I took a punt and signed up for the Positive Grid Spark crowdfunder months ago. Then COVID happened, then it took months to arrive, then I forgot about it. Then one day a box arrived and I remembered I had ordered it. By this time the early excitement of the impulse buy had gone and been replaced with a more subdued ‘I wonder if this thing is any good?’
It has tons of features aimed at the enthusiast, in fact it's feature packed but I was interested to see if it was able to fit into a studio recording workflow.
About The Positive Grid Smart Guitar Amp
At the most basic level the Positive Grid Spark is a small practice amplifier for guitar and bass. It measures 350 x 180 x 190 mm and weighs 5.2 kg, so it’s about the size of a small dog.
Audio Specs are as follows
FREQUENCY RANGE - 20-20,000 Hz
STEREO/MONO - Stereo
MAXIMUM SOUND PRESSURE LEVEL -116 dB SPL @1m
CABINET PRINCIPLE - Bass-reflex
POWER AMPLIFIERS - 40 Watt Class D Amplifier
SPEAKERS Two - 4" Custom Designed Speakers
TOTAL IMPEDANCE - 4 ohms
Features include
Gain, Bass, Mid, Treble, Master, Mod, Delay, Reverb
Output Volume
Music Volume
Four Programmable Preset Buttons
Tap/Tuner Button
ONBOARD EFFECTS
30 Amp Models
40 Effects
(Noise Gate, Compressor, Distortion, Modulation, Delay, Reverb)
WIRED CONNECTIVITY
1/4" Guitar Input
1/8" Aux Input
1/8" Headphone
WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY
Bluetooth Audio
USB AUDIO
USB Interface for Recording
1 In x 2 Out
As I say, those are the basic specs, under the hood there’s a lot of additional cool features that include Smart Jam, this creates backing tracks based upon your playing style using AI. Chord charts. Tone modelling, voice control and the ability to download over 10,000 different guitar tones. This can be useful, for example you can ask it to find the guitar sound from ‘Message In A Bottle’ and it will probably be there. You can also download the chords and the YouTube video to play along to if that’s your thing. However, a lot of the sounds in the cloud seem to be crowd sourced user created and submitted so it can be a bit like the Wild West trying to find the right sound. What one person thinks it’s the guitar sound to ‘Message In A Bottle’ may be nothing like it. However, at worst it’s a lot of fun and at best it’s very useful.
Positive Grid Smart In The Studio
While all the gadgets and gizmos are fun, what I really wanted to know is if the Smart would be any use in the studio and if it was good enough to record with. You can get audio out of the Smart amp using a 1/8” headphone or a USB interface which is mono. I found this a little odd given that the amp is stereo and to be honest I don’t hold out much hope getting a good guitar sound over a 1/8” headphone socket or a USB audio interface.
It is for this reason that I decided to treat the Spark like any other guitar amp and mic it up with a dynamic and ribbon microphone to see how it stood up as a recording amp. I also took the USB out to see how good that would be and compare it with the microphone recordings.
As I expected on clean sounds the USB output was useable but as distortion was introduced into the tone the sound became more and more fizzy as the intensity of distortion increased. I’ve included the audio of all three tracks below for your to hear. I’m no Eric Johnson or Brian May, so don’t get fixated on the playing, you’ll be disappointed!
Where it really got useful, as is the case with any amp recording was being able to blend the tracks together. That said the mics and the USB stream seem a little out of sync so there’s some phase stuff going on if you mix all three together. The WAV files can also be downloaded if you want to drag them into your DAW and see what you think when blending the sounds.
To get the USB and mics working together I had to create an Aggregate Device on my Mac so that the Spark and my Apogee Ensemble would work together. However, I’m not a fan of doing this as I don’t trust the clocking using the AD option. So in most cases I would mic the amp up rather than use the mono USB output. If you are using the Spark in a home environment then the USB interface may be useful, but for studio it’s not really good enough compared to using mics on the cab. The Spark USB also seemed to only work at 48kHz which is not the standard for music recording, something I found a little odd, but I’m willing to accept that might be user error.
Summary
I have to say for such a small footprint and two 4” speakers the sound of the Spark is impressive. It certainly doesn’t lack any bottom end and with careful mic choice and some experimentation of mic position the sound is very useable.
There’s certainly no lack of bottom end that one would want on chunking muted guitar riffs and there’s no sense of the Spark feeling cheap or lacking weight or girth in the sound department. For such a small amp it’s excellent and at just over £200 it’s a bargain.
One thing I like is the iPhone App, less so for all the gimmicks and simply for the fact that I can control the amp from across the room. There’s also an iPad app but that’s more cumbersome when you have a guitar in your hands.
In summary the Spark was a bit of a ‘screw it, what have I got to lose?’ purchase. The answer is nothing. I’m delighted with the Spark on many levels, it gives me a handy little practise amp, some stuff I can use if I want to have some fun with a virtual band, but most of all it gives me an amp I can use in the studio that gives impressive results for a professional project that belie both the size and marketing angle they’ve taken. I don’t think it was aimed at the professional studio user, but don’t let that stop you missing out on this little monster!