Review: Korg Ampworks

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to review another legacy piece of hardware that I have owned for years: Korg Ampworks!

This 2003 piece of gear was Korg's take on the world of desktop amp and effect simulators for guitar, following the groundbreaking success of the Line6 Pod.
Actually Korg has been a pioneer in digital amp emulation, with tools such as the Pandora, but when the Pod hit the market, that's when the digital technology started to catch really the attention of guitar players, before the Pod digital amp modelers were considered toys for the starting guitarists, something that should never be used in a studio/live environment.

The ampworks was a cheaper, much lighter and portable version of the Pod, actually it was made by such light plastic that a real live use would have been possible only by fixing it in some pedalboard, otherwise just the weight of the guitar cable would make it fall.
The unit can even be connected to a footswitch to move through the presets live, but for live purposes it made much more sense the floorboard version, which featured two footswitches and an expression pedal.

The Ampworks can be operated with batteries or via Ac adaptor, and it features a very intuitive interface: it offers the typical controls of an amplifier (and a noise gate), 11 types of amp voicings, both for bass and guitar, 11 types of cabinets and 9 effect presets, which consisted in single effects (with a dedicated button for the tap tempo of the delay) and some common combination of them.

What about the sound? Well, it sounded definitely one generation behind the Pod (which on the other hand was costing 2/3 times as much back then), and maybe it was geared towards a less demanding audience: the effects were not bad, althought there was no real way to control the parameters, but the preamp section was sounding extremely thin, with the distortions that were buzzy and without body as typical of the early emulators and they lacked completely of any harmonics richness, sounding more similar to a fuzz than to a hi-gain amp.
By playing it today it shows all the technological limits of the time, but it's been fun nevertheless toying with it back then (especially with low gain/overdrive tones), until the Vst amp simulators completely blew away the low end of hardware guitar amp simulation.

Thumbs down!


Specs taken from the manual:


- REMS technology delivers an array of classic Guitar/Bass Amp, Speaker Cabinet and Effect models

- Intuitive user interface with 3 Select Dials and 6 Knobs

- Loaded with 11 classic and modern Guitar & Bass Amplifiers

- 11 sought after Cabinet models for Guitar and 10 Cabinet models for Bass

- 9 Guitar Effect models (Ampworks), 11 Bass Effect models (Ampworks bass)

- 11 Preset Amp settings, 2 User Programmable settings, plus Manual setting

- Battery or AC powered



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