Tagged As: Yamaha Guitar Amps
Question:
I was wondering if anyone is using (or has tried) any of the new Yamaha digital modeling amps. I'm looking at getting a DG60-112 and I thought I'd see if anyone had any comments about it first. Any comments appreciated
Answer:
I tried out the Yamaha DG80-112 amp today at Mars. Just for reference, the price on it was $699. I tried it out with a Fender MIM Classic Series 50's Tele. First, the technical details... It's a 80w digital modeling amp. Unlike some other modeling amps, it doesn't say exactly what it's emulating, but you can guess pretty easily. It's equipped with a single 12 Celestion Vintage 30 speaker. It has MIDI in/out, an effects loop with blend, high/low instrument inputs, and a line out. The built-in effects are limited to reverb and echo along with tube-like overdrive/distortion. The user interface is unique on this amp. It has motorized knobs so that when you select a patch, the knobs automagically rotate to match your selection. That way you can look at the knobs and see what you've selected at a glance and you know what you're doing quicker if you make changes. The front panel allows you to select 8 presets from buttons or toggle through to select a specific setting. It's a very intuitive interface. Now, for how it sounded.... The tone on this amp was pretty impressive. The nice folks at Mars had printed out a list of the 90 factory presets and left it with the amp. I tried out about a 16 or so of them ranging from clean tones to distorted ones. I was most impressed by the range jazz tones. These settings produced very warm and balanced clean tones. The overdrive tones I selected were hit and miss with the Texas Blues one coming out the best with a nice ballsy sound and just a touch of sizzle. The modern sounds were interesting. One of the Soldano-style emulations captured the modern Clapton tone pretty good (good or bad thing depending on your opinion) The scooped mids setting seemed like it could do a decent Metallica sound. The LA Studio distortion sounded very 80's. Most of the settings did well picking up dynamics and so forth, although some did better than others. It doesn't seem like volume would be a major problem with this amp in most situations. Just judging from what I heard without pushing it hard, it seemed like it would do as good as any 80w 1x12, solid state, amp. It was plenty loud with the master volume set at about 1 to 2. Hooking it up to an external cabinet would give it more guts though. Controlling the volume as you changed patches is a little bit of a challenge. When I went from a country setting to a metal setting there was a big volume jump and I got a little feedback, but I guess this is to be expected. All in all, this was a nice amp. It's certainly better sounding than the Johnson or Crate DMA amps and it's equal to the sound of the Line6 Flextone and AX's and better than the Spiders. I think it's user interface is better than anything else out there right now. Those auto-rotating knobs are just too neat (however, if they break...?). The only drawbacks I noticed was that there wasn't a headphone out and it didn't have as many built-in effects as some other brands, but these might not be serious problems for most people.
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