Atomic Ampli-Firebox

[Whiny Minotaur]

I've been using the Joyo American Sound to replace my amp lately. A lot of praises have been sung about the American Sound and for good reason. It's probably the best bang-for-your-buck pedal out there, and it really does sound great when you play it clean.

But lately I've become increasingly unsatisfied with how it sounded with some dirt. It was good enough to just play, but on recordings no matter what I did it just wouldn't sit very well in the mix. I also began to notice how even the clean sound had a boxy quality to it which made it sound muddier than I like no matter what setting.

So I picked up an Atomic Ampli-Firebox, which most agreed that the preamps on it are as good as any other modeling amp out on the market i.e Fractal, Kempfer etc. I didn't want a pedal with a huge amount of settings, I just wanted one which has sounds like a good Fender amp, and takes pedals well. It does both of those fantastically and more.

Once I got the pedal I bought an $8 Ownhammer Deluxe Reverb IR pack and loaded it on the ATB, and hooo boy does it sound great. It's amazing that I can just record my guitar directly to my DAW and do minimal processing on it. No fiddling around with EQs, no more getting annoyed by that nagging feeling that my recordings don't sound quite as good as they should be. As a bonus, I set the second 'boost' footswitch to be a slapback delay, so that also eliminated the necessity of constantly changing the settings on my delay pedal.

I do have a few complaints though. The biggest one is that the presets don't save the knob settings. I'm very much a 'set and forget' kind of guy, and it's annoying that you can't rollback to the original knob positions that you want if you accidentally knock the knobs with your feet. It's a minor thing, but still it's there.

Another one is that it doesn't have an FX loop. You can just place effects after the AFB, but that means they also effect the cab sim as well. It doesn't ruin the sound or anything, but I have the sneaking suspicion that Atomic intentionally left it out so that the AFB wouldn't cannibalize the sales of their higher end models.

Other than those quibbles, I'm happy as a pig in shit. It really is a fantastic platform for people wanting to go ampless without throwing out your pedals. It's way more expensive than the Joyo pedals, but the improvements were well worth the money.