play house
A modelling amp that’s also a play-along music centre for your front room. What gives?
Coming up with new amp formats is good business practice for all amp manufacturers if they wish to remain in the eye of the guitar-playing public. Line 6 certainly kept its profile up before the recent NAMM show with a teaser campaign: ‘The Guitar Amp, Reinvented’. And here it is: a cross-genre concept that’s designed to cater for the needs of the modern player.
The AMPLIFi, available in two versions, pairs a modelling guitar amp with a wireless stereo music-playback system. Yes, you can play your guitar through it, but you can also play your music library through it – streamed from Bluetooth – allowing you to play along with your favourite songs with a matching guitar tone.
Looking elegant and sophisticated, the AMPLIFi 150 has a handle built into the recess that the controls (and an iPad) sit in. It’s easily moved around, and an easy car-fit to gig with. Five speakers deliver the sound: a custom 12-inch Celestion takes care of the bulk of the guitar tone while the music playback comes from a pair of tweeters and mid-bass drivers (with the Celestion on subwoofer duties). Interestingly, effects are amplified separately
from the dry guitar sound, and are reproduced in stereo.
While the amp sports an array of physical knobs and four instantly accessible presets, its main source of control is from an iOS app featuring an editor and librarian facility that can zap any edits or a new preset directly across to the amp from iPad (or similar) via Bluetooth. Presets are constructed from a signal chain made up of noise gate, wah, amp/ cab, compressor, EQ, volume, modulation, delay and reverb. Each of these can be chosen from a range of 200 models, and some of the effects blocks can be moved pre or post the amp/cab. All of this is rendered in clear, userfriendly graphics, and you can change amps and pedals and tweak all their parameters in seconds with a few finger swipes.
The app also features a music player that accesses your device's music library and has some useful phrase-training facilities, including half-speed playback and, perhaps best of all, a tone-matching facility. When you load a song for playing, it will be recognised and a Wi-Fi connection will provide you with a selection of possible tones to suit the song. These tones from the Cloud are provided by the Line 6 community, and you can upload your own original tones and rate others. Of course, not all songs have matching tones, but there are plenty of good ones out there – and the number can only grow along with the AMPLIFi’s user base.
Sounds
When playing along with a song, the pressand-turn volume knob lets you set levels for both guitar and music. As a music player, the AMPLIFi 150 offers a powerful and clear sound that’s plenty loud enough to annoy the neighbours. Guitar tones can also get suitably loud, certainly loud enough for gigging if digitally modelled sounds work for you live – let’s face it, this is not going to appeal to valve purists. Our view is that, although it could be used onstage, the AMPLIFi’s core function is
The tones work fine for playing along to music, and the stereo effects help blend the guitar sound with playback
home practice, and it excels at that. It sports a varied range of sounds that, although they may not be what you'd necessarily use onstage, are very playable and could inspire you to try new things on guitar. The tones, familiar to POD users but not the latest HD sounds, work just fine in the context of playing along with music, and those stereo effects help blend the guitar sound in with the playback.
Verdict
Okay, there are going to be naysayers around when a new product like this arrives, and quite justifiably so in some cases. This amp does rely on the use of an Apple device, which not everyone has or wishes to have, and Android users will be disappointed that the app is not yet available for them. Putting a streaming music player and a guitar amp into one unit is a great idea, and here, it works effortlessly, creating a whole new experience for us guitarists… all without having to get up from the sofa. Bliss!