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Peavey AT-200

posted January 3rd, 2013 in Guitar,Music

I dropped by Guitar Center tonight and finally got a chance to try out the Peavey AT-200, which I’d first seen in demo videos from last year’s Winter NAMM show. (Aside: woot, it’s almost time for another Winter NAMM!) I guess they’ve been on the market for a while, and GC has even had some in stock near me for a month or so, but I hadn’t sat down to try one yet.

The guitar was (probably intentionally) even more out of tune than the average display guitar at GC, but as advertised it popped right into tune after a single strum and pushing the volume button. I guess I should’ve tried comparing the sound of the guitar autotuned to the sound of it, you know, actually tuned, but it worked well enough. The sample tunings they demonstrate in the video — drop D or baritone — worked pretty well, too. And the most exciting bit to me was that it sounded good in the couple of open tunings I tried, open D and open Dm. Of course, those took a little bit of thought to figure out what to fret to get the autotune to end up where I wanted — ultimately you fret the number of half steps UP that you want the open string to be DOWN. (I guess that means if you want to tune any open string up, you have to tune everything down an appropriate amount and then capo up, which sort of defeats the purpose of the autotuning but is workable.)

And then I got to the fun (==ridiculous) things. I’ve always wondered about just how far you can push these tuning modelers, since they seem to usually demonstrate them at a baritone tuning at the furthest. But of course djent with 8-string guitars with a low string around F# is in right now, or if I didn’t own a bass I might want to be able to play bass parts on my autotuned guitar. Unfortunately, running a regular guitar through a pitch shifter or octave pedal usually sounds nothing like a real bass, to say nothing of the fact that they can’t track multiple pitches simultaneously — they’re useful as an effect but you would probably never be able to actually use one as a bass replacement. I think the AT-200 would be CLOSE to being usable as a bass, although I’m not sure. I autotuned it down at least as far as a bass in drop D, and I might’ve gone even further than that, and it sounded more natural than a pitch pedal but probably less natural than a bass guitar. (Obviously, running it through a guitar amp put some limit on the usefulness as a bass…)

From a practical perspective, I would still rather get a James Tyler Variax, because of the wide variety of tweakable modeled instruments it comes with on top of being able to model retunings. It would also fit in quite naturally with my HD500, which last I heard supports storing the guitar configuration along with amp configuration in presets. From what I’ve read, technically the AT-200 supports firmware upgrades to allow it to model instruments as well, but my understanding is that they will be paid upgrade packages instead of just being a standard part of the guitar. Of course, the cheapest JTV is more than twice the cost of the AT-200, which you would probably not reach even with all of the upgrade packages; on the other hand, Line 6 has pushed out several free updates for the JTV to improve its value proposition. But playing with the AT-200 did convince me that something with this simple retuning magic is something I “need” in my creative arsenal.