I’m a homebrewer and in the craft beer biz almost every successful small craft brewer has been bought up by a large commercial brewer. And craft beer fans get all apoplectic over it. Locally, budweiser bought goose island who make my favorite beer, bourbon county stout. Everyone said it would ruin them. What changed? With the beer nothing. But they got major financial backing and distributorship which gave them flexibility to produce more beers. Will this (darkglass) be the same, who knows. I just think a lot of people jump to the conclusion that its a horrible sellout thing and that may not be true. Time will tell.
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If you owned Darkglass - great news.
If you are a consumer - not great news.
What I like about the smaller companies is they try things, experiment. But when your brand gets big, it’s super tempting to cash in and reap the rewards of your sweat and work.
For all the foibles Rickenbacker has, I do like they are independent and don’t give a damn about making every last cent to be made.
What becomes of the great brand is to be seen. No way to tell.
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it worked out somewhat okay with Vox. There are some pedals with Korg’s “nutekt” tech and even little screens like on their recent synths.
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Like a lot of other Japanese companies, Korg takes its reputation very seriously. Whether or not this is good or bad depends on a lot of things, but much like Yamaha with Ampeg and Line6, it may simply be that nothing will change. I don’t see the product line going to crap just to cut corners for profit, like you might see with a lot of huge US companies.
Plus look at it this way: could’ve been Uli instead 
Only half joking, look at what Uli did to TC.
The bigger news in this is I bet this frees up Doug to focus mostly on NeuralDSP. That might be exciting.
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Core-tek (Cort) also bought Digi-Tech.
Its just the way things go.
It sucks but seems inevitable
And its nothing new.
You can only hope they intend to build upon, or stay consistant with the original companies ways.
I some cases, they will buy, then quickly or slowly kill. In other cases they stay the course
As a proud SWR amp owner / collector, i wholeheartedly agree.
Fender never improved or maintained SWR’s standards, and eventually killed.
But Rumbles are not SWE’s, or better then SWR, or nearly as good IMO.
So Fender didnt even stay on par with SWR
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Pretty sure this will be the case. At least for now.
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It wiuld be a bad business plan to take a company that is loved with devited followers.
They would need to play the slow game, needing time to lose a lot of devoted followers, otherwise Korg would turn all DarkGlass lovers to Korg haters
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I’m on the fence on this one. I’ve worked for some of the largest corporations in the world, and for startups. And without knowing the finances, hard to say. If Darkglass was saddled with debt or had little cash on hand, then this is a great way to bang out new products. Especially if they remain independent under Korg. The engineers at Darkglass could also move onto a new startup and invent all new stuff - like Leo Fender did with Music Man then G&L. Or it could be the end of innovation at Darkglass. I’ve been through mergers and it takes time to shake out.
My Ibanez was built by Core-tek. They are pretty solid at building instruments.
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And pedals. They probably already build most, if not all Digi-Tek at this point. Now they control it all.
Probably good news for Core-Tek and the owners and executives at Digi-tek.
Probably bad for some employees.
For the rest of the world, probably will go un-noticed.
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ah okay. I thought I had read somewhere (maybe even here, but I don’t remember where) that Rumble amps were SWR designs or something like that.
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I actually wish Fender would have just taken SWR and kept that as heir brand of Amps, or kept SWR as their US built amp line, instead of moving them to Mexico and tgen China. And just have tgeir Fender amps made in mex and / or chin.
SWR is to bass amps, what Fender was to electric basses, Pioneers.
It fits, right.
Well, guess not, instead they keep making Fender Amps and keep making SWR, until it was not worth keeping SWR alive.
I think it was a long term goal. Over time get the SWR loyalists to be not as excited about the brand. Less marketing, poor design choices, poor changes, price jacking, so when they close SWR, not as much backlash from brand loyalists.
Korg would have to do that to DarkGlass over time to be able to close it down without huge amounts of backlash that they would get from the bass world today.
Of course that is ALL In theory.
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I read on talkbass where Genzler wrote about the buyout of Genz-Benz. He said they had him show up to his office and do nothing for a year. He then left and when his non-compete was up, he started Genzler Amplification.
For SWR, Steve W Rabe had moved on and the CEO had made it public knowledge he was “looking for a date with Fender”. He got that “date” and was happy for the buyout. Fender floated SWR for 12 (?) years. My understanding is the big problem with SWR was they couldn’t patent most of the substantial changes they made. By the time Fender canceled the line, the rest of the industry, including Genz-Benz, had already absorbed the new stuff SWR had been working with. Fuller range cabinets with adjustable horns were a big part of this.
Genz-Benz took the whole idea of full range bass amps and cabinets and ran with it. They also had an amp that was two amps in one. It had a tube side and a solid state side and you could blend the two. Isn’t that cool! When Andy Field (head engineer for Genz-Benz) went to Mesa Boogie he designed the Subway TT-800 which also has two amps in one. Unfortunately, you can’t blend them on the TT-800. I thought that was a real missed opportunity.
Nobody, outside of Fender, can really say what all went into the development of the Rumble. My best guess is they took all the best ideas from their own 50+ years of amp building and combined the best of what they had from both SWR, Genz-Benz, and any other modern concepts for amp building.
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Yeah, of course there is much more to the story, short game, long game, its all a business plan. Succesful companies thru skill, knowledge and / or luck pick the ones that work for many reasons.
Good selling product, competition, revolutionary technology, brand recognition, etc…
I am not saying its Fenders fault, they are a very succesful business model, and make many right chouces, as can be validated by their high success rate.
Of course with every choice there will be a percentage of the gen pop that praises you, a percentage that curses you, and another percentage that is impartial.
But at the end of the day its no different then the law of the jungle.
Small and weak seek protection from big and strong, or become excrement after being eaten by big and strong.
As bad as that sounds, we have all been inpressed with many of our meals, and even some if our shits, regardless the particular circumstance…
Its ok to be proud to have survived, thrived, protected and conqured in the concrete jungle.
Thanks for the deep dive Eric, very good info.
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Hi there!
I’m considering buying the Element and I stumbled on this thread - great read, learned few more things from what you gather on the DG website (kinda weird tbh, but on the other hand a great shootout to this community!).
I have a very naive question: do the amps/cabs simulations to through the headphone out? I’m asking because I would always use the Element with headphones plugged in, and I’m confused whether the XLR out or headphones out get the same signal output.
Apologies if this is kinda obvious, this would be my first pedal so I’m quite of a noob in the field!
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Yeah they do. The signal is the same for any output. You can control the effects in the signal via the app/suite. So in theory you can turn everything off or on. FYI the element has a bass and guitar amp sim, 2 types of EQ, a noise gate and ofc the cab sims.
I’m still hoping they would add extra effects in the future, but I don’t think the device has the power for that.
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Thank you for clarifying the output signals Paul! Makes sense, logic was also suggesting me that that was the case but I thought it was better to ask 
I think it’s already cool that they added new stuff via firmware updates, but I agree, more features would be welcome! The end of their video on the last update clearly hints at a metronome, drum loops and, I don’t know what’s the third icon? But looks like there are plans to further expand what the Element can do.
I hope this pedal will help me transitioning to a more “offline” set up, I’m finding off-putting to have to turn on my laptop every time I want to play. I recently finished B2B course, that can’t be a coincidence
I tried the zoom b1four in a store but the headphone volume was super low, no matter how much I played with settings. I’m eyeballing at the Element as a solid “plug & play” kinda thing.
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They also added a tuner. A big feature of the Element is actually the Bluetooth connectivity. I connect my phone to the Element and use my metronome/drums app for adding drums to the signal. You can do the same with music and backing tracks. So I don’t see why the should add those kind of features. I rather have new effects 
People do have divergent opinions about the Element. As a standalone pedal I think it kicks ass. The touch sensitive knobs are a bit meh imo and I hope they remove those from future products. The sliders are cool and have been adapted too.
The Mooer Prime P1 is also an interesting alternative headphone amp. It has more multi-fx (like the Zoom B1 Four) but I don’t know good the quality is compared to the Element. Maybe @itsratso knows?
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Well now you’ll have to turn on and pair your phone every time you want to adjust your eq. (It does not remember the bluetooth pairing, you have to do it from scratch every time.) I returned mine, it was just too much of a pain in the arse.
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Funny I have been doing the same. I love my laptop but I rather play “offline”, that’s why I invest in amp in a box pedals because I still like to have physical pedals to toy around with. If you really want a really good digital multi-fx pedal that does everything what the Element does and beyond I would highly recommend the HX Stomp.
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I would also use the bluetooth streaming a lot, both for drums apps and backing tracks. New effects would be awesome but maybe they don’t want the Element to eat into their other products, who knows.
Yeah I get that, but I think I can much more easily digest that rather than taking my laptop. If I go for it time will tell! Weird (and a pity) though that it doesn’t remember pairing.
Same boat, for work I look at 2 screens 8+hrs every week day, having to be in front of another screen is not appealing to start practicing, unless I want to follow something on youtube (or when I was doing B2B).
Yeah I had a look at the hx stomp, looks like an awesome piece of gear but also very expensive 
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