Amp in a Box

A head-to-head with no winner declared. The IR-X is built on the BE-100 — Dave Friedman’s refined, fully modded Plexi — and gets as heavy as you want; the IR-J comes off the Jake E. Lee head and, on a semi-matched setting through the same IR, leans further into 800 territory: rawer, maybe a touch brighter, a little less gain on tap. A Friedman Smallbox pedal in front of the IR-J gets it closer to the IR-X. The question was never really which one; it is whether the Smallbox counts as the second purchase or the third.

Jake E. Lee’s JEL-100 distilled into a two-channel tube preamp pedal: the top a Plexi, the bottom an 800 that tightens into the Friedman mod, a TS-style boost on each, and three front-panel IR slots preloaded from the pedal’s own cab library, an EVM12L among them. It runs straight into an interface, which makes it the argument for not bringing an amp at all — and then buying the pedal anyway, for the pedalboard.

Two channels off the Jake E. Lee signature amp, a three-way IR switch on each, a gain structure switch on the second, and news for the whole IR series: a MIDI CC list that now reaches channel, boost, loop, IR bypass and slot, presence, depth and low pass, on the IR-X and IR-D too. The read is a little bit of a hot-rodded 800 style thing that, with a delay or an H90 tacked on, would probably cover most of a rock gig, and the closing advice is to go back to Ozzy’s Shot in the Dark and, if you can find it, the first Badlands album.

A Meet the Machines episode with the intro recorded straight into the interface, no cab, no amp. Channel one runs from Plexi cleans to AC/DC crunch and channel two from dirty to filthy, each with a TS-style boost that can carry its own volume for the solo jump, which adds up to something like four channels. The sell is that tones that used to take a wall of Marshalls now fit in a box that runs into front of house or a power amp, which is the exact sentence that gets one ordered.