Quick Review : Fender Tone Master Pro
Hey folks. In keeping with the flood of spam regarding the newly released Fender Tone Master Pro, I went to spend an hour with one after viewing the getting started documentation in order to provide you an unfunded, unpaid, no free stuff review. Please note that I usually read the manual in full before any review, and as of this writing, Fender has yet to make the manual available online. This is not a surprise as they still don’t even have the manual for the Princeton Tone Master amp available yet. This is indicative of how Fender approaches customer support based on facts, not opinions or press releases.
Fender does not send me anything to review. Ever. And I do not expect them to do so because I don’t just puke up their press releases (or anyone else’s) on my site. I have been inundated with news and reviews of the Tone Master Pro multi-effects unit as likely have most of you and they are consistent, many using exactly the same words and pictures. Amazing how all these diverse sources arrive at exactly the same conclusions. I expect nothing less from a paid shill. You have a better chance of honesty from a kid dealing Three Card Monte on the side of a crate with three lookouts watching for the police.
So I went to a guitar shop that graciously let me spend time alone with the device for an hour. They had already sold one as well as the Fender FRFR cabinet that they had in stock and had connected it to another FRFR. I turned the FRFR off and used my studio headphones to hear the output clearly and to avoid annoying the other patrons of the store. I’m not going to name the store, because I do not want my review to reflect on the fine store in any negative way, and I say this because I left completely underwhelmed and having decided that I would never buy one, nor recommend one. If you were expecting a big suck up, I tell you now so you are not disappointed.
First Impressions
It looks very pretty. The FRFR cabinet looks like a speaker cabinet, not a general purpose FRFR. As such this will appeal to all who believe that having a Fender logo plate promises something amazing. And for those people, it’s perfect. They aren’t reading my work anyway.
The unit has ten programmable foot switches which have no click and if the ring around them did not light up, you would not know if the switch was active or not. The absence of tactile response makes the rings a requirement and they are nicely visible in a stage scenario. They can also act as rotary controls in some cases, but have none of the responsiveness or positive feel of the rotating switches on a Neural Quad Cortex. It has a lovely bright display about the size of an iPhone Pro Max and the look reminds me a LOT of the look of the UI of the Positive Grid smartphone app. It’s easy to follow and as it’s a touchscreen is pretty darn easy to use as well. The UI work is excellent. Full credit there. Adjusting the knobs on the amps and effects by using the touch screen is not as easy as on other touchscreen based interfaces and takes significant effort if precision is desired. Compared to every other touch screen type interface, this iteration is not very good from a practical perspective when it comes to fine adjustments. Did I mention that it is pretty?
Your primary view is of an effects chain and like a Helix or Kemper or Quad Cortex you can arrange the chain as you like. Fender does win one space for allowing for more effects on screen in front of the amp, between the amp and cabinet and post cabinet. Anyone who has ever used a Helix or HX Effects can use this device. The included tuner is big and bright but I found it jumpy and would stick to an in tune position when a string was still out. The tuner in the aging Helix is better.
There are apparently over 100 amp sims in the device. I will say that the Fender branded amps that have physical Tone Master versions sounded like their Tone Master physical versions. I like the physical Tone Master amps a lot and own the Deluxe Blonde Reverb Tone Master. I have also recorded with the Tone Master Super Reverb and the Tone Master Princeton. The Tone Master Pro’s simulation of these amps is superb. Other Fender owned amps and cabs are included as sims and IRs as well. I did not personally find that any of the EVH amps sounded much like a real EVH amp. Moving out of the Fender owned products, I would say that the amp and cab sims are similar to what you might find in a software product like Amplitube or the offerings in the Presonus Ampire add-on for Studio One. This is not a big stretch since Fender now owns Presonus although Fender claims that they used their secret Tone Master profiling process on all the amps. The other amps sims are mostly ok, except for one that I discuss later. I would say that the effects are also of the grade of the effects in an all software product like Amplitube or the effects modules for Studio One. Certainly decent enough, and none of them named exactly what they are supposed to be except where Fender has licensed the rights to a name. The Tone Master Pro does offer four separate effects loops so you can use your actual effects if you are not happy with the built in ones, but in that case, why buy the unit at all?
The outputs are both balanced XLR and line outs. I prefer the balanced outs to go to a proper interface or to a powered FRFR speaker myself. There is also the ability to connect an auxiliary source like your phone for playing songs, to plug in headphones using a proper ¼” stereo plug as well as inputs for external expression pedals. Like the Quad Cortex and Line6 and Kemper, Fender has contracted with Mission Engineering to build their expression pedal. I own the Mission pedals for my Kemper and my Quad Cortex and think very highly of them. I know what they cost and hope that Fender does not act like Fender and jack the price into the stratosphere because their logo is on it. Time will tell.
Getting to playing is really simple. The average buyer never downloads a manual, let alone reads one, and that average buyer can get by without doing so, albeit while missing out on a lot of capability. Just as you cannot fix stupid, you also cannot fix lazy. Which is too bad because this box is VERY EXPENSIVE. The iconic representation of pedals look very good and while the naming is mostly by analogy, the icons do look a lot like the pedal they are designed to emulate. Turning a pedal on or off is as simple as tapping the pedal to bring it to the forefront and then tapping the virtual stomp switch or choosing Bypass at the bottom of the touchscreen when there is no virtual stomp switch. Other vendors make the virtual power switch tappable where Fender does not. I have no real preference either way, but it surprises me that Fender did not follow the standards set by most every other provider. The Scribble strips are easy to read from a standing position and the unit top is inclined so they are easy to see. I think that the stomp switches are a bit close together, but that is based on me and my needs.
The Sound
I mentioned that the sound from the Fender amps that have Tone Master physical units are just like the actual Tone Master amps, which means very good indeed. I thought that the Fender owned EVH amps did not sound right, but they were closer to real than the Fender sims of Mesa Boogie, ENGL or Marshall. Those all sounded bland, sassy, far away and overly fizzy to me. If I were seeking a modeller to accurately represent a variety of amp brands, this one is not it. I particularly hated the attempt at the venerable AC30. Instead of sounding chimey and snappy, it instead sounded like an annoyed lizard with a toothache. Just horrible. I also found that even with a pro grade guitar cable, the noise floor was pretty high when the virtual amps were turned up and if there was an OD, distortion, fuzz or high output amp in the chain or preset, the noise was enough to be annoying and distracting. Fender does provide a virtual noise gate pedal and I would encourage buyers to use it to keep the noise floor down where it should be. I did not find documentation of what pickups were used to build the amp sims, but the sounds do suggest that a single coil was used during the profiling process. Using a Telecaster with low wind gold foils produced a lot of noise in general and switching to a PRS SE with hum buckers and coil split had less noise, but still more than I would like or prefer. This is of course subjective, but personally I want to hear the instrument output, not the noise floor.
The effects pedals that I tried were ok. None of them sounded particularly great, and I will say that the pedal emulations in any of my Spark amplifiers sound better than the ones in the Tone Master Pro. This is of course based on the ones that I tested in my limited testing window. I did not test very pedal emulation available. Sound is very subjective and you may find them great. I found them boomy, without high end and frightfully noisy. Clean amp turned down, guitar volume turned down, no effects, excellent for Fender blackface amps, ok for most others. Turn them up and it sounds like the same amp where the sound is basically the same with different settings on the tone stack. I do not care what Fender says about their magic secret Tone Master profiling method, I have heard better amps, cabs and effects out of my Kemper, my Quad Cortex, my aged Helix and even my Spark GO!. Fender does provide a lot of options in this device when it comes to effects and while that causes me to worry about option paralysis, I’m not going to buy one, so it’s not really on my mind much.
About the FRFR Cabinet
From a cosmetic perspective, it looks fabulous. It is still however an FRFR with a 10 inch driver and a 1000watt Class D amplifier. The qualifications of a proper FRFR speaker means NO colouration to the tone at all, yet the Fender FRFR has controls on it that change the sound that is coming into it. Therefore, those controls mean it is not actually a true flat response full range speaker. All the lipstick in the world does not change a pig and at $690 CAD for one cabinet, this is a very expensive pig that is no better than a similar product that sells for ⅔ that price. But that FRFR is not as pretty or does as good a job at looking like a guitar amp. I am far less enamoured by cosmetics than by audio quality. Regular readers know that I have only disdain for fakery or cosmetics.
Modeller NOT Profiler
I have seen many articles comparing the Tone Master Pro to the Quad Cortex. Both provide the ability to leverage amplifier sims and cabinet IRs and also to choose the placement of the virtual microphones (the Tone Master interface for this is really excellent). However, the Tone Master Pro, unlike a Quad Cortex or a Kemper or an AxeFX is not a profiler, so you are getting a lot more for your money with those devices over the Fender product.
“Now wait a second”, you may say. “I’m not interested in profiling at all, so why would I consider a Kemper, Quad Cortex or AxeFX?” If this is true you would be right. You would not and should not consider any of those options, but why then would you spend $2349 CAD for a Fender Tone Master Pro instead of $2349 CAD for a full blown Line 6 Helix that includes an expression pedal? A Helix LT reduces the Send Return loops from 4 to 2, has no microphone inputs and no scribble strips for $1659. By the way, Neural announced a price reduction on the Quad Cortex to $2349 and it does profiling, and has a community with THOUSANDS of prebuilt configurations. Even if you never profile with a Quad Cortex it is a better solution all around.
Please note that there is a significant firmware update available for the Tone Master Pro already. There are also updates for the Windows and Mac apps that allow you to control the Tone Master Pro over USB. Even two days after release, regular folks like you and I are wondering how long Fender will support the Tone Master Pro. While this may seem very pessimistic on day two, we have seen Fender drop support for stuff without notice and Fender direct support is pretty much non-existent. We know that Fender wants to sell direct, basically screwing their dedicated dealer channel but have no idea at all about what it is like to properly deal with end user customers. A maker may be able to push a dealer around, but pushing an end user around only works if the end user is a complete moron.
Sample Sounds
It was not an appropriate time or place to try to record so I didn’t. I was also so unimpressed that even when the opportunity arose for me to use one in the studio, I decided not to do so. So sorry, folks, no samples. There are probably a ton on Fender’s website and they probably haven’t been processed within an inch of their lives. Or maybe they have. Don’t know, but am skeptical.
Dealer and Youtube Reviews
There are plenty of dealer reviews out already. No Fender dealer is going to say anything bad about the product as doing so would impact their dealership as has been proven for those who were honest about their findings about the Acoustasonics. You may love your dealer, and love its people, but any review they put up has to be positive, so expect nothing genuine there. Take the same perspective on Youtube influencers (paid shills) who received a unit from Fender. If any were to say anything negative, Fender would cut them off, and has done so in the past. Fender’s business mission is to sell as much of their branded product as possible at the highest possible margins. That is honest and we should trust them to do anything that they can to succeed in their mission.
My Conclusions
Even if I did not already own a Kemper, a Quad Cortex or the full load Helix, I would not buy a Tone Master Pro. The switches feel cheap, and I am not impressed by the amp or pedal sounds. I have done better and so can you. However, if you believe that just owning something with a Fender logo glued on makes it better, or makes you better, it’s a free country, spend your money as you like. Serious musicians who care about the sound, the usability, the support and the longevity will do as I do, and take a pass. To be completely clear, I think that my Positive Grid Spark 40 sounds better in almost every case and it cost about $400.
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to post a comment or send in a question. Until next time, peace.
