Kelt Amplification (keltamplification.com) is a French boutique tube amp brand founded by Thierry Labrouze. The F-Type is one of the new model recently introduced, it is a 15W all tube Fender style amp with a tube driven reverb. The video below was recorded live during an FAQ broadcasted on December 27th 2023 in French on
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Cherry’s Guitars, demo of a Les Paul type guitar built by the French luthier Thierry Ceresa
Saturday, 17 September 2022
The Les Paul number VIII guitar from French luthier Thierry Ceresa under his brand Cherry's (cherrysguitars.com) is an exceptional guitar! The demo below is a compilation of the playing sequences from the Direct Backstage live show on September 2, 2022 on La Chaîne Guitare. The guitar is plugged into the Universal Audio Dream 65 preamp
After recording an in-depth guitar in hand interview in the showroom, Sylvain Luc agreed to play a song in front of the cameras. It is his composition called Boléro Langoureux, taken from the excellent album by Renaud Letang. A pure moment of music to enjoy without moderation! Sylvain Luc plays Boléro Langoureux Gear used Sylvain
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Franfret luthier’s guitar model #1, a Strat with a Mahogany body
Friday, 12 February 2021
The Spanish luthier Francisco Rodriguez is the craftsman behind the Franfret brand (franfret.net). Already interviewed several times, he sent to the showroom of The Guitar Channel a Strat like no other. Indeed, not only is the inspiration clearly David Gilmour's vintage guitar #00001 but its body is made of Mahogany. On this kind of guitar
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Unicorn Classic Ruokangas, a super high-end Les Paul type luthier guitar
Wednesday, 25 November 2020
Ruokangas (ruokangas.com) is a difficult name to pronounce for us but it's a well known name on The Guitar Channel since there have already been several interviews with luthier Juha Ruokangas as well as several luthier chronicles. In the category of high-end luthier guitars, here is the Unicorn Classic, the reinterpretation of the Les Paul
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Fender Lead II and Lead III, two great guitars from Fender Mexico!
Friday, 19 June 2020
At the Winter NAMM 2020, the Mexican reissues of the Fender Lead models caught my eye. A few weeks later, here is now the complete test of the two Mexican Fender Lead series, the Lead II and the Lead III. To make it simple, the II is equipped with two single-coil pickups and the III
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In this video we put back to back two loadbox simulators, the Captor X Two Notes Audio Engineering and the OX Box Universal Audio. Both devices are connected to the same Marshall 6101 100W tube amp. May the best win! Captor X Two Notes versus OX Box Universal Audio Advantages Ox Box Advantages Captor X
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Fender Duo-Sonic, an excellent Fender Made in Mexico, in Desert Sand!
Friday, 29 May 2020
With its scale of 610 mm instead of 648 mm on a normal Strat, this Fender Duo-Sonic is terribly sexy! Especially in that Desert Sand finish with its anodized plate which is a must have for this model. Here is the complete test of this beautiful Made in Mexico reissue of a flagship model from
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Valvebucker, the tube powered guitar pickup invented by Juha Ruokangas
Friday, 22 May 2020
Juha Ruokangas is a Finnish luthier who leads a small team of highly skilled craftsmen. Ruokangas Guitars builds high-end electric guitars and basses. In 2014 at the Holy Grail Guitar Show in Berlin, Juha Ruokangas presented the Nemo guitar, a prototype electric guitar with a tube pickup, the Valvebucker. It wasn't until 2019 that the
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Amp attenuators and cabinet simulators, only the best gear at our showroom!
Wednesday, 20 May 2020
There is only the best gear regarding attenuators and speaker/mic simulators in The Guitar Channel showroom in Paris for recording gear reviews, for Guitar in Hand interviews and for live broadcasts every Friday night. Reminder on attenuators and simulators The gear presented in this article has two distinct functions: Attenuator: to reduce the electrical power
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JHS PG-14, Paul Gilbert signature distortion pedal – Jam à la Santana
Friday, 10 April 2020
The American pedal brand JHS (jhspedals.info) which bears the initials of its founder Joshua Heath Scott has just released a distortion in collaboration with the one and only Paul Gilbert. With a clever equalization with a semi-parametric midrange adjustment, a very large range of sounds can be reached. The dynamic response is also pretty awesome.
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The Klon Centaur is probably one of the most cloned pedal with the Tube Screamer. Today we are testing the Centura pedal from Ceriatone (ceriatone.com) which is one of the most highly regarded clone of the Klon. It is built in Malaysia and looks absolutely gorgeous. Test configuration Amp : BD Custom Amplification Guitars :
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New test run for the Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box which is this time connected to a Marshall 6101 combo. For reference, for comparison a recording was also made with a Shure SM57 positioned in front of the speaker combo. OX Amp Top Box / Marshall 6101 Connection of the OX on the amp
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Gear Review – OX Amp Top Box Universal Audio / Kelt Sideman FX amp
Friday, 03 May 2019
Here's a new review for the Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box which is this time connected to a Sideman FX Kelt head and cab. For reference, for comparison a recording was also made with a Shure SM57 positioned in front of the 15 inch speaker cab. OX Amp Top Box / Sideman FX amp
Here's a video review of the Friedman DS40 plugin available in the Universal Audio Apollo interface. Friedman is well know for the quality of their tube amp. That's why I was very curious to test drive the plugin based on their DS40 model. Here's a screenshot of the plugin : Setup used for the review
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We continue the exploration og the Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box which is this time connected to Marshall 6101 combo using a 2007 Gibson Ls Paul Faded modded by Larry Corsa. In case you are wondering, the OX is a piece of gear you connect between the output of a guitar amp and the
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Shootout – Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box versus Shure SM57 mic
Friday, 01 March 2019
Out of curiosity and having a certain taste of provocation, The Guitar Channel presents you an unusual shoutout between the Ox Amp Top Box from Universal Audio and a timeless Shure SM57 microphone. A kind of David against Goliath fight in the field of sound recording! The goal of the game is more to show
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Telecaster pickups shootout – Lollar Pickups vs Dreamsongs Pickups
Tuesday, 04 April 2017
Here is shootout of two sets of Telecaster pickups, one from Dreamsongs Pickups (www.dreamsongspickups.com) with the Classic Blues-Rock reference from Italy and one from Lollar Pickups (www.lollarguitars.com) from the US with the 52 T reference.
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Francisco Rodriguez is a Spanish luthier The Guitar Channel interviewed during the Holy Grail Guitar Show.
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Pedal Review – Rumble Seat from Analog Alien: overdrive/delay/reverb in 1 unit!
Friday, 17 March 2017
Analog Alien (www.analogalien.com) is an American brand of boutique pedal that offers a range of products with a very original look and a beautiful palette of sounds.
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Mojo Classic Ruokangas Guitars review – A Telecaster coming from Finland
Wednesday, 15 March 2017
Juha Ruokangas is a Finnish luthier well known on The Guitar Channel since he has been the subject of several interviews and has also animated a series of luthier chronicles. Juha (pronounced Yu-A) manufactures with a small team of luthiers instruments of very high quality entirely by hand, without the help of CNC (ie without Computer Numeric Control machine).
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Finally a Jazz guitar reviewed on The Guitar Channel! Yes, everything happens. Here is the D'Angelico model EX-SS in a very standard configuration: archtop type guitar with two humbuckers.
D'Angelico EX-SS video review
Audio version of the video available in the podcast:
Photo album
What I enjoyed the most
The sounds
The built quality
The confort of playing
What I enjoyed the least
Too much gold hardware!
Conclusion
For a budget of around $1,500, the EX-SS offers a very good guitar that should delight the fans of Jazz and Blues.
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As promised in the article documenting the installation of the Häussel Pickups in my PRS McCarty, here's the pickup shootout between the stock PRS McCarty pickups and the set of 59 pickups from Häussel Pickups.
Pickup Shootout: PRS McCarty vs Häussel 59
I tried as much as possible to cover the same kind of guitar playing throughout the test: with the fingers only, with a pick, light and heavy riffing, etc.
Conditions of the test
Guitar: 2005 PRS McCarty
Strings: no change of strings to keep this parameter the same between both recordings
Sound: Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface
Types
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Walrus Audio Bellwether – An excellent delay pedal full of possibilities
Monday, 21 November 2016
Walrus Audio offers, with the Bellwether, a very complete analog sound delay pedal offering a delay with many possible settings. In addition to the conventional time, level and tone settings, you can activate and set a modulation and decide the subdivision in time, not to mention the tap tempo button (to determine the delay time) and the possibilities with external connections.
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The XTomp Hotone pedal is a brand new pedal that has recently come on the market with an innovative concept: the ability to load an effect (or a couple of effects) on the pedal to make it sound like a reverb / delay, Chorus / reverb, overdrive, etc. The proposed catalog is very extensive and contains just about all the great classics of the analog pedal you can think of.
The effects are loaded on the pedal using an iOS / Android app that communicates in Bluetooth with the pedal.
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Universal Audio is highly respected for its great plugins which run in their interface. So far, the guitar amps plugins available were geared toward the big distorted sounds with the Friedman or Marshall plugins. It was possible to get some cool clean tones from the existing plugins but not as good as a real Fender amp. Until now. Universal Audio has just released a plugin for the Fender '55 Tweed Deluxe amp. Here's below the Tweed Deluxe plugin review in video.
Universal Audio website: www.uaudio.com
The cool looking user interface for the plugin.
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Maybach is a guitar brand launched a few years ago with a line of instruments manufactured in Prague, Czech Republic with German pickups.
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Yes you can get Slash Guns N'Roses Paradise City sound (or at least get close to it) with the Apollo Twin Universal Audio interface with a couple of plugins and the Burst guitar from luthier Mikaël Springer.
Paradise City sound with the Universal Audio interface and a Springer guitar
It's always a challenge to try to get close to a legendary tone from a hit like Paradise City.
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Here's a video review of the Friedman BE100 plugin available in the Universal Audio Apollo interface. Friedman is well know for the quality of their high gain tube amp. That's why I was very curious to test drive the plugin based on the BE100 model.
Here's a screenshot of the plugin in what I call the simple mode where you see only the amp settings:
Here's a screenshot of the plugin in what I call the rack mode where you see in the top half all the settings to fine-tune the sounds : noise gate, cab and mikes, delay, etc.
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