LPMojoGL
Well-known member
Recently got a Spark Mini. It's been pretty great! Here are my thoughts:
The good:
*I get any sound I want, using my phone and the Spark app. Impressive sounds: clean, blues, jazz, rock, metal. All there, convincingly. Great selection of amps and effects.
*I play guitar on my couch while watching TV, at low volumes.
*Sounds great thru headphones.
*It's a better bluetooth speaker than my Bose. Really.
*I take it and my Squier Strat on road trips, so I have something to do if I get bored, with equipment I don't worry about.
*It has a rechargeable battery that lasts 8 hrs of play time, which is freaking awesome. One charge lasts longer than your beard/nut trimmer, weed eater, etc.
*The best thing, I plug it straight into my laptop with a USB cable to get some very decent sounding recordings in GarageBand. No interface or mics needed.
Cons:
*The aux input has severe (0.5 sec) latency, making it worthless for plugging in a keyboard/synth. Why? Very dumb. It could be just as good for coffee table synth play, as it is for guitar, if the aux input was up to snuff.
*No way to integrate a looper. I get it. It's a stupid cheap, portable option for playing guitar. They saved the looper for the more expensive products. It would be so much more useful as a scratchpad, if it had a built in looper. Luckily, as I mentioned, all you need is a USB cable to plug it into a laptop, iPad, or whatever, to lay down scratch tracks or ideas. They're not studio quality, but they're not bad by any means.
Here are a few tracks, using my Les Paul that's loaded with @scottosan PAFs:
The good:
*I get any sound I want, using my phone and the Spark app. Impressive sounds: clean, blues, jazz, rock, metal. All there, convincingly. Great selection of amps and effects.
*I play guitar on my couch while watching TV, at low volumes.
*Sounds great thru headphones.
*It's a better bluetooth speaker than my Bose. Really.
*I take it and my Squier Strat on road trips, so I have something to do if I get bored, with equipment I don't worry about.
*It has a rechargeable battery that lasts 8 hrs of play time, which is freaking awesome. One charge lasts longer than your beard/nut trimmer, weed eater, etc.
*The best thing, I plug it straight into my laptop with a USB cable to get some very decent sounding recordings in GarageBand. No interface or mics needed.
Cons:
*The aux input has severe (0.5 sec) latency, making it worthless for plugging in a keyboard/synth. Why? Very dumb. It could be just as good for coffee table synth play, as it is for guitar, if the aux input was up to snuff.
*No way to integrate a looper. I get it. It's a stupid cheap, portable option for playing guitar. They saved the looper for the more expensive products. It would be so much more useful as a scratchpad, if it had a built in looper. Luckily, as I mentioned, all you need is a USB cable to plug it into a laptop, iPad, or whatever, to lay down scratch tracks or ideas. They're not studio quality, but they're not bad by any means.
Here are a few tracks, using my Les Paul that's loaded with @scottosan PAFs: