MusicRadar

A fantastic one-stop practice solution

View in gallery

• Related News
• Review
• Manufacturer's Description

Practice amps have come a long way since the Fender Champ. Not necessarily in tone – a tweed Champ is up there with the best – but certainly when it comes to facilities.

These days it's not unusual to see practice amps with built-in effects and even built-in digital recorders. It’s been left to Fender, however, to come up with what may be the most advanced practice amp yet seen – the G-DEC, or to give it its full name, the Guitar Digital Entertainment Centre.

What you get is an amp with built-in MIDI synthesiser to provide accompaniment to your playing. Karaoke for guitarists? Well, maybe…

At its heart the G-DEC is a modest 15-watt modelling amplifier with an eight-inch speaker and single tone and volume knobs, but it has as much signal processing power as Fender’s Cyber Series amplifiers, endowing it with 17 different amp types, 29 effects and 10 reverbs, plus a built-in tuner.

To get an instant sound, a large silver front panel dial calls up one of 50 ‘performance presets’. Each preset is not only a specific combination of amp sound and effects but it also has an associated drum loop and bassline in the style that the particular guitar sound relates to.

Besides the factory presets there are also 50 user spaces to store your own guitar sounds, along with a drum and bass rhythm of choice.

Rhythms

The drum and bass rhythms are switched to run by a single button press and can be quickly tweaked to suit the user – tempo and key being the immediately obvious choices. The actual sounds are generated by the G-DEC’s 16-part multitimbral MIDI sound module, which can be accessed by plugging a MIDI sequencer (hardware or computer-based) into the G-DEC and playing MIDI song files should you want a fuller sounding backing track or a song with complex chord changes to jam along to.

A strap button on either side of the cabinet provides a useful method of carrying the G-DEC via the provided locking shoulder strap.

The absence of a handle is because Fender wanted a flat surface on which the user could place a portable CD or mp3 player that could be plugged into the stereo aux input to provide another source of accompaniment. These can be used for simply playing along to, but the G-DEC has an internal phrase sampler so up to 14 seconds of music from any plugged-in source, including your guitar, can be recorded and looped. Half-speed playback is possible if there’s a difficult phrase that needs learning.

In use

Using the G-DEC is pretty intuitive. All of the illuminated front panel buttons are self explanatory and a large backlit screen lets you see exactly what’s going on if you want to start tweaking things.

The factory presets should suit just about all guitar styles. There is something here for everyone, from clean country and reverb-soaked surf tones to full-on metal and Purple Haze-like fuzz. Some of the presets come across as quite brightly voiced, and the effects are sometimes laid on a bit thick – designed to impress by making a big sound emerge from such a small box. But on the whole, the tones are pretty good and absolutely fine for practice.