Blackstar Fly 3 Mods
I was looking for a small, portable battery-powered amplifier that I could play anywhere in the house without having to plug into the laptop or my full rig. There are many portable amps to choose from these days. Some are very small like Marshall MS-2 and few dreadful Fender mini amps, but they all sound rather bad, partly because of simple circuits, partly because of tiny speakers. There are some amps that are very decent, but are a bit larger than I need, like Yamaha THR5, Roland Micro Cube and VOX Mini3 G2. Smaller amps tend to have simple (and bad) analog circuits and most larger portable amps these days feature digital amp simulations (which is not bad per se). And then there’s Blackstar Fly 3 that sits right between the two groups. It’s very portable, but still has a “real” analog two channel preamp, digital delay and a full-range 3″ speaker.
At around 60 $/€, the price is closer to those cheap and crappy Marshall and Fender amps than to bigger Roland, VOX or Yamaha. At this price point, as expected, there’s no vinyl-covered wooden box. The amp is housed in a dull looking black plastic box, but there’s a limited edition for the same price that features beige plastic box with British flag on the front grill. I went with the limited edition.
Specs
- Analog preamp with two channels – clean and overdrive. Shared volume control, Gain control for Overdrive channel.
- Single knob ISF EQ control.
- Digital simulated tape delay with Time and Level controls.
- Aux-in 3.5mm jack.
- Line/Headphone out jack.
- Proprietary jack (looks like LAN connector) for stereo extension cab (cab sold separately).
- Runs on six 1.5V AA batteries or a 9V DC adapter with positive tip (not included).
ISF Eq Control
Instead of a conventional tone control or a tone stack, there’s a single ISF control that changes the character of the EQ as you turn it. It’s one of Blackstar’s selling points for their amps and they even had it patented (they had to patent *something* to brag about 🙂 ). In their bigger amps they usually combine ISF with a conventional Bass/Middle/Treble tone stack to add versatility, but in this case, ISF is the only control over the EQ. I would prefer a standard Bass/Middle/Treble but I understand that space and cost would be an issue. ISF is better than nothing, and probably better than a standard treble-cut Tone control.
I wanted to take it a step further and analyze how response of the amp changes when playing with ISF control. To do that, I hooked up Fly 3 with my laptop, connected audio interface output to Fly 3 input and then took the simulated output from Fly 3 and connected it to audio interface input. Then I played frequency sweep going from 50Hz up to 10KHz and recorded what comes out of Fly 3. This is repeated with 5 different positions of the ISF knob. Below are frequency responses of each take plotted on the same graph. Treble and bass roll-off is most likely part of speaker simulation circuit and doesn’t seem to be affected by ISF control.
As you can see, the response with ISF set to zero is very different than the rest of the pot travel, probably caused by the same effect that causes drastic change in tone with guitar’s tone knob at 0 when there’s no resistance in the network. That’s my favorite position for rock/metal and for riffs. It has a pronounced mid scoop that prevents it from sounding boxy, noticeable low end boost around 200Hz and it has the most clarity in the high end. As we turn the knob to the right, the scoop shifts and is less and less pronounced. At the same time, there’s less and less high end and the low end hump is less pronounced. For my taste, positions around noon sound the best for lead sounds. The extreme right position sounds a bit too dull for my taste, but could be useful for bluesy/jazzy stuff.
What I Like About Fly 3?
Analog preamp featured in Fly 3 is quite good. Cleans are nice and clean and overdriven sounds range from mild crunch to saturated gain, with about the same range of distortion as say a JCM800. The distortion is crunchy and smooth, almost tube-like, with no digital artifacts or fizzy character usually associated with cheap solid state amps. What’s great about it is the great dynamic range. With lighter picking (or playing with guitar volume control), it cleans up nicely without losing clarity. Harder picking pushes it harder and produces more distortion. Digital simulators in small practice amps rarely sound this good and usually have poor dynamic range. High gain models sound very distorter regardless of guitar you plug into or how you play it. You get the same sound, just louder or quieter. With Fly 3, my Ibanez with high power humbuckers can push the preamp quite far into saturation, even reaching the metal territory. With a Strat I can get nice SRV type of sound and classic distorted rock sounds with Gain control maxed.
Having a delay on-board is a big plus. It’s advertised as “tape” delay, but in most cases, “digital tape delay” is just a imperfect digital delay that has low fidelity, so it cuts high end and potentially adds distortion or digital artifacts. Fly 3, like most of other “warm digital delay” circuits uses PT2399 delay chip that is imperfect to begin with. Then they double the maximum delay time from ~300ms to ~600ms, degrading the quality of echoes even further. In this case, I can definitely hear that echoes are warmer sounding, but there’s no too much distortion or noise, meaning that they did a good job filtering the signal. Shorter delay time with level set to around noon can be used somewhat as reverb to add space to the sound and longer times with more pronounced level can be used as conventional echo.
3W amplifier delivers plenty of volume for bedroom playing. For late night playing I keep it at around 9 o’clock hoping not to wake up anyone.
What I Don’t Like About Fly 3?
The 3″ full-range speaker is good enough for listening to music, but I’d like it to have more punch and clarity with guitar. The preamp is voiced rather dark. It sounds decent for lead playing, but riffs can sound a bit dull. I’m guessing that they feared that the tiny amp would sound thin with more treble so they make it warmer. Sure, you can’t expect wonders in a small plastic box, but it’s still something I think can be improved (mods to follow).
I really miss the feedback control for the number of repeats on the delay. It’s preset to barely two repeats, which is fine for slapback-style delay, but for lead playing it would be nice to be able to have more. One more mini pot next to delay level would solve that.
Below are some of the mods I did. If you’re not interested, you can skip the section and jump to Sound Clips section.
External Speaker Mod
The minuscule size is one of the biggest strengths of Fly 3, but it’s also a drawback at the same time because such a small speaker cannot provide enough depth in such a small plastic box. Plugging it into a bigger guitar cabinet makes it sound much fuller and it’s relatively easy mod to enable this. The first thing we need is a switching 1/4″ jack. Regular open-style jacks will not fit because of the internal “ribs”, but plastic style jacks with lugs at the back will (just) fit. Make sure you have the switching type jacks that have three lugs instead of the usual two. The third lug allows us to disconnect internal speaker when external speaker is plugged.
Then we need to drill the plastic cabinet to find the right place for the jack. That’s not very easy to do because of the aforementioned ribs and battery compartment, but there are few places that we can use. One of those is marked on the photo below. If we drill the cabinet at exactly that spot, the hole will land right between the two ribs and you’ll be able to squeeze in the jack there. I drilled a small 3mm guide hole before going all the way to 9mm.
The next problem is getting to speaker leads. You can probably cut the ribbon cable and solder the wires there, but my approach was to desolder the small daughter board from the speaker and add more cables from the board to the jack and the speaker. These carry low impedance signal, so added noise from more leads is not a concern.
Note where the + and – terminal are on the speaker and where the corresponding solder pads are on the daughter board. After the board is desoldered, wire the jack sleeve lug together with – pad of the board and the – terminal of the speaker, wire the + pad on the board to jack tip lug and wire + terminal of the speaker to jack shunt (switch) lug. After all done, it should look something like on diagram below.
And here’s how my wiring looks like, admittedly the angle is not revealing enough.
The final result, with the jack is installed.
JFET Booster Mod
Pretty much the whole circuit is built using SMD technology and there’s no schematic available yet, so it’s really not really mod-friendly. However, with some analysis and patience, I was able to further improve the amp without killing it. I wanted to expand tonal range of the little Fly 3 and add more gain for high gain tones and to improve definition when playing rock or metal riffs. The stock preamp can get decent amounts of gain with higher output pickups, but I wanted to push it harder. I put together a simple JFET booster based on J201 with parts I had in my bin.
The circuit resembles a simple triode gain stage from tube amps and provides at least 6db of gain. 4.7uF capacitor in parallel with the source resistor further boosts the output for most of the sound spectrum except for the very deep lows, as we don’t want the sound to get too muddy. I built it on a small 3-per-pad 1″ proto board, ready to be installed in the amp. The plan is to somehow inject it between the input jack and the rest of the circuit and have a bypass switch that would return the amp back to the stock voice (which is nice in its own right).
After using the booster for a few months I further improved the design by adding a 68K input resistor which eliminated radio interference that I was getting sometimes and some of the white noise. I also added a 220K/10nF low pass filter at the end that cuts some of the treble, as I was finding it too shrill most of the time.
Analyzing the Fly 3 circuit board, I identified the crucial points on the board. “A” is the circuit ground, “B” is input jack’s tip connection, “C” is the input leg of the input capacitor and is connected to “B” and finally, “D” is the power connection after the power switch. Powering our booster directly from batteries would drain them even when the amp is not turned on, so we want to make sure to get the point in the circuit that’s downstream from the power switch. “D” is exactly that.
Now the tricky part. We want to break connection between “B” and “C” so we can inject our booster circuit in between them. There’s a thin copper trace on the other side of the board that connects input jack to 22nF input capacitor and also connects the 2.2M reference resistor to ground. We want to cut the trace right next to the capacitor and break that connection without damaging the adjacent trace. Using continuity check on the DMM, I verified that the input jack and input capacitor are no longer connected.
Next is the bypass switch. Use the smallest DPDT toggle switch you can find because there’s not much room there. I drilled a 6mm hole exactly between the “Input” and “Level” labels and as far down as it could go. That position is perfect for installing the miniature DPDT switch.
Here’s now it looks like from the inside. Note how the middle terminal of the switch gets perfectly aligned with the point “B” on the board. The two terminals on the right side of the switch should be connected together, that’s our “bypass” side.
Now we can connect the middle two terminals of the switch to points “B” and “C” on the board, as shown below.
And the final step is to install the booster board. I used a piece of strong double sided foamy tape that works well for attaching two surfaces that are not perfectly flat and provides electrical isolation. Booster input and output leads are soldered to the two terminals on the left side of the switch, ground is soldered to point “A” and power supply to point “D” on the board. And voila, we’re done!
The mod worked great. Not only did the little amp survive my butchering, but it sounds even better now. The switch turns it effectively into a four channel amp – stock clean, boosted clean (sounds slightly broken up, but still very lively and not as compressed as overdrive channel), stock overdrive and boosted overdrive (great for high gain). Boosting the overdrive channel makes the sound more aggressive and present. It’s great for riffs, heavy lead sound and metal. Pinched harmonics jump out of the fretboard with ease. Sure, the same can be achieved by using a separate booster pedal, but for me it wouldn’t really work. Fly 3 is a tiny portable amp and adding any other pedals to the signal chain makes it much less portable. Having everything contained in a single unit is a big plus for me.
DC Output Mod
Fly 3 can be powered by batteries or an optional power adapter (regular pedal adapter will not work as it requires 6.5V DC and uses a non-conventional 2.5mm jack with positive tip), but to me batteries make it a great portable amp. However, if we wanted to use additional pedals in front of the amp, we’d need to get extra batteries for them. Luckily, there’s a way to use the amp to power additional effects from the same batteries used to power the amp. The way DC jack is wired, it disconnects ground lead coming from the batteries when we plug the jack, but if we defeat the switching, we can have the DC input jack work as DC output when batteries are installed, or as a regular DC input jack when there are no batteries. By doing that, we can use DC jack to power additional pedals.
Looking at the photo above, there’s a small PCB that hosts the extension cab socket and DC input jack. Black and red leads are coming from the battery pack and are connected to the two terminals of the DC input jack. The third terminal at the bottom is connected with the circuit ground. When there’s nothing plugged in, battery ground is connected to circuit ground. As soon as we plug the adapter, connection to battery ground is broken and instead it connects adapter’s ground to the circuit ground. But if we jumper the two ground terminals, we are bypassing the switching mechanism of the jack and we can use the jack to output power for external effects. It’s possible to solder a jumper wire without having to disassemble the whole amp, we just need to remove the screw that holds the mini PCB in place, and lightly pull it up as far it will go. Have in mind that you shouldn’t connect power supply AND batteries at the same time and also note that power switch of the amp does NOT affect the DC output jack. It is permanently connected to the batteries, so we need to make sure that the device(s) we power can switch the power on and off by themselves, or we need to unplug the DC plug when we’re not using it.
Sound Clips
Stratocaster with neck (Kinman AVn-56) and middle (Kinman AVn-62) pickups, ISF set to noon. Played without the boost and then with the boost engaged.
Telecaster with DiMarzio Chopper in bridge position. Gain set to around noon, without boost, ISF set to 0, then the same riff with the boost engaged.
Ibanez with DiMarzio Crunch Lab in bridge position. Gain set to around noon, without boost, ISF set to 0, then the same riff with the boost engaged.
Stratocaster with neck (Kinman AVn-56) and middle (Kinman AVn-62) pickups, ISF set to noon. Played without the boost.
How is it possible to use 9v adaptor in the amp? Because it specified that we need to use 6.5v 1.5A. Unfortunately, there is no common adapter for this.
Six AA batteries give a touch over 9V when new, so you will be fine with a 9V DC adapter, but I would only use voltage-regulated adapters. Non-regulated adapters will give voltage much higher than 9V when not fully loaded. One of mine measures 14V! Also, 1.5A is ok if you run it in stereo. For mono operation, you’ll be fine with half of that.
Cheers
I own 2 tube amps,but I seldom use them, I prefer the fly 3. I really like your mod, but would not be able to do it mysef. Do you know someone who could do it with compensation?
Since the Fly 3, when on battery power, runs on 9v, shouldn’t it be fairly easy to wire it for a 9v adapter?
It will work with a 9v adapter.
Hi, thank you for this tutorial 🙂 What is the speaker impedance of the external speaker connection?
You can use anything above 4ohm…
Thanks!
Hi there!
Sorry if you already got this comment, as I replied to another users comment, and it didn’t turn up for some reason after submission. This is just in case.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but would you be able to make a diagram or be even more in depth with the wiring of external speaker connection? The how-to in the article was abit too straight forward (atleast for me) as I have no Idea where each of the wires you soldered go to from the speaker to the daughter board. I’m not really that great with electronics, but I can wire connections just fine If I’m confident with the instructions. Hope you can expand on it. Anyway, amazing work with coming up with mods the Blackstar.
Thanks
Also looking to perform the external output mod. Would you post a photo of the speaker/.25” jack connections from a different angle? Love to see those color-coded wires connected to the speaker leads. Thanks!
I don’t have any better photos, but I added a paragraph explaining how it’s wired. Hope that’s enough.
Cheers
Great job !! I was thinking , is it possible to use Fly 3 inside DAW with some great Cab Impulses ?.Not sure if it makes sense to add impulse after emulated out. Some other way around maybe. Mod? Thanks!!
Hello! Very cool mods for this amp. Do you happen to know anything about the external speaker connection?
My uncle has the amp, and wanted to cobble together a DIY ext speaker, but was vexed by the special connector.
Hi. The article explains how to add external speaker connection. The special connector is only to be used when you want to run the amp in stereo together with their speaker cab. My mod adds a 1/4″ jack that disables the built-in speaker when external speaker is used.
Hi there!
Sorry if this is a silly question, would you be able to make a diagram or be even more in depth with the wiring of the external speaker connection? The how-to in the article was abit too straight forward (atleast for me), as I have no idea where the wires you soldered go to from the speaker to the daughter board. The picture you provided wasn’t really clear on that. Hope you can expand on it.
Thanks!
Hi there!
I just read your article on the Blackstar Fly-3 Mod! Good Job!
What me impressed was the frequency response diagram for the ISF tone knob.
I would like to reproduce this for my Blackstar HT-1R amp, but I’ve got a couple of questions.
1.) How did you generate the frequency sweep on the input side?
2.) Which software did you use to sample the output data on your computer?
Your blog is awesome, keep up the good work!
All the best from Frankfurt/Germany,
Frank
Hi Frank,
thanks for the comments!
As for your questions, I used very simple method which makes it easy to apply at home, but will probably not be super accurate or scientific. It’s good enough for experimenting, I think.
First I generated frequency sweep using this tool (I think) https://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sweep.php
Then I connected headphone jack from the phone to input jack of the Fly 3 using 1/8″ stereo to 1/4″ mono cable.
Then I took the headphone amp output from Fly 3 and connected it to my sound card using another 1/8″ stereo to 1/4″ mono cable.
ThenI played the generated file 5 times and recorded output on my laptop using Audacity with different settings of ISF pot.
Then I used frequency analyzer tool in Audacity to analyze each take and export outputs into separate files.
Finally I collected all the data into excel and drew the graph.
It’s not ideal solution because it also includes the emulated speaker simulation that is active on headphone output. That’s why you can see bass and treble roll-off on the graph. It’s part of speaker simulator, not ISF…but it’s good enough for experiment.
Cheers,
Bane
Hi,
Great stuff!
Any tips on how to add an effects loop to the fly 3?
Thx.
First thing I’d do is to see what signal is transmitted between main and daughter board through the 9 lead ribbon cable. That’s easy to do without cutting anything.
If one of the leads carries distorted signal, I’d just cut it and insert passive FX loop there.
That’s the easiest way I could think of.
Hi, I know this is an old post but I’m trying my luck anyway 🙂 You seem to be the most knowledgeable dude around the interwebs on this topic.
Could you please provide a bit more info on how to find where to add the effects loop please? How do you find the lead that carries the distorted signal? Is that something you can do with a regular multimeter? Also, if I add an fx loop there, will the headphone out still work (and include the effects)? The headphones out seems to be on the main board.
Thanks!
you cannot do it with a multimeter. The best way is to run a clean signal into the input of the amplifier, then use audio probe (here’s how to make it http://diy-fever.com/misc/audio-probe/ ) and plug it into another (clean) amplifier or into a sound card. Anywhere really where you can hear the output. Then you can connect the probe ground to amp ground and trace the signal with the probe lead, listening to the output. When you hear distorted signal, you are in. I would cut just that one lead from the ribbon cable and extend it on both side to form send an receive. Headphone out will work with the effects if you get it right. There may be more than one lead in that ribbon cable that will carry distorted signal, but you need to experiment. Try one and revert if it’s not good. It was too much hassle for me so I gave up.
So there is. Many thanks.
Great posting. Just one point: how do you get the case undone? I have removed the two obvious screws, what next? I don’t want to try too hard in case I invalidate the warranty. By the way I want to stop the 5.5mm charging plug disconnecting the batteries so I can charge the NIMH batteries in situ. I have built a constant current (200mA) charger.
there’s one more screw at the top that you can see if you look between the middle two pots from the back.
The mod this little sucker really needs is a non removable rechargeable battery.
I use mine with rechargeable AA batteries, it’s not too much of a hustle to charge once a month 🙂
Hi, I just listened to your samples through my blackstar fly 3 pair 🙂 They make an awsome pair of powered speakers for my macbook on my coffee table. This is my most often used guitar amp by far, in about 40 years of playing 🙂 I simply can’t live without it. Just wondering you if noted while modding..was the amp circuit based around a particular chipamp IC, or was it a discrete design? Was hoping a schematic would turn up by now on the web. I’m playing around with solid state amps, and having a ton of fun adding in snippets of various pedals and tone controls. Love ur site man.
Thanks for the comment, Steve. It’s definitely a chip amp. I’m guessing something class D. It’s odd that you mentioned, haven’t occurred for me to check it while messing with the amp. The preamp seems to be op-amp based with few clipping diodes.
How come there is no input coupling cap on that preamp circuit? Just not needed because the biasing is set correctly?
Also, that circuit sounds awesome. I’m gonna do the exact same mod to my Fly when it arrives. Added a little bit of high-end crispness to the (Metallica?) riff.
It’s possible. The headphones I often use are slightly on the warm side so mix that sounds good on them can sound a bit too bright on others.
Bias is set by source resistor, there is no dc on the gate of the fet, so there’s no need for input capacitors. Just like in tube amps
Makes sense, thank you for explaining!
I soldered this up with some SMD components and ended up with a really tiny layout. Installed in my Fly 3. Sounds great, thanks!
Only changes I made were substituting the DPDT for SPDT (I had it on hand… just means the JFET input is always connected to the guitar, still sounds fine), and a smaller cap on the source terminal to roll off a little more bass.
glad to hear it worked! Yeah, it’s a little gem this one and really shines with a booster. Boss has learned their lesson and their Katana Mini has 3 channels, one is “Brown” that sounds similar to boosted Fly 3.
Dear,
Your skills are so much ahead of what I ve seen before, really. I love this little amp so much, I bought it twice, the cream edition and play it everyday,
I own other amps, tube category, vox ac4tv, fender blues junior, and bugera v5 for the latest I like very much. My question,
People say you can’t have a nice break-up bluesy tone without a valve amp, but this is wrong. I push the gain on clean channel with maybe a volume booster pedal, or not, dependibg on the guitar model, and here comes a very nice and warm overdriven sound, better than any from the od channel. I just wish they make the same with a bigger speaker. How can you explain this unexpected natural overdrive tone on a cheap non-valve amp ? Thanks and regards. Christian
Hi! Thanks for the kind words. I agree, this is a little gem of an amp. It sounds even better through a big speaker, much fuller. I modded mine to have ext speaker jack, so I can use it with a big guitar cab.
Building a decent amp for little money is not too hard. Cheap amps usually sound bad because nobody put any thought into them when they designed it. Need distortion? Slap any distortion circuit in there, need power amp? Put any amplifier chip. Just make some noise, any noise. And in some cases they deliberately make it sound worse than the more expensive line of amps so you have incentive to trade it up later. Marshall, Fender, Orange, they all make terrible transistor amps because they have an army of followers that will buy their stuff as their first amp not knowing what else is out there…and as they progress they will move up the line and buy more expensive models. Blackstar still doesn’t have the brand name like those old players, so they have to put a little more effort to be successful. Fly 3 probably doesn’t cost more to build than other crappy cheap amp, but it’s well designed. That’s why it sounds good. And other makers will have to adjust their strategy if they are to stay in this segment. Boss recently launched Katana Mini amp that is also phenomenal (although a bit more expensive).
Cheers
Been playing through the Blackstar Fly 3 and love it! But, today I started hearing only the delayed sound of the guitar. If I turn the “Delay Level” knob off I hear nothing. If I turn the “Delay Level” up I hear delayed guitar without the original signal. Any thoughts on what might be going on? Thanks!
Most likely and issue around the delay part around the delay pot where it mixes dry and wet signal, but I can’t tell you in details without having the schematic.
Hi, would you know how to put fx loop to this amp?
I would like to use my pre-amp pedal with it. (bypassing preamp section of the amp)
Or some how inject the input of guitar straight into poweramp section.
You can plug it into aux-in, that goes straight into the power amp. You just need a mono 6.35mm to stereo 3.5mm that sends the same signal left and right (it goes down to mono inside the amp anyways).
Cheers
Your mod sounds quite remarkable. Congrats!
Thanks!
how loud is it …is it loud enough to play with a drummer?
I would say no, but battery powered amps are not really intended for that 🙂
How about if you link 2 or 3 Blackstar Fly 3, with their extension cabs – using an ABY switch box or a Boss Line Selector? Do you think it could do the trick to play with a drummer in the street?
Not sure, I’d rather go with a bigger amp for simplicity…and you get a bigger speaker.
Dear Bane.
Do you think it is possible to build a footswitch for the Blackstar Fly3?
BR
Werner
Yes, I do think it is possible, but it could be tricky. I’m not sure how the channel switching works in this amp, as I don’t have schematic. Next time I take it apart I’ll examine how the switching works. Looking at this photo ( http://s1325.photobucket.com/user/Muli_Cohen/media/IMG_20150619_132430_zpsatcitu4a.jpg.html ), they probably use DPDT switch (on the right) to bypass drive channel. To make footswitch work we’d need to:
a) replace the switch with a relay, probably 6VDC would work, although voltage can very between 9V (6 AA batteries) or 6.5V power supply. Latching relay would probably be better because non-latching would drain the batteries faster. Maybe you’d need to have a 6V DC-DC converter to make sure that you don’t mess up the relay with 9V supply.
b) add footswitch jack and connect it with the relay, when the footswitch is pressed, the relay should close and open. You will need a non-latching footswitch for this to work
c) add a pushbutton switch where the old one was so you can control the relay when footswitch is not used
alternatively, you can use a non-latching relay and a latching footswitch, but relays draw a lot of power. Batteries would last shorter.
Dear bancika,
could not yet try it, but intend to use a conventional hardware switch replacing the built-in on/adding to existing one (parallel use?).
Much to do at work. Needs time.
BR Werner
Not sure I follow what you are saying