The BEST Amp You've Never Heard Of

[Music] if you're a guitar pedal collector like me and are constantly swapping around effects on your pedalboard having an amplifier that can accept distortion and overdrives and is a real pedal platform amp is kind of mission critical for any player out there and when you see us use pedals and demonstrations and things like that whether it's rfx or others we typically try to stick with great pedal platform amps and what i want to talk about today is a pedal platform amp that is not only a great price but has seemed to flown under the radar since it came out and never really got the traction that i was expecting nor i think than what the manufacturer was expecting so today is really going to highlight what i think is one of the best sleeper pedal platform amps ever made it's incredibly affordable it sounds amazing and as you'll hear today through several different demonstrations with different effects and pedals clean and dirty then it really is one of the greatest pedal platform amps ever made and people just don't know about it let's check it out [Music] if you've been around the guitar pedal world for any amount of time and you've been buying two bams undoubtedly you've heard of the hot rod series of fender amplifiers whether it's the hot rod deville or the hot rod deluxe and the different speaker combinations thereof that can come with those types of amplifiers what we're going to talk about today is something that's a derivative of those but is a special edition that just never really got any traction and it's none other than the hot rod devil ml which stands for michael landau whether you know it or not you've absolutely heard michael landau he was one of the most prolific session musicians of the 80s and 90s and even well into the 2000s to now and is an absolute icon in the la session musician industry he's been on every hit record that you can think of during that time you've certainly heard him on the radio and whether it was somebody like steve perry or richard marks all of his guitar playing is so tasty and absolutely wonderful and it's amazing that there hasn't been more signature products of his until maybe the last decade or so now what makes the hot rod deville ml so special is a couple of things i think really differentiated one is it's got two clean channels so instead of having the typical overdrive channel that you would see on most fender hot rod series amplifiers you basically have two different preset volumes which you can switch between which basically gives you a clean boost if you want it or the ability to have two different levels that you can go between and toggle between with the provided foot switch the other thing that's really cool about this is that it has upgraded celestion speakers you have the v-type speakers which i think sound really great in this amp and you have the upgraded mercury magnetics transformer so it just has a little bit more body has a little bit more width and seems a little bit better built than what you would see on the typical hot rod deville style amplifiers or deluxe style amplifiers and this is a really great feature to have i feel like some of the things that people often complained about when you were talking about kind of the backline hot rod style amplifiers where they could be a little soulless could be a little bit too vanilla and really didn't have kind of the body and the chime of a mid 60s kind of black panel air offender this really does that in spades has the effects loop in it as well if you ever wanted to use that but moreover really is just an amazing pedal platform so with all this said this is certainly something that is among the best at what it does people didn't really respond to it the way that maybe fender expected and i really just want to showcase how great it is and it really is my go-to amp for pairing pedals with this is why we use it on almost every single demo that we do it sounds great it still kind of arcs back to that common backline amp that you would see with the hot rod devil and deluxe series but it just is just a little bit better just has a little bit more of what i would expect from a vintage style fender amp and just takes pedals a little bit better than almost anything else that i've played excluding fenders just in general it's an incredible amp and if you can pick one up used for 600 bucks or find a new one at guitar center it's hardly more than a brand new hot rod deville or hot rod deluxe i think it's maybe a hundred or two hundred dollars more when it was brand new from its equivalent in the devil but sounds two or three hundred percent better now enough of me talking about it let's get into some plain examples so that you can really hear what this thing does and how well it takes pedals i'm going to go through a variety of distortion sounds both kind of lighter overdrive and maybe a little heavier style overdrive i'm also going to play a couple of different clean tones with some maybe compression and a little bit delay and reverb and then maybe do something that's a lot more heavily processed has some chorus and also delay and reverb mixed in with it so you can kind of hear it in a couple different contexts and hear how great this thing sounds now before i start playing let's just talk about the signal path here i have my fender strat i have a vertex input cable which is a belden nine seven seven eight ten foot going into my pedal board i got a tuner i got a nile compressor tone secret ultraphonics mark ii nordlin overdrive steel string vertex boost free the tone flight time delay and a polar reverb this is all running in front of the hot rod devil ml no effects loop is going to be used for this example so here's the clean tone [Music] so not a bad clean tone at all without any pedals even involved sounds good chimey what you would think of as a nice kind of baseline fender clean sound so let's now go to something that's still clean but adds in some processing using a little bit of delay a little bit of reverb i'm going to bring in the polar to kind of do some plate and i'm going to turn on the compression side of the nile just to add a little bit more snap and body to the strat and go to some of those in between positions to really kind of get that chiminess that we really know strats for and that really pair well when you're using fender style clean amps let's do it [Music] you [Music] so you can hear there it's got all that top end that you'd want from a classic fender doesn't sound too ice picky of course the compression kind of helps round that out a bit and going in those in between positions i still have plenty of articulation sometimes they can be a little bit muddy i feel like kind of the glassiness of the fender amp really helps bring that out and i don't really feel like all the hot rod series amps can do that quite as well as this and still maintain all that body and chiminess at the same time i really love how this thing sounds of course we're not adding any gain yet but just putting some textures on top of that sounds absolutely unreal i want to continue with the clean sound and go into now using a little bit of chorus on top of this so i'm going to be bringing in a little bit of chorus from a chase bliss warp vinyl on this one that it's going to have wired off the board and we're just going to use that to just add a little bit more body to everything and just kind of hear how that sounds playing a little bit of something reminiscent from the saab rock album from john mayer it's a little interpretation of that so you can kind of hear how that works using the strat and the hot rod deville ml and then bringing in that chorus for something a little bit more pop oriented let's try that [Music] [Applause] [Music] so i really think that that nailed it now i know that john has been using a ce2 we're not using a ce2 on this one but i think it still sort of shows the essence of how that might sound with a little bit more 80s oriented kind of boss style chorus put on top of some of these kind of vintage modeling style effects of course the free the tone being based on the 2290 and the polaris kind of having some lineage with the lexicon sort of pcm style stuff and then of course the nile kind of being a classic studio compressor a la nile rogers with the kind of 1176 style sound i think that this really nailed that and really just kind of sounding beautiful and lush and having plenty of body and again that nice chime on top i really love that what i want to do now is start to go into some more overdriven type sounds so what i'm going to do here is i'm actually going to turn off most of this stuff and just use a little bit of reverb on the polaris a little bit of delay on the free the tone flight time and then bring in the tone secret which is kind of a combination of a tube screamer and kind of more of a kind of a preamp fendery preamp sound to really get that nice kind of fat warmness and i really love it with double stops and things like that so i'm going to play a little bit of a kind of a landau style americana boy uh is the name of the song i'm kind of reinterpreting and it's really nice to kind of hear how that does with sort of a gain sound in how it takes some of those double stops with chording and hearing some single notes in between so let's go and do that you can hear how that sounds again nothing's changed with the amplifier settings it's exactly the same as you heard on the clean example let's bring this in let's see how it sounds with a little bit more drive [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i really love how it just maintains the the body of the original amp and just adds kind of more of a neutral style distortion and overdrive on top of that so often when we bring in distortion pedals the amp can sound so dissimilar if it doesn't take pedals well or it can add in a lot of displeasing frequencies and i don't feel like that happens at all here obviously being able to know how to dial in your effects helps with that but i still feel like having a really nice blank canvas that doesn't just change so drastically when the front end has hit harder it really is showing that really well with adding in this this overdrive and distortion pedal with the tone secret and really just seeing how it reacts and it still sounds like itself but adds in some of the essence of what this pedal is doing without completely changing the character of what the amp does and a great clean amp pedal platform does that just like this does now let's take it up a notch and go even higher gain with this i'm going to go to the ultraphonics mark ii on this one and do a little bit more of a bluesier thing just so we can kind of see how it sounds with a little bit more mixture of single notes and some chording and kind of just doing a basic sort of 145 which you know any of us can play even somebody that's an elementary guitar player like me can pull this off and get some great tones out of it and really get something with a little bit more bark and a little bit more saturation so let's try that with the ultraphonics and again i'll just have like on a little bit of slap from the free the tone a little bit of reverb from the polaris just to give it a little bit more body and then i still have a little bit of spring reverb on the amp as well again all the settings are the same as the clean example you heard earlier let's do that [Music] [Applause] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that was good too i thought it really sounded fat got a little bit more dumbly so we added in kind of that more mid-range of the dumbbell which is a little kind of lower mid-range kind of a little bit fatter but i think still sounded great with the strat still sounded wonderful through the amplifier really again just added to what was already there and really just had a nice articulate body going for some of those single notes really everything popped out really made it sound really nice without being overly bright and that's again what a great clean amp can do paired with petals and just making the petals sound the best that they can and getting the most out of the amp without kind of having something completely dissimilar to what you started with that is kind of the signature of what i believe to be the best of the clean amp pedal platforms and certainly the hot rod deville ml is one of the best at that is a great buy if you can find one whether that's craigslist whether it's reverb whether that's at guitar center i highly recommend that you check out this amp it is an absolute sleeper that people are not checking out they aren't aware of it they don't know about it now you should know so definitely go check these things out we're going to put some links to some listings that we see available as well as some places where you might be able to get this thing new again i highly recommend that you check it out it's been vetted by one of the best players to ever touch a guitar and michael landau and certainly fits the bill if you're looking for a very very good clean pedal platform irrespective of the price point but it just so happens that it's at an amazing price point whether that's a new one whether it's a used one it's definitely worth your time and your money and your pedals are gonna love it and you're gonna thank me for this one later so if you dug what you saw today if you like this introduction or maybe a refresher about the hot rod devil ml or just clean pedal platforms in general please do make sure that you give us a thumbs up leave us a comment about one of your favorite clips that maybe i played or some applications that you've used it for or if you are a user of the hot rod devil ml we'd love to see some clips linked from you about ways that you've used it or experiences that you've had with this is a great pedal platform or other pedal platform amps that you can recommend that you've had a great experience with i'd love to hear from you and if you want some free ways to continue to kind of learn and expand your horizons with pedals and pedal boards and best practices i highly recommend that you check out our rig doctor podcast it's a great way to continue the education that we try to provide on this channel we interview other rig builders other pros and you really get to hear their perspectives on pedals pedal boards and gear and it's a really fun conversation we try to put new ones up almost every week so do check that out if you haven't already it's available from all the podcatchers out there whether it's apple or spotify or any of those in between also if you want to get some of the same materials that we used on the pedalboard that we used today whether that's cable zip ties tie-down mounts our power grip velcro that's all available on therigdr.com and over at our friends at sweetwater also if you want to check out any of the pedals that we used today those are all going to be listed in the description below with links or you can head over to the vertex effects website where we have all these listed as well as all the dealers that carry these products so you can check that out there thank you again so much for watching and this was our introduction or reintroduction to you of the hot rod deville ml one of my favorite clean amp pedal platforms in an absolute bargain for what it does i hope you enjoyed until next time i'm mason maringella from vertex fx aka the rig doctor see you later [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 166,117

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, michael landau, fender hot rod ml, fender landau amp, michael landau amp, clean amp pedal platform, best clean amp, best pedal platform amp, boutique clean amp, clean tone, boutique amps, boutique amplifier, handwired amp, hand wired amp, two-rock amps, two-rock, landau studio tone, la studio clean, dann huff clean tone, michael landau clean tone, clean amp, pedal platform amp

Id: q9XnzcUOOM4

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022