Review license provided by ML Sound Labs – All thoughts and opinion’s within this review are my own and do not reflect those of the developer or others.

INTRO

ML Sound Lab’s Flagship is their newest entry into the plugin market, utilizing its Vorna amp modelling. Flagship offers 3 Iconic amps, not licensed, but promising a faithful digital tonal recreation of their real Friedman Amplification counterparts. Known for their high quality mods, and amazing sounding boutique amps, Friedman amps are highly regarded and coveted within the music industry. Can Flagship live up to the reputation of the real amps? Let’s find out.

Experience

Diving in, first impressions are promising with the GUI. The amp looks great, definitely has the Friedman aesthetic we all know and recognize. Moving past the amp though, I feel like more could have been done visually for the rest of the GUI. That said, it’s still functional and easy to navigate. I would prefer the pedals to be slightly bigger in size related to the GUI itself, for ease of use, but the entire plugin window can be resized quickly by grabbing the bottom right corner which I like, and helps with the small size of the pedals. 

The speaker cabinet GUI is gorgeous, and again easy to navigate. The two speakers and the mics are fully controllable by dragging them around to change distance and position and scrolling on the mouse wheel changes the mic angle, very cool. Drop down menus have a small but functional variety of speakers and mics to choose from, and a mix slider blends the 2 speakers/mics together. It was fairly easy to dial in a good cab voice once I got used to the control system. It would be nice to have independent adjustment controls for fine tuning on mic placements.

On to the amp tones now and oh boy is there more than a few of them to choose from. Since it’s the default, I’m going to jump in with the Brownie Lead, which is undoubtedly the HBE channel of a be-100 deluxe. Overall good first impressions out of the box, if you will. I did adjust the cab to taste, and preferred using the Freeman M25 in combination with The Freeman V30 using Sm57’s on both blended to the center, but pretty much left the positions untouched.

For preamp controls the amp has the standard layout – gain, bass, middle and treble, and in the power section Master volume, presence and thump, and a host of toggle switches for a slew of options. I will leave a description of each toggle control in a separate section down below. 

I kept all the controls around 5-6, with the exception of the output which I adjusted to the appropriate levels. After cycling through each switch I settled on what felt like a nice thick, heavy rhythm tone. Paired with the Cab settings I dialed in, it sounds great. Adding in the drive pedal, and it all tightens up well and gives it that extra little push for some searing leads, not that this amp needs more gain, that’s just how I decided to move forward with this amp, for my tastes. Add a little delay and reverb and it’s in 80’s territory. With the amount of gain available, I don’t think I’d have a problem going from a Van Halen tone to a Meshuggah tone with this amp. 

Moving on to the Brown Dirty (BE Channel) amp, it has the exact same layout as the lead amp, but with less gain on tap, it cleans up to a nice crunch tone, and gets dirty enough for heavy rock, thrash or 80’s hair metal.

Switching to the Brownie Clean (plexi) amp, and again it has the same control layout but not as many switches to utilize and this amp has a bright switch. Now this “clean” amp basically does what a plexi does, from cleanish at very low gain levels, to breaking up around 4, all the way to loud and dirty when dimed, but still relatively lower gain compared to the dirt amp. This is where I’d go for some ac/dc type hard rock tones. This amp can get a tad bit loud when turning up the gain and master, so just keep that in mind and adjust the output control accordingly.

Onto the Double Jay and it’s pretty obvious it’s the JJ100 Jerry Cantrell signature model. All three amps are identical layout wise with the exception of a bright switch on the clean amp. The lead amp is the JBE voicing which has more gain, compression and saturation to it. Both Amps are great for grunge, doom/stoner rock, hard rock to metal tones, and take a drive pedal well.

The Double Jay clean amp is voiced to be a blend of fender and vox cleans, and has a good amount of headroom, I actually had to push the input to get it to really break up with the gain dimed, without the use of a drive of course. Overall it’s great for doing clean work, takes chorus, delays and reverbs well to get some fantastic ambient tones.
Finally the Nude amp, which is based on the rare to find Naked amp, which is a combination of a Naylor 60w preamp and a Marshall superlead power amp. The “Dirty” amp goes from crunchy to searing, and gets nasty with a drive, fuzz or any distortion in front of it. I really liked this one, it was just fun to play through and see what tones I could get out of it.

The Nude clean amp, well lets just say it goes from clean on 1, crunch past 2, dirty at about 4 and raunchy from 5 and up on the gain control. I preferred the bright switch to the right on this amp. The clean tone was good, but I enjoyed using this amp for the crunch and dirty tones, it feels tight and has a certain level of clarity for dirty lead tones.

I did notice some unpleasant underlying fizzy distortion while utilizing the clean amps in what should be a clean tone, I contacted ML Sound about the issue, and they are currently working toward fixing the issue, as well as other issues that have presented for others, so keep an eye out for those updates.

The pedalboard overall is decent, the drive and chorus are good, the gate was effective, the delay and reverb get the job done. It works in a pinch for practice, quick demo’s or a dirty mix.

I didn’t really find a need to use the IR loader or bypass the cab section, but while testing the loader out, it seemed to work well, was easy to use and once I had the IR’s I liked, the mixer helped fine tune the end result. The cabinet/IR loader can also be bypassed to utilize an external cabinet or impulse loader, such as ML Sound labs Mikko Player, and they have large catalogue of quality Impulse responses available through their website for purchase.

Notes

Switches from left to right – I will only mention them once per amp, if they are available on multiple amps and there is no alternative description, assume that they are the same.

Brownie Dirty & Lead

• 3-way gain structure – three choices of gain structure
• Fat – Fattens tone
• C45 – Custom voicing 
• Sat  – Adds gain, compression and saturations, volume may drop, adjust volume as needed
• Voice – Top end response
• Frequency – Changes frequency of thump control
• Response – Adjust negative feedback,

Brownie Clean

• Fat – fattens tone
• 3-way bright- varies brightness of clean amp
• Frequency 
• Response

Double Jay clean

• 3-way bright

Nude Dirty

• 3-way gain structure 

Nude Clean

• 3-way bright

Work around suggestion from ML Sound Labs for the issues mentions: For the clean channels, use the presets this will reset the amps to resolve most of the issues. I also recommend when switching from the Dirty or Lead amps to the clean amps, to reduce your Master and Gain to 0 before switching, it seemed to help greatly when trying to dial them in myself, and drastically reduced the frequency of the noticeable fizzy distortion.

UPS/DOWNS

The amp selection sounds great for the most part. The cab section is a vast improvement over the older plugins from ML Sound Labs (prior to Vorna), which is great to see. It works really well, and is fairly user friendly. The GUI is easy to navigate, and straightforward for quickly dialing in tones. Overall Flagship sounds good for practice and dirty takes, recording and sits well in a mix. 

There are a few things that could be improved though, The volume level for some amps need to be balanced, for example the Brownie clean gets fairly loud if you crank up the gain and push the master to add the power amp saturation, you can turn the output level down, but if you want to switch to one of the dirty amps you have to turn in back up. This is technically normal operation for the real amp, where the clean channel can get immensely loud, but for an amp sim this should be compensated for cohesion in my opinion.

There’s a bit of odd fizzy distortion on the clean channels, beyond the typical breakup, that seems unnatural and unpleasant, depending on where the gain and master controls are set. With the right settings it’s avoidable but I’d prefer the full functionality of these controls without the fizzy distortion. That said again ML Sound is working on fixing the issue.

The pedalboard can be a bit hard to read if you’re using a small monitor or small laptop screen with the plugin at its smallest window scale. It’s not a big deal but sometimes when you want to adjust one, on the fly, having to rescale it to read the labels can be inconvenient. The preset menu could use an update as it stands it can feel a little clunky sometimes. 

The CPU usage could be a little better but it wasn’t really a big problem for me, and to ML Sound Lab’s credit, they have been making improvements to optimize performance with updates already.

I think the regular price is set a tad high at €99.99, as the plugin stands but with a few improvements, specifically the bugs/issues mentioned above, it could be worth the regular price point, and could easily go from a 8 out of 10, to a 9 or 10 out 10 score wise.

Conclusion

There is a very large selection of tones to choose from, going from clean to dirty to just down right mean and nasty brutal tones and is also great for shredding. I especially enjoyed the Nude clean and dirty amps! If you like Friedman amps, or British voiced amps then this might be the plugin for you. ML Sound Labs has definitely improved things with the new Vorna amp modelling, and I feel like they are moving in the right direction. With a little bit more time and polishing, I think this really can be a great overall plugin. I went into this one with lower expectations based on experience with some previous products from ML sound labs and was pleasantly surprised by Flagship! Go check it out, hear it for yourself!

Final Note: This review will be updated when the ML Sound Labs rectifies the issues discussed above, to reflect those changes!

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