The Guitar.com Awards 2022: Gamechanger Award winner revealed

Every year, the guitar industry shocks us with its ingenuity – for a passion that primarily focuses on the celebration of things that were created somewhere between 50 and a hundred years ago, barely a month passes without someone finding an ingenious new way to give us the stuff that we love in an innovative, more user-friendly or more affordable fashion.

But amongst these products there are some that stand out from the crowd – ideas whose impact ripples beyond the product itself and has the potential to permanently shift the needle when it comes to their particular sector or niche. There are the prime needle-movers of 2022.

获胜者：布莱克斯塔圣詹姆斯

尽管许多放大器品牌将所有精力集中在制作耳机，扬声器和其他生活方式配饰上，但Blackstarremains a brand that is firmly aboutdesigning and making amps. That’s perhaps why many of the industry’s most impressive innovations in recent years have come out of the UK-brand’s‘Dept 10’研发实验室。

Take then, the conventional wisdom that suggests traditional amps are slowly going the way of the dodo and the rackmount unit. Blackstar doesn’t ignore the prevailing winds of guitar culture – the company’s Amped 1 and Dept 10 pedals offer plenty of options for pedalboard amp fans – but it also refuses to accept that there isn’t a way for proper, bonafide valve amplifiers to peacefully coexist with modern requirements for volume, connectivity and practicality. Enter the圣詹姆斯.

The St James range is another ‘how have they done that’ that reaffirms Blackstar’s place as the most innovative and forward thinking major amp manufacturer out there. The most striking thing about the St James is the weight – Blackstar has boasted that they’re the lightest valve amps in the world, and with the combos coming in around 2-3kgs lighter than your average, who are we to argue? This has been achieved thanks to a hugely impressive feat of engineering – a complete overhaul of the power stage to enable a lightweight laptop-style Switching Mode Power Supply in place of the traditional (and heavy) transformers that have been a staple of valve amps for nearly a hundred years.

Combined with a custom-designed lightweightCelestion扬声器，结果是一个放大器，可以使您第一次捡起双重拍摄，并且会使负载和负载量变得更少，以使整个吉他手的后退事件降低了。

But that’s only part of what the St James offers – it’s also a fully-featured 21st century digital amp that offers the facility to play and record at low (or no) volume. Key to this is the inclusion of Blackstar’s proprietary Cab Rig emulation technology that goes beyond what common speaker IRs do and offers a full model of speaker, cab, mic and room to offer wonderfully authentic direct tones, while there’s also a USB recording out so you can use your amp as an audio interface.

几年前，这是一种愉快的每个人的包裹，也应该是不可想象的，但是应该是该行业的真正改变游戏规则，并且是未来AMP设计师在功能和多功能性方面使用的基准。

Read our full review here.

Nominees

Jamstik Studio MIDI

What if a product opens up a world that you never really considered before? That’s whatJamstik’s latest innovationdoes for guitarists and the always murky world of MIDI. With remarkable note-tracking and the genuine feel of a real guitar, this might be the easiest and most inspiring way to incorporate synths, pads and all the other secrets of the music tech world into your music.

Not everyone will want to do this, of course, but for those who want to expand their horizons beyond what you see at your feet on a pedalboard, the Jamstik represents a potential turning point for the electric guitar as a creative instrument.

Taylor 722ce

The planet is dying. The ice caps are melting, weather is getting more extreme, our resources are running out – it’s not a fun time, frankly. The guitar industry is far too small to make a meaningful impact on that of course, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try – and sometimes doing what’s best for the planet means changing perceptions along the way.

Taylorhas been at the forefront of the efforts to make guitar-building more sustainable for years now, but the 700 Series Koa guitars released in 2022 is it’s most polarising departure yet. But Taylor making its flagship series with sustainable Hawaiian koa, regardless of how different these instruments may look and sound to a ‘traditional’ acoustic guitar sends a clear message – the world is changing, and guitar building is changing with it. Thankfully, as the722cedemonstrates – that doesn’t have to mean a future without remarkable and inspiring instruments.

Read our full review here.