Hotone 70th Ampero Silver Edition

La Hotone Ampero Silver és la primera pedalera de modelado que adquiero, y entré en este mundo sin saber dónde me metía. Acostumbrado a tocar con pedales y amplis durante todo mi recorrido, más todo lo digital que había probado hasta el momento, no acababa de estar todo lo definido que podía ser, no las tenía todas conmigo de dar el salto a lo digital... ahora me arrepiento de no haberlo dado antes!

No se tarda más de 15 minutos en tenerlo seteado (descargar el firmware, el editor y listo). La interfaz es MUY intuitiva; cada efecto, amplificador y pantalla tiene un bloque específico dónde puedes editar lo que necesites, con perillas como si de un propio amplificador se tratara. Las pantallas tienen más de 10 micros distintos y se puede colocar donde quieras. A parte, tiene todas las salidas que puedas desear para enchufarte a amplificador o a mesa directamente. Características y uso, un 10.

Referente al sonido, si que es cierto que los presets que vienen por defecto no son de lo mejorcito, pero tienen la suficiente base como para editarlos a tu gusto y sacar el sonido deseado. Enchufado a ordenador y con cascos el sonido es totalmente fiel a lo que estás editando, no se tiene ningún tipo de latencia al tocar, y se puede usar como tarjeta de sonido. Al ir enchufado a mesa y PA's... el sonido cambia un poco, no se va a negar. No tiene toda la profundidad ni la definición que se tiene en el ordenador, pero no es un descenso drástico (aproximadamente se perderá un 5% de la señal original), és decir, que a no ser que seas un purista excesivo del sonido que quieras sacar, quedarás satisfecho sin duda.

En resumen, por 175€ és una ganga, si no eres un músico profesional, y buscas algo para no tener que cargar con amplificadores ni pedaleras a tus bolos de salas pequeñas a medianas.

I perform over 250 bookings a year in care homes and hotels playing 50s, 60s, 70s R 'n R etc. to mainly pensioners. My requirements are fairly straighforward, three basic sounds on three preset footswitches, clean with delay, chorus and overdrive. I have been using an old Boss ME-50, taking the Line Out/Headphone output straight into a powered speaker, currently a Bose S1 Pro, keeping equipment to a minimum with no guitar amp. When I saw this with its three footswitches plus a fourth (the CTRL switch) to modify each patch, I thought "YESSSS!" The build quality is top class and so is the packaging. There is no user manual supplied, but this can be downloaded and printed out. Even so, the manual does not really tell you all you need to know. The user interface with its touch screen and control knobs is intuitive and straightforward. There are lots of amp models and effects, along with cab models, all with lots af adjustable parameters. Download the computer software, connect via USB and you can get it all up on you computer screen for even easier access to all the settings. I set up my three sounds, with an added bonus of being able to add a variation of each one by programming the CTRL button, sounded great at home and went off to do a booking in a hotel. When played along with backing track and vocals, the sounds from this unit was just not good enough in my opinion. To me, they didn't have the "guts" and were quite weak compared to my trusty old ME-50 that only has a basic type of inbuilt amp and cab simulation and to be honest, I have a 30 quid pedal from Joyo, attempting to simulate a Vox AC30 that is far superior sound wise. Fortunately, I took my ME-50 with me and changed over as soon as I could.
Returned!

Decent sound quality for a great price.
The customisable features, such as assigning multiple fx to be turned on/off by the ctrl button and the ability to turn the wah on and off by pressing down the top of the volume pedal are quite nice.
The editing screen and the (non-existent) effects grouping on the computer software create quite a clutter, but it's not so bad once you work them out and save them into your favourite presets.