This tiny guitar amp is the most unhinged distortion pedal I’ve ever used

Is Amp Crash a guitar amp aliases a guitar pedal? Yes.

Death By Audio’s latest is, successful fact, both. While it’s successful a guitar pedal enclosure, Amp Crash is really a mini 3-watt amp hooked up to a 2-inch speaker. You tin moreover link an outer speaker if you want. This isn’t a integer re-creation of a classical Fender aliases Marshall for illustration you mightiness get from a Universal Audio amp sim pedal aliases a Neural DSP Cortex. This is an existent amp pinch an original creation that moves air.

The reside you get retired of this mini point is, unsurprisingly, harsh and boxy. But that’s not a criticism. Guitarists for illustration Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Jack White, and Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) person famously utilized inexpensive solid-state believe amps to get their unsocial tones. Amp Crash lives firmly successful that realm. It ne'er genuinely cleans up, moreover pinch the summation turned each the measurement down, and the brittle edge-of-overdrive astatine those little settings has a charming, amateurish vibe. It’s not going to switch my Yamaha THR10, but I can’t dislike connected it.

What makes Amp Crash special, though, is that, successful summation to a speaker, it besides has a microphone inside. You tin past provender the awesome from that microphone into your integer audio workstation (DAW) aliases different amp, and seizure the existent sound of a speaker successful a room being pushed to its limits. There’s a subtle magic that happens erstwhile the microphone picks up existent vibrations successful the aerial and the sound of a room, alternatively of conscionable moving your guitar consecutive into Guitar Rig 7 successful Ableton. And this is wherever Amp Crash’s existent worth lies, not arsenic an amp, but arsenic the world’s astir convoluted distortion pedal.

The measurement the mic and speaker interact creates immoderate genuinely chaotic sounds erstwhile you commencement cranking the gain. Once you move the summation knob past 12 o’clock, it goes from crunchy, if somewhat two-dimensional overdrive, to explosive fuzz. The reside knob astatine these higher summation settings has a immense impact, going from buzzsaw astatine the apical to sludgy and uneasy astatine the bottommost arsenic the mini speaker struggles to grip the bass frequencies.

Past 3 o’clock connected the summation knob, things get genuinely insane arsenic the speaker fundamentally gives up. It flubs and rattles successful a measurement that tells you it was not designed to return this level of abuse. But the mic besides can’t support up. It introduces its ain crackles and clipping arsenic it struggles to sorb the onslaught from the speaker. The introduced natural, somewhat unpredictable compression turns your guitar into a ceramic wall of sound wherever the edges of individual notes and chords each illness successful connected themselves. The 2 besides create earthy feedback truthful you tin get that existent cranked amp howl, without disturbing the neighbors excessively much.

You tin dial successful a spot of the nonstop awesome (no mic) to adhd a spot of meaning to your tone. Or moreover disable the speaker wholly by connecting a cablegram (no speaker) aliases a ¼-inch headphone adapter to the speaker-out jack. But why would you want to do that?

Things get moreover much insane erstwhile you commencement playing pinch the mini multi-effect module successful the apical right-hand area of the pedal. You tin take betwixt reverb, echo, aliases chorus. They’re each integer and rather lo-fi, pinch conscionable 2 controls (depth and time) to play with. The chorus is rubbery and highly resonant, the echo crushed and self-oscillating, while the reverb is metallic and abrasive.

Add each these components together, and you get a small container that caters to the wildest of noisemakers. It’s nary astonishment that the companies that conceived of this point are Death By Audio — the brainchild of Oliver Ackermann from sound stone mainstays A Place to Bury Strangers — and Rainger FX — a institution that made a distortion pedal you capable pinch beer, soda, aliases moreover humor to alteration its tone. The Amp Crash is an due summation to their bequest of philharmonic chaos engines.