Soldano 20 watt - new amp

TotallyRadGuitars said:
As a *small* youtuber the problem is a few things:

1. If a new product comes out, and they think you are going to review it critically, they won't give you early access to it. They want only positive reviews, so while they won't outright tell you "you must review this amp positively," they just carefully select who they will allow to do a review to get their desired result. It's like survey questions, if you have a specific result in mind that you want, you'd only survey a certain group of people or ask certain carefully designed questions - it's not a true unbiased opinion they want.

Plus, getting those reviews out early with a launch like this guarantees a positive hype. If you do have someone willing to do a more critical review (myself included), I'd have to wait for release, maybe even wait list, plus buy it all with my own money. By the time my review comes out, it might be 3 months after everyone else when the hype has died down and it's already been decided, and by then probably 1/10th the number of people are even still searching for stuff on it.

2. When you are critical of a product, the fans of that product will come out in full force to be dicks to you. And to make it worse, many of these people don't even own the product and their opinion was decided by that first wave of new reviews. I softened my language *substantially* when reviewing the 2020 Kramer Nightswan and I still get the occasional bitter comment about that video. Most people have been very nice to me on YT and elsewhere, but I've seen coments/emails sent to other youtubers that are pretty awful, even my tiny channel I've had to block a few people. So imagine if I have 3 loud jerks on my channel with only 1800 subs what it's like for someone with 18,000 or 180,000 subs. So that discourages critical reviews.

3. People in it - not even necessarily for profit, but just to break even - do not get their videos ranked highly by the algorithm. There's also lots of other little shitty things about Youtube I can get into, for example my JCM900 video was claimed for 30 days because I played the riff from "Basket Case" in it. They lost and I kept the video, but all of the ad revenue from that 30 days went to youtube, not me. I mean it was like $5, but still. This gets worse for people who review things like games or movies, I remember there was a whole thing where negative movie reviews were getting copyright claimed by big companies like Sony and Disney, then since it's fair use, the claim is cancelled, but it's still enough to take away the vast majority of the income for that review.

So if videos that are more in depth, or negative, or even middling about a product are not shown as highly in youtube search results or dashboards, and they are delayed by months by either copyright shenanigans or waiting for the product to actually come out.... and the money made from a video is highly dependent on how quickly the video is released... you can see how it quickly becomes stacked against content creators that don't just "get in line."

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Long story short, you make more money, get a larger audience, and piss fewer people off if you just say "yeah, this product is great, look how great it is." There are always people that fall outside of this, gain some traction in another group or as an alternative viewpoint, but it is much less common to be successful that way.

PS I'm not blaming any of these people or calling them "shills" or whatever this type of discussion usually degenerates to. Just explaining from my perspective why it ends up this way.
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In other words, it is what it is.

We all want our reviews ASAP, so we have to expect most of them to be positive. I get it. For those that have a lot of disposable income and need to have the latest and greatest are also probably the ones doing a lot of selling. No one here of course.
 
griff10672 said:
Micheal Nielson .... makes everything sound great ....

I'd love a small scale Soldano ...... but I still have yet to find a 20 watter that I've liked .... Power Tubes haven't mattered .... but ... I can say I haven't tried one with 6V6's in it yet .
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I feel the same about lower watt amps with a high gain preamp.
I dig the sound of 1974/2061, AC15, Brown Deluxe, and Deluxe Reverb cranked with a band.
I had a 6v6 4-holer that sounded glorious. I text the guy that I sold it to every couple of years, asking if he wants to sell it back. I think he's literally taking it to his grave.

Looking forward to checking this Soldano out when it hits the stores.
 
I don’t get the demo fatigue thing. These guys get paid to make demos. They’re supposed to say good shit. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. If you’re tired of all of the same people, don’t click on the video. No big deal. For me, anytime the guy that was mentioned does a video at Sweetwater, I fast forward or skip it.

That said, it’s a really hard to buy a bad product by these companies nowadays. People are pretty dialed in on what works and what sells.

Especially with boutique anp distribution. The new Soldano has Dave Friedman‘s XLR out for the cabinet. A lot of the stuff is are recycled Ideas with different product badging on an already known platform. I’m sure it’s all on a dry erase board somewhere, don’t launch the Jake amp at the same time you launch the Soldano.

boutique amps is going to come out with a plethora of IRX models, just like they did with the synergy line. I’ll bet somebody somewhere is going to make one of those each things sound fucking great. Everyone of them will have a half dozen paid YouTube videos that all launch within three days of each other.

While in a way it’s product overload, in another way boutique amps is allowing a lot of amp builders (designers maybe at this point) to be profitable.

There’s a lot of wasted energy bitching about these videos. We’re lucky to have awesome gear everywhere. and most of it is infinitely easier to use and get a great result than it used to be. 🤷‍♂️
 
youtube reviews are just for fun...
Especially from some certain guys that I really like such as Leon Todd and M. Nielsen...
I click for the nice songs and playing...

Tone is very subjective and the "feel" cannot be heard in a youtube review...I like the videos, the fun, the playing, love the effort...dont care about the gear...
 
This looks awesome. It's really looking like something I wish I could buy lol It's a killer price IMO, I am just not at a point I can drop money on gear. Another kid on the way in a couple weeks :)
 
griff10672 said:
Micheal Nielson .... makes everything sound great ....

I'd love a small scale Soldano ...... but I still have yet to find a 20 watter that I've liked .... Power Tubes haven't mattered .... but ... I can say I haven't tried one with 6V6's in it yet .
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I have a 25w Rivera with 6v6s and everyone loves it. I run BlackPlate RCAs in the front and Smoked RCAs in the output. Sounds HUGE through a 2x12, and easily keeps with a drummer. Idk about this Soldano one but I'd like to give it a go for sure.
 
TotallyRadGuitars said:
There's also lots of other little shitty things about Youtube I can get into, for example my JCM900 video was claimed for 30 days because I played the riff from "Basket Case" in it. They lost and I kept the video, but all of the ad revenue from that 30 days went to youtube, not me.
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Could you flesh this out a little.... what does it mean when a video is claimed? We haven't bothered to enable monetisation but have had a few videos flagged as Ineligible because of certain riffs. Thanks.
 
311splawndude said:
For those that have a lot of disposable income and need to have the latest and greatest are also probably the ones doing a lot of selling. No one here of course.
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My specific niche in this hobby is buying the cool boutique amps about 10-15 years after everyone's forgotten about them haha

ZEN Amps said:
Could you flesh this out a little.... what does it mean when a video is claimed? We haven't bothered to enable monetisation but have had a few videos flagged as Ineligible because of certain riffs. Thanks.
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My experience may differ since I'm in the US, but it should be similar:

Basically, two ways it gets flagged. Either youtube "checks" catch something it thinks is copyrighted material (this is called "Content ID"), or a video can be manually flagged, with timestamps, by certain agents who work for the owners of these copyrighted things (movies, music, etc).

As for what the copyright flagging does, it's not the same thing as a copyright "strike." While your video is flagged with a Content ID claim, you have a few choices but most of what we do - demoing an amp, talking about guitar playing techniques or lessons, parodies or covers, & discussing/reviewing music is classified under "fair use" which means that there is nothing wrong and you are allowed to use those riffs, songs, whatever to make your content. This means you can dispute the claim and probably not have to worry about losing.
Obviously if you are trying to monetize a full song or movie that isn't yours, you'll lose, and there are a few ways that can go. Sometimes the ad revenue just goes to the copyright owner, sometimes you can split it, other times they'll force you to take it down entirely. A copyright strike only happens if they file a legal takedown notice which has its own whole chain of events.

Most large content creators get the vast majority of their views and engagement within the first 24 hours of publishing the video. This isn't as true with guitar stuff, I still get views on year old videos as new people search the web for demos and so on, but it is absolutely true with new product releases, games/tv/movies, news/politics/opinions and those kinds of videos.
There's a reason the first details the youtube studio shows you are the amount of views your newest upload has compared to previous videos in the same time frame, and the average view duration. Youtube rewards videos that have more rapid engagement because it feeds their ad revenue too. It's also why uploading a video every X days consistently is such a critical thing to getting more revenue from videos (something I'm very bad at, 9 months between videos lol).

So keeping that in mind, if I upload a video and play a 30 second long riff in an hour long video, and Evil Record Company puts a copyright claim on my video, it is assumed that they are right automatically. If they choose to "block" my entire video, it will not be viewable by anyone until the claim is lifted. Evil Record Company has 30 days to do this, so if they know they won't win the dispute, they'll wait 29 days 23 hours 59 minutes to lift the claim. Technically any ad revenue earned during that time will be paid to the creator, but if the video is blocked, the ad revenue is $0.

By the time the dispute is over, the video is 29 days old and may only have a handful of views or comments, and therefore is not ranked as highly for placement on the front page, search, or suggested videos. Effectively, the most critical time where most of the money is made from the video is gone. And it's not as simple as a re-upload, it'll just get flagged again - which is also why you'll hear some creators saying they had to take down, edit, and reupload a video. It's also worth mentioning they don't have to block the whole video, they can just mute the specific section, or even leave it up and just file a claim for a cut of the ad revenue and so on, I'm explaining the worst case scenario because they can and will use it.

It's annoying for us, but imagine how rough it must be for people who do movie reviews and such. If some company is pissed off that you panned their movie, they can just copyright claim a few spots in your video and hold it for 29 days and essentially strip you of any income you might've had for that video. I imagine this happens all the time to people like CriticalDrinker or Mauler. This could easily spiral into pages of discussion so I won't get into that further.

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For guitar related youtube channels that are just focused on the gear, like you Zen, my advice would be:
  1. Definitely turn on monetization. Anything you aren't monetizing just lines the pockets of youtube/google anyway. The same number of ads appear on your videos no matter what, you may as well get something for your time even if it's just a few bucks here and there.
  2. When uploading a video, do not publish it live until the youtube checks have completed.
  3. Immediately dispute, within the first 5 days, any content ID claim made against your video.
  4. Use independent funding to review amps and guitars as best you can. You might just be one voice in a sea of yes-men but at least there would be SOME critical thinking when it comes to this stuff.
  5. If your videos are long like mine, please, for the love of god, turn off the mid-video ads. I always turn them off. Nothing pisses me off more than watching a video only to have the guy interrupted mid-sentence or mid-riff to show me an ad. You can set time stamps to "suggest" where the ad should display, but Youtube is awful and will show ads whenever they feel like it and ignore your chapters/suggestions.
 
TotallyRadGuitars said:
For guitar related youtube channels that are just focused on the gear, like you Zen, my advice would be...
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Wow, cheers for that detailed reply - really appreciated.

I haven't had any time for making videos this year but was looking into stuff for next. May well include covers, and was wondering if it was worth avoiding due to stories like yours. I was under the impression I could get away with it, and worst case was a copyright claim. Sounds like a block is the worser case, and if it's not lifted you're screwed.

In your experience, whether it's a claim or block, what's your hit rate for winning a dispute?
 
Does it have a depth knob? Haven't watched the vids, sorry.

I think the problem with the original Astro is that it sounded kinda thin in the lows?
 
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