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“We put the same level of attention into everything. It can be infuriating… We’ll listen in different rooms, with different guitars and different players, to get there”: Inside Blackstar’s quest to build the next generation of guitar amps
There’s no shortage of talk about “innovation” in the guitar-amp world. But genuine innovation is harder to define. Is it a radical new circuit? A clever piece of power-supply engineering? Or simply a small change that makes an amplifier more useful to the person standing in front of it?
For Blackstar, the answer appears to be a combination of all three. The British company was founded in 2004 by four friends and former bandmates, but it would be another three years before its first products reached the market.
Those intervening years were spent on research and development, with a deliberately engineering-led approach to understanding why classic guitar amps sound and respond the way they do.
Rather than simply recreating established designs, Blackstar set out to develop its own circuits and technologies. The company has subsequently been granted four UK patents, covering ideas ranging from tone shaping and power reduction to valve-inspired response and the architecture of lightweight valve amps.
As Blackstar's Chief Engineer Paul Stevens told Guitar World in 2024, “We put the same level of attention into everything. It can be infuriating, because we’ll go round in circles. We’ll listen in different rooms, with different guitars and different players, to get there. It doesn’t matter if it’s an expensive tube amp or a beginner’s solid-state, we put the same amount of attention into everything.”
One of the best-known is ISF, or Infinite Shape Feature. Rather than treating an amp’s EQ as a choice between broadly American- and British-voiced presets, ISF continuously alters the response of the tone network between those extremes. In practical terms, that means there’s a range of sounds between the familiar reference points rather than a simple either/or choice.
Another is DPR, or Dynamic Power Reduction. The idea is less about making an amplifier quiet and more about changing the operating conditions of its valve output stage so that characteristics such as compression and harmonic response remain available at lower power.
That distinction is important for guitarists. The appeal of a valve amp isn’t necessarily its ability to produce ear-splitting volume – it’s the way the circuit behaves when it is being pushed.
Blackstar has also applied its approach to non-valve amplification. Its True Valve Power technology – or TVP – is designed to reproduce some of the response associated with different valve power stages in non-valve amps. It became part of the company's Response control, giving players a way to alter the amp’s feel and character rather than simply changing EQ.
Perhaps the most ambitious example is the St. James series, where the company rethought the valve amplifier at the system level. The design combines conventional valve preamp and power-amp stages with a lightweight switched-mode power supply, an internal reactive load and digital cabinet simulation.
The result was a 50-watt valve amplifier that weighed dramatically less than the traditional alternatives. Much of that weight saving came from engineering decisions made throughout the amplifier rather than one headline-grabbing component: lightweight power-supply technology, candlenut plywood construction and a specially developed Celestion Zephyr speaker all contributed.
The internal reactive load also allows the real valve power stage to interact with a designed load, while CabRig provides control over cabinet, microphone and room simulation for direct recording and output applications.
Blackstar's interest in making traditionally inconvenient technologies more practical isn't limited to full-size amps. The Fly 3, for example, demonstrated how much functionality could be squeezed into a three-watt battery-powered amplifier, combining two channels, ISF and delay with a small speaker. The HT-1R took a different route, using a one-watt push-pull valve design to make genuine valve amplification viable for practice and recording.
That same philosophy has appeared in Blackstar's valve pedals, which use high-voltage valve circuitry rather than employing a valve simply as a visual nod to traditional amp design.
More recently, the company's focus has expanded beyond conventional amplification. Beam Mini can load Neural Amp Modeler captures through TONE3000, allowing players to use community-created profiles rather than being restricted to a single manufacturer's ecosystem.
And the Beam platform is increasingly becoming a practice and music-making tool as well as an amplifier. A September 2026 update to the Beam app adds Moises' real-time stem-separation technology, allowing users to isolate or mute instruments in backing tracks. For guitarists, that means being able to remove the guitar part from a song and play directly into the space it occupied.
The technology may have changed considerably since Blackstar's early valve amps. The underlying question, however, remains surprisingly straightforward: does a particular piece of engineering help a guitarist play, practice, record or create more effectively?
That's perhaps a more useful definition of innovation than simply being first, different or new. In an industry built on decades-old circuits and familiar sounds, sometimes the most interesting advances are the ones that solve problems players have quietly been putting up with for years.
Head to Blackstar for more.
