Roland Micro-CUBE

[808]

Flick, I just bought one of these last Saturday. I wasn't planning on buying one but I tried it in the store and walked out with it. The manager of the store and this old guy ran to me when they heard me playing it. They thought I was playing through a halfstack.

This is a great practice amp!!!

[FLICKOFLASH]

YouTube - Micro Cube demonstruction

[Sportrider24]

Ok I know this is an old thread but at least I didn't start a new one. I just picked up a Micro Cube and DAMN do I love it!!!! You can't go wrong with this amp for $125.

Funny story though, while I was in Sam Ash I asked the guitar tech which amp he liked better the micro cube or the Line 6 15W. He told me the Line 6 without hesitation. I was a little baffled because so many raved over the Micro Cube. After I walked away he followed me and whispered "Get the microcube, a Line 6 representitive was standing right next to us when you asked".

Anyway, glad I purchased this little champ !!!

[needlespauls]

Originally Posted by Sportrider24

Ok I know this is an old thread but at least I didn't start a new one. I just picked up a Micro Cube and DAMN do I love it!!!! You can't go wrong with this amp for $125.

Funny story though, while I was in Sam Ash I asked the guitar tech which amp he liked better the micro cube or the Line 6 15W. He told me the Line 6 without hesitation. I was a little baffled because so many raved over the Micro Cube. After I walked away he followed me and whispered "Get the microcube, a Line 6 representitive was standing right next to us when you asked".

Anyway, glad I purchased this little champ !!!

Thats a riot dude!! Micro Cubes do kick ass, I need one!

[Classicplayer]

Sportrider,

How does your Ephiphone LP 100 sound through it? I have a Micro Cube,
and my Les Paul Classic with Duncan '59s sounds very good through it.

Classicplayer

[Sportrider24]

It sounds great. Especialy the classic stack setting with the guitar on rhythm.

[gibiphone]

Anybody know how a Roland 15x Cube stacks up against the Micro-Cube?

I've not had an opportunity to try them head-to-head.

gibiphone

just north of the mexican line

[Wuchak]

I love my microcube. The addition of the real eq, drum patterns and the chromatic tuner on the microcube RX are great but it's a much larger amp. For me the original microcube was the perfect size for a little amp. I wish Roland would do a microcube II and add the tuner, eq, and drums to one the same size as the original. If they did they would have the perfect practice / starter amp.

Edit: I run the line out on the microcube into my laptop and record with audacity. It's an easy way to get some nice sounding recordings. I lay the cube on it's face when I do this so the top panel is facing me as I sit at the desk. It's a great setup, especially for the price.

I think I would choose the Cube Street over the Cube RX. The extra channel with separate volume controls would be more useful than the drum machine. With the Cube Street I could torture people with my singing as well as my playing.

[Classicplayer]

Would I be able to record my Micro Cube using Garageband by Apple?

I need to get myself familiar with this software.

I was thinking about the Cube RX. After seeing the Johnny Demarco vid.
about it on Youtube. I don't really need a full size amp at the moment.
Can these small micro cubes be run into any good P.A. system or mik'd into one?

Classicplayer

[Wuchak]

Hi CP. The answer to all your questions is yes. The Cubes have a 1/4" stereo jack for headphone/line-out that defeats the internal speaker when used. Simply run a cord from that to the mic input on your computer and you are in business for recording. You can also run it into a PA.

Interesting little article on the MicroCube
Roland U.S. - Insider

Micro CUBE
Free Range Turkey
By Paul White

Micro CUBEThe Micro CUBE guitar amp may look like a handbag, but it punches above its weight. It’s so small and light, you can pack it in a suitcase. So we did — and took it to Turkey.

Pre-Flight Check
I’ve been looking for a portable guitar amplifier — ideally one that can also be run from batteries — for a couple of years now, but the available products always struck me as being little more than toys. I wanted something that could be transported as airline hand-luggage on my occasional holidays to Turkey, as I’ve made friends with several of the local musicians there, and generally end up joining in with gigs at the local Blues Bar or in some of the many bars in the area. I also wanted something with basic effects built in. On previous visits I’ve taken a guitar effects preamp and a homemade power amp, but the combination was heavy and difficult to transport without it getting broken. I was considering cannibalizing a boom-box and combining it with the innards of one of my preamps when a solution presented itself just three weeks before I was due to visit Turkey again.

As luck would have it, I was passing a couple of hours by looking around a music store. As I walked down the stairs I saw a young lad playing through a tiny amplifier and making lots of noise in the process. It turned out to be one of the newly arrived Roland Micro CUBEs, which is based around a digital modeling preamp, a choice of digital delay or reverb, a selection of modulation effects, as well as a choice of amp models. They even have dedicated settings for acoustic guitar and microphone, as well as a DI output plus an aux input that can be used to combine outside audio sources with whatever you’re playing through the amp. I though this might be useful if I needed to play to CD backing tracks, albeit in mono.

I read the blurb on the box until the young guitarist finally relinquished control over the amplifier, after which I gave it a try. Immediately I was impressed by the quality of sound — not like a toy at all — and the case was built in the same way as a large amplifier, using wood and metal, not plastic. Nevertheless, it weighed only a little over seven pounds. It took me all of two minutes to decide I had to have it and I bought it there and then. It was only when I got it home that I realized the power rating was only two watts and not the eight or so I’d expected from the volume it put out. I was also intrigued by the claim that it could run for up to 20 hours on half a dozen AA alkali batteries — though I didn’t believe a word of it at the time.

Test Run
Before my Turkey trip I had to go to Spain for a few days for work, so I took my new Micro CUBE along for the ride. I don’t know what the Micro CUBE looks like on the airport X-ray scanner but my bag was searched every time! It got used for general jamming (some by the pool, purely in the interests of research you understand), but we also recorded some guitar parts in the studio there — for use in a piece of TV music — and the DI output recorded perfectly.
Micro CUBE Top Panel

I found the British Class A model worked best with my Strat, and it responded fairly well to using the guitar volume control to change the amount of overdrive, though the other amp models also came across as fairly authentic (British Stack and US High Gain models based on the usual suspects). The single tone control seems to provide bass boost in one direction and top boost in the other, and if you run the amp flat out there are some settings that sound just a bit ragged, possibly due to power-amp clipping, but if you back off the level just slightly you can still get a great sound with quite a lot of volume, so I guess the little speaker is pretty efficient. What’s most unusual for an amp this small is that the ported cabinet actually delivers a real impression of low-end punch, not that ‘bee in a paper cup’ sound that most little amps produce. A friend of mine who also happened to be at the same studio at the same time liked the amp so much that he bought one himself the first weekend after he got back, and several other friends have since added it to their shopping lists.

To Turkey or Bust
Two weeks and two airport searches later, I had the amp in Turkey, where I met up with my old friend Haluk who plays classical guitar and sings. He’d already lined up a couple of bar gigs for us, as well as couple of private parties for British ex-pats. First time out, I had the little amp set to around one-third level and was soon asked to turn it down because the sound level was too high for the restaurant across the road, despite the fact that they were playing canned music. Impressive. I originally took the mains PSU and a socket adapter around with me, but eventually decided to try running from batteries as it saved trying to locate a power socket near to where I was playing. Certainly it didn’t sound any different on batteries.

Micro CUBE Rear PanelNow you won’t meet friendlier people than the Turks anywhere, but when it comes to music technology, most of them seem to lack that smattering of techie knowledge that most of us take for granted. For example, they see nothing at all wrong in using a length of twin lighting flex [cheap cable] with a jack plug on either end as a guitar lead. I encountered powered mixers that seemed older than the Roman ruins over the river, and speakers where faulty rectangular tweeters had been ripped out at some time and nasty round piezo tweeters nailed in their place. I don’t know whether they’d wired them in or just nailed them – it sounded like the latter. In one bar Haluk and I encountered just such a system, which was made worse by the fact that the mic seemed to have come out of a Cracker Jack box. No matter how we tried, we couldn’t get a vocal sound that didn’t resemble a dictaphone under a duvet, so in the end I suggested he try the mic input of the Micro CUBE and I’d forego the luxury of a decent guitar sound and play through the house antique. To my amazement, the ‘mic from a cracker’ sounded quite respectable through the Micro CUBE and, providing he didn’t get too close and yell, it didn’t break up. The inbuilt reverb worked nicely with the vocals (which is surprising when you think the whole Micro CUBE costs less than all but the cheapest reverb pedals) and we were able to hold our own when playing outdoors to eight or nine tables with the restaurants on either side playing canned music. Not bad for a two-watt PA.

Blues Bar
At the Blues Bar they have a fairly serious PA, drum kit, back line, and everything (even screened cables and tweeters without nails), but the only spare amp they had for me to use was an old model CUBE 15. They DI this into the PA for extra volume, but I decided to try using the Micro CUBE as a preamp by connecting its DI out to the guitar input on the CUBE 15 set to a clean, neutral sound. I was running the Micro CUBE from batteries so there wasn’t a sniff of ground loop hum or unwanted hiss, and I soon had something approximating what I like to think of as my usual guitar sound, which I achieved using the Brit Class A model on full drive with a little delay and the tone control at about one o’clock. For some reason, the signal seems less overdriven when DI’d, so I guess the speaker must contribute to the sound in that respect. This setting meant I could turn the guitar volume control down, except for solos, and get a reasonable transition from cleanish to dirtyish.

My party piece was playing along with the band’s rather dubious rendition of “Another Brick In The Wall,” and I got some nice comments about how authentic the solo sounded, so I must have been doing something right. By contrast, their resident guitar player — who is really technically very good — had about a meter of pedals and a well-known British rock combo, but still managed to produce a pretty mushy sound that didn’t show off his playing skills to their best advantage. The more pedals he stomped on, the worse the sound seemed to get, and some nights he spent more time fiddling with his pedals than playing. By contrast, I just plugged one lead into the back of my Micro CUBE and started playing. In fact I went round to the guitarist’s apartment to make some adjustments to his guitar, and left the amplifier with him for the morning as he was dying to play through it.

Return Trip
At the end of two weeks it was time to unbolt the neck from my trusty holiday Strat, wrap it in towels and pack it back in my suitcase as I’ve done so many times before, but, just as I was packing the Micro CUBE into my hand baggage, one of the band members from the Blues Bar asked if I’d sell it to them for rehearsals in the garden and for playing through on boat trips. To buy their own they’d probably have to order from Istanbul and pay a lot in import duty, and as leaving the amp behind would avoid at least one extra customs search as well as lightening my hand luggage, I agreed. But the day I got home I ordered another to take its place, not just for holidays but also for garden parties and for rehearsing or recording at friends’ houses without dragging loads of kit around. When the new one comes, I’ll try it at the local pub jam night, which means I can now carry in all the gear I need under one arm. If my experiences with this little amp are anything to go by, I’m expecting that the sound quality of music in the London Underground will improve quite noticeably in the near future.

Coda
After two weeks or fairly intensive use in Turkey, my first set of batteries was still going strong, but as I sold it with the batteries still inside, I can’t say when they finally gave out!

Paul White is editor in chief of Sound On Sound magazine. Thanks to Paul and our colleagues at Roland’s PowerOn magazine in the U.K., for the use of this article.

[Classicplayer]

Thanks Wuchak. I have read that article on the Roland site before. I'd quite forgot
about it. It answers alot of my questions, and explains some good points of the Micro
Cube.

Classicplayer