Roland Blues Cube, have you tried one?

[Mark]

Has anyone played through a Roland Blues Cube?

I saw something on the Eric Johnson Blues capsule in Premier guitar on-line.

http://www.rolandus.com/promos/tone_capsule_ej/

[bluesfendermanblues]

Has anyone played through a Roland Blues Cube?

I saw something on the Eric Johnson Blues capsule in Premier guitar on-line.

http://www.rolandus.com/promos/tone_capsule_ej/

sounds very convincing ...maybe a new trannie amp that will gain the popularity of the LAB series or Roland Jazz Chorus. Off course the 'tube' is a marketing gimmic

When will we see a Larry or Robben version?

[xtian]

Fizzy.

[matt h]

(deleted)

[jestaudio]

Ive heard a lot lot worse than that, I doubt anything will ever really nail a valve amp but that's a pretty good effort

[TUBEDUDE]

Modeling grows up a little. The marketing pukes should have been ignored when they insisted on making it look like a tube. Hokey. Rev. 1.5 will have a heating element so it will get warm also!

[Jana]

I've never tried on of these. I did have a Roland Micro Cube for a few years (gave it to a son of one of the neighbors). I thought that the Micro Cube did a very respectable job of modeling a plexi--to a point.

The part that I didn't like is that when I let a note die out, there was a point where the digital stuff would cut off and the note would go silent. It makes sense that this would happen--the note is being modeled which means that the signal from the guitar is constantly being sampled. Once the guitar signal drops below a certain threshold, the digital stuff no longer has enough signal to sample and model. Granted, it was very low level when this happened but it was there nonetheless. It was kind of like using a noise gate all the time and when the signal drops below a certain point, it just stops and goes silent.

The other thing I didn't like was there seemed to be a very slight delay. Again, understandable because the original signal is sampled, processed, and then converted back to an analog form. All this takes time even if it is very, very short.

I did like the Micro Cube and felt that Roland did a good job with it. For the price, it was unbeatable. But, as good as it was/is, it just didn't have that "soul" that a pure tube amp has.

Maybe these issues have been addressed with the Blues Cube--I don't know. Again, I have never played a blues cube. I have a feeling though, that if I had one, it would probably go like this--play the blues cube for a while, really like it, get into it, etc. Then, plug into a pure tube amp and realize, oh, that is what was missing.

On the other hand, given Roland's quality and the reasonable price of these amps, they would be a good amp to throw in the back of the bus for those just in case situations.

[Mark]

Thanks for the feedback.

My experiences have been I can used them, the clean channel/tone sounds good, but the overdrive never quite cuts it.

I think you'd have to play one of these amps to know if it works for you. I had to laugh that Roland mentioned the light weight issue, which I must admit is nice when I pick up a transistor amp, but I now accept the weight of the valve amp as something I have to deal with.

I wondered why Eric Johnson got on board with Roland, I dare say the practicality of hauling his rig around combined with Roland giving him something for his troubles must have been a powerful motivator.

There is a You Tube clip where the two guys from Andersons in the UK do a blindfold test with two solid state amps and a valve amp. One solid state amp was the Blues Cube, they pickup the solidstate amps by the fact they could tell the difference between a really spring reverb and the reverb in the S.S. amps. Secondly when they pushed the front end of the amp with a preamp, the S.S. amps didn't perform the same as a valve amp.

[teemuk]

...they could tell the difference between a really spring reverb and the reverb in the S.S. amps. Secondly when they pushed the front end of the amp with a preamp, the S.S. amps didn't perform the same as a valve amp.

And while these were undoubtedly real things they perceived for the topic of tube vs. SS it tells practically nothing. The reverb in many SS amps (including the old Blues Cube:s) is a real spring reverb, so effectively the folks probably heard a difference but identified it's cause incorrectly. DSP just models certain reverb tone, there can be as much difference in it as there can be in different -real- spring reverb -based arrangements.

Secondly, there is no single characteristic way in which tube and SS amps react to preamp overdrive. If i would push the front end of Fender Champ it would sound entirely different than pushing the front end of SLO100. When even different tube amps react quite differently and sound quite different it's no surprise that solid-state amps will do the same. Oh, and you find about as much differences from them as you will find from tube amps; For example, boosting preamp of a Roland JC-120 is totally different thing than boosting the preamp of a Randall RG-100ES.

It is kinda fascinating that when push comes to shove in identifying tube and solid-state sound people can't do it but simply hear many other differences that are entirely non-relevant to SS vs. tube tone discussion.

I rememeber when in one of these blind tests people made a mistake of thinking that every moderately versatile (read: not one-trick-pony) amp was a modeling amp, just because folks couldn't believe that you could get such a vast palette of different tones out from a tube amp.

[Richie]

Has anyone played through a Roland Blues Cube?

I saw something on the Eric Johnson Blues capsule in Premier guitar on-line.

http://www.rolandus.com/promos/tone_capsule_ej/

Watched the video. Weren't these amps first copied for the sound the bassman? Or that's what they bassed the sound on? Seems that's what the 2 guys doing the demo spoke of. I wondered how could you ever model an amp like the bassman, and not figure in the sound of the 4x10 speakers. Which is a lot of that sound. And it will never be in a 1x12!

Now they made the add on EJ "tone capsule" to sound like Erics deluxes,and his marshall.. haha fender copying a marshall that's a twist.

Ok, now I believe Eric uses a JBL in his deluxes,and Celestion in his marshall cabs. In the video, they have all the test equipment for comparing etc.. but how can you make any amp sound like another that uses a different speaker? Maybe a 2 speaker cab that switches speakers to the correct amp its trying to sound like.

I'm sure its probably a good sounding SS amp,and modeled after EJ's sound or tones of his amps. But what happens when you change guitars? The amp was modeled after EJ's strats.. I guess if you want that certain sound then keep those things in mind. Maybe they will come up with more modules or setups.