Belfield Music

NAMM Show 2018 has given us another huge shakeup to the guitarist’s landscape, with Fender (a brand you may have heard of dominating the electric guitar scene, and shaping rock, blues, and all other contemporary music as we know it), with THAT fender, releasing a serious, and professional range of guitar pedals covering all the most important food groups:

These all are built to a quality and standard that does an already-legendary brand proud, and are destined to become an irreplaceable part of every guitarist’s collection.

Headrush are not slowing down for one second, and are following up the hugely successful release of it’s all-in-one pedalboard last year with the announcement and impending released of a speaker that is specifically designed to be the perfect choice to run it through, or to run  any other amp modeller or multi-FX!

The FRFR-112 is a powered speaker cabinet with a massive 2000 watts of output power, and is touted as a ‘Full Range, Flat Response” speaker - this has been carefully, and painstakingly built to give you as exact a replication of your sound as it’s possible to get. No amp colour, no flavour, no change at all.

Have you heard the amazing chameleon work from Daniel of Silent Underground Studio? he’s made a huge name for himself creating stunning exact tone clones of famous artists, albums, and bands, and by a crazy attention to detail, replicates exactly the amp, amp settings, valve types, cabinet, speaker types, microphone placement, reverb, delay, modulation, and more and more and more until the final effect is so perfect that an audio engineer could examine the waveform and not tell them apart. It’s really an amazing talent, that requires an incredible knowledge of how every part of a guitar rig works, every effect, every setting, and then the amazing ears to hear it on an album, and recreate it from scratch. He’s released these patches for Fractal, for the Kemper, and now he’s bringing his sorcery to the Headrush pedal board, and has just announced an upcoming release, a full package of tones from all of Metallica’s top tracks!

Roli have just released their new ‘Lightpad M’ block, and it’s a huge evolution on the previous models, that were already exciting and innovative already - the board is more touch-sensitive, allowing things like drumming and performance to be a lot more intuitive and clean, the lighting system is significantly brighter, enough for easy use in daylight or well-lit situations, and the touch pad is not only easier to track, with its improved grid system and subtle tactile cues, but also has, well, improved squishiness, allowing a sense of physical dynamic to your performance, too!

Couple this with the improvements to the NOISE software, the constant expanding sound packs, DAW compatibility, and more, and this is the cresting wave of the next generation of sound and DJ performance and production!

Fender have finally released their fourth series of the legendary Hot Rod amplifiers, and there’s already plenty to be gossiping about!

The Hot Rod series (15w Blues Junior, 15w Pro Junior, 40w Deluxe, and 60w DeVille) have long been renowned as THE gigging musicians amp, and that’s no exaggeration. If you’re a working musician, you already have these amps. And if you’re not, you’re either saving up for one, or wondering which amp will give you “that” sound in your head.

Do your research, and try as many brands out as you possibly can. But then try out a Fender Blues Junior, or a Hot Rod Deluxe, and you’ll have that wonderful warm feeling of realising that it was exactly what you’d been looking for all along.

This might sound like an admission of guilt, but when I started out gigging with my first live band, I didn’t really know what I was doing. 

Sometimes that meant knowing when to tune up, when to set up, when to stand quietly, but sometimes it meant I was doing big silly things like trying to step on five different FX pedals at once - I can remember a whole bunch of times I used to stand up on my wah pedal, so I could quickly press another three pedals without breaking my stride.

Broke that thing pretty quickly.

I had no idea that things like the BOSS MS-3 and ES-8 or ES-5 even existed - these clever things are designed to let you do exactly that, switch from one set of effects to another - turn on these three, turn off those two, have a slew of complex different pre-sets and move between them easily, without needing more legs and feet than the average.

Now and then I tell my students they really should get a Metronome. (Occasionally my band-mates, too.)

The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how fast you can play, if you can’t play in time with the rest of your band - what’s the point in that?

Now, students will often tell me they can get a free metronome app on their phone. And that’s great, I suppose, but phones are quiet, they chew through batteries, and if you want to practise with your amp turned on, or in a noisy environment, you might as well give up

Korg, though, has got you covered. They’ve got your back - the IE-1M, or ‘In-Ear Metronome’ is a tiny, light, earpiece metronome with variety of built in rhythms, beats, and super easy jog-wheel metronome function.

The new DigiTech DOD Mini-Volume and Mini-Expression have landed, and after seeing them in person, my first thought was “why didn’t they do this years ago?” 

A Volume and Expression pedals are two of the most commonly used pedals, but also they’re two of the largest, clunkiest, heaviest pedals that take up space on your pedal-board, and I think every gigging musician will agree that nothing is more valuable in a show than space and weight. Big, heavy amp stacks are as impractical as they are out of fashion, and smaller profile for amplifiers, for pedals, for speakers mean it’s easier to carry, easier to fit in your car, on your stage, in your lineup, and has a great affordable price without sacrificing tone quality OR build quality.

Dramatic? maybe not. But life-changing? absolutely.

Purchase the DOD-MINI Volume here and the DOD-MINI Expression here