GoKawiilis the Verge’s weekend editor. He’s covered the tech industry for over 18 years and knows a thing or two about synths.
Is Amp Crash a guitar amp or a guitar pedal? Yes.
Death By Audio’s latest is, in fact, both. While it’s in a guitar pedal enclosure, Amp Crash is actually a tiny 3-watt amp hooked up to a 2-inch speaker. You can even connect an external speaker if you want. This isn’t a digital re-creation of a classic Fender or Marshall like you might get from a Universal Audio amp sim pedal or a Neural DSP Cortex. This is an actual amp with an original design that moves air.
The tone you get out of this tiny thing is, unsurprisingly, harsh and boxy. But that’s not a criticism. Guitarists like Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Jack White, and Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) have famously used cheap solid-state practice amps to get their unique tones. Amp Crash lives firmly in that realm. It never truly cleans up, even with the gain turned all the way down, and the brittle edge-of-overdrive at those lower settings has a charming, amateurish vibe. It’s not going to replace my Yamaha THR10, but I can’t hate on it.
All sound samples were recorded direct from the Amp Crash into Ableton with no additional processing.
Mid-gain, 50-50 blend mic and direct signal.
Mid-gain, 50-50 blend mic and direct signal.(opens a new window) Mid-gain, 50-50 blend mic and direct signal.
What makes Amp Crash special, though, is that, in addition to a speaker, it also has a microphone inside. You can then feed the signal from that microphone into your digital audio workstation (DAW) or another amp, and capture the real sound of a speaker in a room being pushed to its limits. There’s a subtle magic that happens when the microphone picks up actual vibrations in the air and the sound of a room, instead of just running your guitar straight into Guitar Rig 7 in Ableton. And this is where Amp Crash’s real value lies, not as an amp, but as the world’s most convoluted distortion pedal.
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