sheath (either with slippery insulation materials or paper/plastic wrapping), and the care the manufacturer takes in assembly. Most shielding, either braided or double-wrapped, provides 100% shielding and, contrary to your high school football coach’s bullshit, 100% is as good as it gets. Avoid aluminum foil shielding because it will become noisy when it is flexed. Long cables are less reliable and more likely to become noisy. Noise is a relative thing with guitars, though. Since they are unbalanced and high impedance, your pickups are likely to be a bigger noise issue than your cables.

Jeff Was My Beatles

90% of the British Invasion went over or under my head. I was not a Beatles fan, but I liked the Who a lot and Stones fairly well. The rest of that lot was just elevator noise. But Jeff Beck changed my world. And now he’s gone. Since I heard the news, last night, I’ve had my office stereo system on an endless Jeff Beck loop. I own eight of his eighteen albums, plus two Yardbirds records, which amounts to about seven hours of non-stop Jeff Beck. Not nearly enough.

Geoffrey (Jeff) Arnold Beck (24 June 1944 - 10 January 2023) was four years older than me and light years beyond me musically from the moment I first noticed his guitar playing in “Jeff’s Boogie” on the 1966 Yardbird’s record (on Epic Records at the time, in “Simulated Stereo”). A friend and I travelled from Dodge City, Kansas to Denver, Colorado in ‘66 to see the Yardbirds. Specifically, to see the guy who played “Jeff’s Boogie.” Sadly, I don’t remember a lot about that show. It was in a fairly small venue, there were a pile of those weird looking Jordan amps on the stage, we weren’t able to get particularly close to the state, and I didn’t learn a thing from watching Jeff play. He was at least that far over my head when he was 21 and I was 17. I stupidly thought his guitar was fretless, based on his fluid technique and went home to rip the frets out of my Airline electric, rendering it useless.

The second time I saw Jeff in concert was in 1976 at the Music Hall in Omaha’s old Civic Auditorium. He was touring to promote the “Wired” album with the Jan Hammer band; Believe it or not, Billy Joel’s band was the intro act; talk about an odd couple. Mrs. Day and I had front row seats, stage right smack between Hammer’s keyboards and where Jeff stood. There was nothing between me and Jeff except a few feet and I still learned . . . nothing from watching him play. The band I was in at the time covered “Freeway Jam” and often ended our practices with “Scatterbrain.” “Scatterbrain” was slightly past my level of competence, which is why that song did not make it into our setlist, ever. There was a moment when Jeff appeared to be concentrating and I briefly imagined that if I could just get to the point where I could play the song at that speed, I’d have finally caught up to Jeff after a decade of floundering in his wake. Then, he noticed that Hammer was waving a scarf over his head while he played the song’s Lydian scale riff. Jeff walked over to Hammer, had a short conversation, and he laughed and they began to double-time the song (roughly the tempo of this 1976 live recording). At the new impossible pace, he didn’t look even slightly pressured.

Around that time, poor, sad little no-solo-hit-wonder John Lennon was whining about the credit George Martin received for turning their pitiful little bar band into a massive success, “"When people ask me questions about 'What did George Martin really do for you?,' I have only one answer, 'What does he do now?'” What George was doing about that time was Jeff’s “Blow by Blow” and “Wired.” Can anyone remember anything other than “Give Peace a Chance” or “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” from post-Beatles-Johnny? One more reason I do my best to avoid Beatlemania.

This is a quirk, I know, but vocal music rarely connects to me emotionally. Blow by Blow's "Diamond Dust" is one of the songs that practically reduces me to putty, especially when I'm listening to it on headphones. Pat Metheny's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" is another song that effects me that strongly. This Rolling Stone interview has Jeff talking about the clarity of sound, purpose, and musicality George Martin brought to the studio and Jeff's music: "Jeff Beck Remembers George Martin: ‘He Gave Me a Career’." This one of my favorite stories from that interview, "Beck has particularly vivid memories of the album’s last track, the gorgeously orchestrated 'Diamond Dust.' When they first cut the song, Beck thought his band’s version 'sounded a bit lame.' But Martin suggested adding a string section to emphasize the drama in the melody. 'When he finished it, he came wafting in and said, 'This reminds me of a French love movie!'' Beck laughs. 'I said, ‘You’ve just spoiled the whole effect! I might not put it on the album!’ He didn’t realize it was the worst thing he could have said to me. But I thought it was beautiful. George lit a fire under it.”

In 2011, my daughter Holly (through a connection from her Guitar One column of the time), got a couple of amazing seats at the Minneapolis State Theater for Jeff’s group of the moment. I swear my wife was the only non-guitarist in the audience. Every time I looked away from the stage at the audience everyone around me was fumbling air guitar, totally baffled at every note Jeff played. Me too, of course. Finally, I learned something from watching Jeff play, “There are no picks in his fingers!!” said my hillbilly-self probably out loud to nobody in particular. Holly, of course, had figured that out either before or after the interview and we had a conversation about my big breakthrough. I watched some YouTube and learned even more. Jeff’s biography documentary, Still on the run: the Jeff Beck story, gave me more insight than I needed or wanted to know about his genius. As Jan Hammer said, “Jeff is the guy who took the instrument of guitar into the furthest reaches of guitar universe and nobody ever - nobody even comes close.“

 I think I’m going miss his smile the most. Not just that he was having a great time on stage, but that “Did you see what I just did?” look that every guitar player within earshot heard, saw, loved, and desperately wished they could do. Even at 78, he was pulling off stuff nobody else in the world could do. Nobody. We’ll never hear anything like Jeff Beck again.

This is one of the few moments I wish I could believe in a life-after-death. The world would be far less empty if I could imagine Jeff is still playing guitar somewhere, anywhere. Today, his live version of “Elegy for Dunkirk” seems particularly sad and relevant. When I saw him perform this song live at the State Theater in Minneapolis in 2011 (not listed on the setlist, but he did play it), it was heart-stopping then. Today, a part of me wishes my heart had stopped with his.

A Declining Market or Just Laziness?

At the suggestion (to put it mildly) of a couple of friends, I finally visited Dave’s Guitar Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin this past week. Weirdly, this small town near the border of Iowa and just across the Mississippi River from Minnesota is known as a “guitar mecca” to lots of guitar collectors. The store deserves that reputation, if for no other reason than not much else about La Crosse is likely to attract national attention. It’s a perfectly nice small city, but not much different from at least 10,000 other similar sized cities. Dave’s Guitar Shop, however, is quite a bit different from other guitar shops. For starters, there are hundreds of guitars and Dave’s is a premier Taylor and PRS dealer along with several other brands. That, alone, is pretty cool.

The reason it has been suggested that I “need to see” this store is that several of my musical friends think my fascination with my two Composite Acoustics carbon fiber guitars is “sick.” I live in a small Minnesota town with a lot of guitar freaks, many of the rich guys who don’t play much but have substantial guitar collections plus there is a community college here that specializes in teaching Guitar Repair and Construction; wood only, of course. One of my local friends died in late August and I helped his widow find homes for his guitar collection and assorted gear over the past couple of months. Even though three of those instruments were high end guitars, it didn’t occur to me that I should play them to see if I had any interest. Several years ago, he swapped a red Composite Acoustics Cargo for my black sunburst Cargo and that turned out to be his favorite guitar to the end of his life. He, still, thought I should own at least one wood acoustic guitar. I made one a few years ago, but gave it to my grandson.

Mrs. Day and I did not travel to La Crosse solely for the purpose of me looking at guitars. That was just a side-benefit of our trip, which was to look at migrating birds (who have yet to arrive in our area). We’re celebrating her 6th cancer-free year after successful treatment by the Mayo Clinic in 2016 and this trip was part of the celebration. After a 120 mile drive and a 2 hour medical exam, Mrs. Day was ready for a nap. I left her and the cat to relax in the hotel and I slipped off to play with guitars at Dave’s.

To be honest, I am not a motivated buyer; mostly just curious. I’d just read the last hard-copy Taylor in-house magazine and there were lots of “this guitar just spoke to me” comments from their many owners. I wondered if a guitar could speak to me or make me feel anything different than I already feel about my pair of carbon fiber acoustic guitars. Contrary to my friends’ opinion of my instruments, I’m pretty happy with them. They are definitely capable of more than I can do, they play easily and comfortably, are simple to maintain, and I like the way they look. So sue me.

First up, on a Wednesday afternoon, I was not surprised to see that The Gig Store, a live and studio sound equipment place (in the same building) and a drum shop next door to Dave’s, appeared to be closed indefinitely. The retail music business is in rough shape and it is likely to get rougher. Dave’s was open and full of guitars. The entrance is all electric stuff all the time, which was fun but not my reason for being there.

The acoustic guitar area is on the south side of the building, through a short and narrow hallway that could easily be mistaken for a shop area. There must have been 100s of acoustic guitars and I played a couple dozen of them. I was most attracted to the Eastman AC series, with a upper bout sound port and a chamfered edge, Eastman seemed to be at least making some effort to be different than the crowd. Feel-wise, though, all of the acoustic guitars I played had pretty much the same neck, body style and feel, general design, and other than variations on the appearance of the wood they might as well been the same guitar; for my purposes. I really wanted to grab a guitar by the neck and feel that comfortable, natural grip I have with my hot-rodded hand-carved Yamaha V-neck. I had wild hopes that someone would take a chance on doing something inventive with the most important part of any guitar.

But, nope. Vintage Martins are a slight V-shape, but too slight for me. In fact, I had to move fairly quickly from a typical round guitar neck to a Martin to feel the difference it is so slight. Somewhere between a “hard V” and this “medium V” is what I’m looking for. And there was nothing like that in Dave’s great big guitar store. Even the lone carbon fiber brand carried in that store, McPherson, totally wimps out on the neck shape. They don’t even list neck shape options on their custom build page. If I wanted one, I’d have to build it myself, but at this stage in my life I’m not sure I want one bad enough to mess with it.

The music business has undergone some huge changes, mostly for the worse, in the past couple of decades. What has been called “Moneyball-for-Everything” has done a lot of damage, if you’re interested in any sort of variety or creativity. Like every other area of US culture, the guitar is not the hip instrument it once was and the majority of folks buying (and collecting) guitars are old farts. Old farts are not looking for anything new, unusual, or even odd. They want a ‘55 Strat or Tele or a 40’s Martin or a 60’s Gibson and not much else. Companies not in that collector strata are making instruments similar enough to the old standbys that you can’t tell much difference between a 1950 Gibson or Martin and a 2022 Taylor or the rest of the crowd of wannabes. So, I did not find anything that tripped any sort of trigger or even interest in all of those fine instruments.

I did leave that shop wondering how I’d feel when I got home and played my own instruments and the next day I found out. I’m unreasonably satisfied with what I have.

Talent, Technique, and Tone: How to Hide Them All

Back in the mid-70s (as an old friend would say, “When the sun was little-tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet.”), I was a wannabe rock lead guitarist with a lot more confidence than talent and had just moved from rural Nebraska to a city within easy striking and gigging distance from the “Big City”: Omaha, Nebraska and, almost as often, Lincoln, Nebraska and, occasionally, Kansas City and Des Moines. It didn’t take long for me to learn that all of the hot players in town got together fairly regularly at the Saddle Creek Bar for an open mic/jam session and as soon as I figured out where Saddle Creek was I geared up to go into battle.

My amp and gear, at the time, was a 1970s Peavey Artist 100W combo with a Peavey 12” speaker. It was more than enough amp for any gig my band ever did and with an assortment of pedals screwed to a board and a Morley wah, I could handle almost anything on the pop charts at the time. That was considered a “tiny” rig at the time for a rock band guitar player. The Artist was the first amp I ever owned that had a “switched” input setup where I could go from a clean channel to a distorted one with a footswitch. The distortion that amp provided was pretty much fuzz-box quality and, at the time, my tone roll model was probably Carlos Santana.

The Saddle Creek jam session was a different setup than I’d expected. The stage backline was a permanent setup. As I remember there were a couple of Fender Twin Reverbs for the guitars, a Rhodes, a drum kit, an Ampeg bass amp of some sort, and 3 or 4 vocal mics; all set up and ready to go. This was 40 years ago, so my memory of the equipment is open to question, but I won’t be far from wrong. As a guitar player, I was “allowed” to bring myself and my guitar, but no pedals and sure-as-hell no amp. What I learned about myself that first time at Saddle Creek was that I sucked. Without the crutch of distortion and sustain to cover up my mediocre right and left hand technique, I sounded embarrassingly mediocre and having to pick every note or cleanly hammer-on or off slowed me down to 1970s country and western music territory. I went home with my tail between my legs, my ego squashed, and my confidence turned into brutal humiliation. Not that anyone I was on stage with or who heard me said anything. They didn’t need to, I said it all to myself.

After getting my ass handed to me, I went home and re-evaluated my equipment choices and my playing technique. There were a lot of terrific musicians at the Saddle Creek jam and I desperately wanted to go back and, even more, I did not want to suck in front of my peers. I started practicing on an acoustic guitar, even with the band. We lowered our practice volume drastically to accommodate my acoustic guitar and to protect our hearing. For performances, I sold the Peavey Artist and lucked into a 1950s Fender Harvard, which I immediately “hot-rodded” with a JKL K120 12” speaker, Marshall-style tone controls, and a foot-switched gain-boost circuit (all tube). [Yeah, I know. I destroyed the “collector value” of the amp. I did that sort of thing to a few hundred amps between 1974 and 1984, so get over yourself.] No more pedal board, no fuzz box sound, just a collection of tones produced by my Moonstone guitar, my amp, occasional contributions from the Morley wah pedal, and my fingers.

A few months and dozens of gigs later, I went back to Saddle Creek and I didn’t suck. I went back often over the next few years and learned more from that experience than I had from practicing and playing in bands in the previous dozen years. In the process, I also learned a lot about live sound systems, acoustics, electronics, and even audiences. Not only did I improve, as a player, enough to feel reasonably happy with my performance among the great players at the Saddle Creek Bar, but my band’s overall sound improved enough that I would often have other musicians walk right by my little Harvard, on it’s folding stand right behind me on stage, They’d often ask, “How do you get that sound from that amp?” And they’d be pointing at the bass player’s SVT, totally ignoring the little Harvard they’d walked past.

And so, sometime around 1976 I discovered “small is better” and I have never found any evidence to the contrary. But I have seen a lot of evidence that big is bad from everyone from the rich and famous to the godawful cacophony produced by wannabe guitar players in cover bands from Texas to Nebraska to California to Colorado to Minnesota and the surrounding territories. When my Nebraska sound company was designing and building sound systems for bands in the late 70s, I’d tell whoever was spending the money “For every 100W Marshall you let on to your stage, you’ll need at least 1,000W of PA system to get the vocals over the guitar.” I haven’t seen any evidence to conflict with that advice, either.

Product Review: Positive Grid Spark Mini

Silly me, I thought the Positive Grid Spark Mini was a fairly new product, but my resident guitar repair guru and guy-who-will-try-to-fix-anything about town, Brian Stewart (Tree Strings Music), has already repaired one in his Red Wing shop. I haven’t yet heard what the fault was in that unit. I ordered a white one from Amazon, thinking it might be a fun practice and outdoor jamming amp. I’ve had it about a week and, sadly, the fun is wearing off fast. The good and bad news is that almost everything about this amp is driven by a phone/tablet app, iPhone or Android. The good is that it has hidden power if you’re willing to climb the usual steep software learning curve. The bad is, like most apps, it’s glitchy, unpredictable and often counter-intuitive, almost completely inflexible, and very dumbed-down while pretending to be a product for the sophisticated, discriminating guitarist (the ultimate oxymoron?). A lot of the positive reviews you will find for this amp begin with something like “I’m new to guitar and have only been playing about a few months . . .” It’s easy to like or even love something if you don’t have anything to compare it to. In my case, it’s hard for me to look at any product with the eyes of a newbie. So prepare to be disappointed if you’re hoping for that kind of bubbly, happy-talk review. At 74 and after 50 years in various areas of pro audio and music, there is nothing new about me except for the crap that keeps popping up every time I have a doctor’s appointment. Having spent 20-some years in test and reliability engineering I tend to find more things wrong with software than right.

 

You can’t beat the Mini’s physical controls for simplicity. On the top of the amp chassis, you get 4-position Preset switch (Rhythm, Lead, Solo, and Custom), a Guitar volume, a Music volume control (Bluetooth or Aux In signals), and a guitar input. The back of the chassis has 3.175mm (aka 1/8”) Line Out and Aux Input jacks, a USB-C port for charging the battery and (sometime in the future) a functioning digital audio interface), a Bluetooth “Pair” switch (the Pair switch also fires up a rudimentary guitar tuner), and a power switch. The amp comes with a cute leatherette strap and a pair of buttons to attach the strap on the side. The amp is a 10W Class-D unit that, supposedly produces 90dBSPL at 1m. The cabinet has two 2” speakers and a bottom-facing passive radiator. The 3Ah battery supposedly provides power for 8 hours (on mid-to-low power output) and charges from empty to full in 3 hours. The firmware contains “33 Amp Models, 43 Effects, (Noise Gate, Compressor, Distortion, Modulation/EQ, Delay, Reverb – fixed in that order) and the USB interface is a 44kHz/16 bit A/D. You also get a a free download of PreSonus Studio One Prime recording software with your original purchase. Registering for your software is the closest thing to registering for warranty with Positive Grid. You can buy (for $110) a Spark Control footswitch to either control the presets, turn on and off various virtual pedals, or a combination of those functions. The amp is 146.5 x 123 x 165 mm (5.76 x 4.84 x 6.49 in) and weighs 1.5 kg (3.3 lb).

As usual, the included paper “Quick Start Guide” is close to useless. Not so typically, Positive Grid hasn’t provided much in the way of useful information on their website, YouTube, or anywhere else. Figuring out the app and the various features of the amp that are only accessed through the app is up to the buyer.

For a beginning guitarist who doesn’t know any other musicians, some of the Mini’s app features are probably fun-to-useful. This “screenshot” is really a compilation of three different screens as typically displayed on a phone. The middle one is an example of a dumbed-down imitation of a fairly common DAW guitar pedal screen; like the one in Logic Pro. A big difference between the DAW pedal boards and the Spark is that you can’t reshuffle the order of the pedals to suit your purposes.

After spending considerable time playing with the various pedals I can say “they work.” The compressors in the Comp/Wah section aren’t up to DAW standards, but they are probably as good as most hardware pedals. The “Wah” function, also included in this group, is “Temporarily Disabled.” As usual, I don’t like the distortion (Drive) pedals much, but I rarely do. About half of the Drive pedals are red-flagged, which means you’ll have to spend $20 or more to enable those pedals on your device. So it goes for the Amp models, too. Most of the red-flagged amp models are variations on the mediocre Marshall models. The Mod/EQ models are predictable and not bad. The Delays are ok, except for the absence of a multi-tap delay. The Reverbs are typically pretty good, since digital reverb plug-ins have been fairly well staked-out territory for at least 20 years. I didn’t find a favorite from the verbs, but I didn’t find anything I hated either.

Irritatingly, with my Samsung tablet and the Samsung Music player, anytime I open the Spark app the music player starts playing something from my current playlist through the Spark Mini. Before you start babbling about some “play on Bluetooth connection” toggle in the player, get a grip on yourself. No other Bluetooth device that I own has this behavior: from consumer buds to Shure in-ears to three different Bluetooth speaker systems. It is a glitch in the Spark app and that has been logged by Positive Grid’s customer service and I wasn’t the first to make the complaint. If everything else was excellent this wouldn’t be a deal-breaker, just unpredictably irritating. (If it does this when I first open up the app, will it spontaneously do the same during a gig?) Yes, I could turn off the Music volume, but if I am using it as a backing track at the time it sort of defeats the purpose of that function.

With that out of the way, my impression of the guitar amp is somewhat positive. I’m not fond of electric guitar distortion in the usual buzz-box fashion, but some of the amp models deliver decent slightly over-driven sounds with the kind of amp EQ and tone you’d expect from what I’m guessing are the amps being modeled. Some of the setups both by other users and Positive Grid are fair-to-decent. I had some high hopes for Pat Metheny style sounds, but the lack of multi-tap delays squashed that. You could just add a pedal delay up front but that would defeat my purpose. I have an old MacBook Pro with MainStage that will do everything this unit does with a ton more effects including my multi-tap delay that I’d rather use with a small wired power speaker than add a pedal that is almost as big as this amp.

And speaking of power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mini an produce 10W, but the distortion at that output would be objectionable. That goes for the spec’d 90dBSPL@1m acoustic output, too. At any volume over a moderately loud voice or a strummed full-size acoustic guitar, the bottom end of this amp clips indecently. It is not a pleasant distortion, either. It is the usual splatting sound of digital clipping. That was the straw that broke the back of my interest in the Positive Grid Spark Mini. There were moments when I thought I was about to find the sweet spot for several of the Presets but “almost there” was as close as I got to something useful. When the amp sounded good, it was too quiet to compete with a couple of acoustic guitars. When it was loud enough to cut through a small instrument crowd, it sounded awful.

For a beginning practice amp the Spark Mini isn’t bad. Most beginners, however, will have a terrible time with the mediocre application software that is an absolute necessity for using the amp. Advanced users will be frustrated with the user-hostile programming of the app and disappointed with the little amp’s small performance.

Acoustic Guitar String Comparison

This all started when someone from Cleartone Strings sent me a note on my Wirebender Audio Facebook page asking if I’d be interested in reviewing sets of their acoustic and electric guitar strings. I’m up for free stuff, so I said “sure” and they sent me two pairs of their Custom Light 11-52 Acoustic Phosphor Bronze Treated Strings. These are not cheap strings at $17.99 a set, but I have been playing D’Addario 11-52 Custom Light Phosphor Bronze Coated Acoustic Guitar Strings for the last couple of years after almost 20 years of almost exclusively playing Elixir Nanoweb Phosphor Bronze Lights and Custom Lights and those strings are all in the same price ballpark. All of these strings make similar claims to longevity, also, with a special coating and other process secrets.

I have two Composite Acoustics guitars, the OX and a Cargo. I’ve been waffling on how I feel about the D’Addarios on the Cargo since I started using them, but I’ve been really happy with the OX’s tone with those strings. Mostly due to the added “edge” the brighter D’Addarios add to the larger bodied guitar, which isn’t an “effect” the Cargo needs.

Before I replaced my current set of D’Addario’s, I examined the strings and, especially, the coating and listened carefully to the sound and measured the output on my Composite Acoustics OX with both the pickup and a Shure KSM 141 microphone. I’m going to make a wild claim here that the CA OX, being a carbon fiber guitar will do a good job of neutrally demonstrating whatever character there might be to guitar strings. I could be wrong, so sue me.

The D’Addarios sound clean, relatively bright, and have enough bottom to make the guitar as full as a guitar this size should sound. They were recommended by my local guitar expert, Brian Stewart, Tree Strings Music, and they have been everything he said they would be, including long-lasting and a moderately different sound from my Elixirs. The Elixirs are more mellow, maybe slightly more full than the D’Addarios and that impression is true across the six strings. I have liked these strings for more than 20 years, especially during the years when I rarely played my guitars. Before using the Elixirs, my strings would often be ruined before I had an hour of playing time because of corrosion from being exposed to either the local humidity or the humidifier in my guitar case.

The ClearTone strings were a fail right out of the package. The first thing I noticed about the ClearTone strings was for the first time in the 6 years I’ve owned my CA OX the low E string buzzes like crazy. With the same gauge D’Addarios, the guitar rang clear and clean on all strings. It is only the low E that is rattling and I have no idea what that means, although the whole set feels lighter than the D’Addarios I’d just removed. [Obi-Wan-Brian Kenobi-Stewart suspects the ClearTones might be round-core, rather than hex-core strings. I guess round-core is a trendy “vintage” design, but it’s also know for being fragile, likely to come apart of the strings aren’t crimped near the tuner post, and to have problems like those I’m experiencing.] It’s nice that the guitar is more easily played, but at the cost of “clear tone” (pun intended) from all strings? Probably not so nice.

I was about to yank the ClearTone strings when I thought I saw a section of the wrap pulled apart. When I looked closely, the source of the rattling problem was obvious. The wrap (whatever that is called) at the ball-end of the string is so long (only on the A and low E strings) that it extends slightly past the edge of the saddle. You can sort of see it on the attached picture (at right). That explains why it rattles everywhere, because it is rattling at the freakin’ saddle! If I put a little bit of fingernail pressure behind the saddle, it rings clear. It’s a manufacturing/design problem and a weird one because every other string has shorter wraps, but none of them is consistent in length.

Outside of the design problem, the ClearTones are somewhat less bright than the D’Addarios and seem even a little more dull than the Elixers but with considerably less fullness of tone. In fact, I think the ClearTone strings make my guitar sound like it is made out of plastic (which it kind of is). I left them on for a disappointing week and discarded them to return to the D’Addarios. I was disappointed enough with the first experiment that I did not bother to try them on the CA Cargo.

Initially, I’d planned on doing a lot of data collection for this review: charts and graphs, screen shots of string amplitude and harmonic content, and maybe even some sustain tests. Honestly, I don’t think any of that would be useful information after what I have experienced with the ClearTone acoustic strings. Your experience may vary, but I’m just not happy enough with the initial experience with these strings to put much more time into them. 

I suspect my career as an “influencer” will be short. It’s pretty obvious that advertisers imagine that they are paying for a good review, not an honest one. Magazines have been threatened with and lost advertising revenue when a mediocre product is identified as such. All of my revenue from my blogs comes from the occasional hit my readers make to the advertisements in the blog. I have very little control of the ads (I can only tell Google and Wordpress not to use an ad I find objectionable.) and I kind of like it that way.