Fender's original Mustang Micro was an impressive little headphone amplifier for silent practice and recording – but the brand-new Plus version is a remarkable upgrade that puts a ludicrous range of tone options at your fingertips.
There are plenty of these dongle-sized headphone amps out there now. It's a solid little formula: a gadget not much bigger than a matchbox that plugs straight into your guitar's output jack and lets you leave your family and friends enjoying blissful silence as you wail on your six-string, hearing a range of nicely modeled amp and effect sounds through a set of wired headphones.
Yes, they've got to be wired headphones – Bluetooth ain't fast enough at this point to get the signal through without groove-killing latency. So you do end up swimming in wires a bit, but the tradeoff is that you can rock out to your heart's content in a safe and responsible manner that's less likely to get you lynched by your housemates.
I had a lot of fun with the first Mustang Micro before it came to a bitter end at the hands of a four-year-old and a glass of cola, so I was excited to see how far things had come when Fender was kind enough to send me a pre-release review unit of the brand-spanking-new Mustang Micro Plus – but I wasn't expecting how far they'd be taking things.
Visually, the change isn't too dramatic; there's a little LCD screen on the front now so you can flick through 100 different presets as opposed to the original Micro's 12, and see their names instead of trying to remember which color is what preset.
The battery's still good for at least four hours of playing, the Bluetooth function still lets you stream songs from your phone and play along with them, and there's still a USB-C jack you can use to charge it, or connect it directly to your computer and use it as a recording interface. It still offers a broad range of sounds, from atmospheric cleans to bluesy breakup tones, to classic rock and high-gain metal options.
And there's now a built-in chromatic tuner – which is super handy, if a little slow and less responsive than it oughtta be.
The real leap forward here is on the software side – every patch on the Mustang Micro Plus is now fully editable to a frankly ludicrous degree for a device so tiny.
Fender has brought this thing into line with its fantastic Tone Master Pro amp and effects modeling floor station, whose gorgeous touch screen interface and super-intuitive effects chain building wiped the floor with the likes of Neural DSP's Quad Cortex and Line 6's Helix range when it launched. The Tone Master Pro instantly set a new standard for how people interact with floor modelers, and now the Mustang Micro Plus brings the same experience to a tiny headphone amp.
A lot of people will never bother installing the Fender Tone app, and will be perfectly happy using the built-in presets. But they'd be missing out on the real power of this tiny device, which now lets you fine-tune all the settings on your 25 amp options, and stack multiple fully-tweakable effects pedals before and after it in wildly flexible signal chains.
Let me be clear here: I'm properly blown away by how much grunt the Mustang Micro Plus must pack into its minuscule form factor. The real-time processing load it can handle is absolutely insane for a device its size – one high-quality amp/cab simulation, plus up to four excellent effects pedals, some of them running in stereo – in any order, with a global EQ slapped on top of the lot to account for different headphones.
So while the standard patches offer plenty of neat sounds – particularly for lower-output single-coil Fender-style guitars – you're no longer locked in to a compromise. If you're willing to get your sleeves up, you can put together some absolutely epic personalized tones through the app that'll make any guitar shine.
The amp and effects models are just gorgeous. There are now 25 electric guitar amplifiers to choose from, including a stack of Fender's own iconic amps, as well as classics from Marshall, Vox, Mesa Boogie, Orange, HiWatt, Friedman, EVH and Bogner. There are studio and tube preamps, as well as a dedicated acoustic simulator. All of these have appropriate knobs to play with.
There are also 25 effects pedals, offering iconic overdrive, distortion and fuzz drives, compressors, sustainers, EQs and envelope filters. Modulation effects include chorus, phaser, flangers, vibrato pedals and tremolos. There are mono, stereo, reverse and tape-style delays, and four different reverb pedal options, including a small room sound, a large hall, a 1965-style spring reverb and a large hall reverb with modulation on it. Again, all the pedals have knobs up the wazoo.
The quality of modeled amps and effects is outrageous these days, whichever of the higher-end companies you choose to go with, and the Micro Plus certainly doesn't disappoint. As just one example, in the real world, I've recently got myself a RAT distortion pedal, and I've been spending plenty of time getting to know it.
The virtual RAT model in the Micro Plus is a beautiful recreation, adding all the same gorgeous pick attack and guttural clipping at low to medium gain levels as the real thing. It collapses into fuzz territory if you push the gain to the max and hit it with the neck pickup. The filter knob takes all the harshness out of the top end. It cleans up with the volume knob. It sends a higher-gain Marshall or Friedman amp into a chewy, percussive sixth gear that gives me a nasty case of stank face, but it can also put a subtle, articulate, bluesy edge on a clean Fender tone. I can't fault it. I love it. And it's just one of fifty things to play with here.
The degree of customization this gadget offers is stunning – matched only, perhaps, by the Boss Katana Go, which launched earlier this year and then mysteriously got discontinued, with no replacement yet in sight. But Boss's preset-editing app was nowhere near as visual and guitarist-focused as what Fender's done here – so while it'd certainly offer a similarly spectacular array of tone options, it'd be much less tactile and pleasant to interact with.
The Katana Go, however, did offer one popular addition the Mustang Micro Plus doesn't, in the form of a spatial 3D environment modeling overlay that'd let you move your guitar rig around in a virtual space, making you feel like you're in a nice studio or on a stadium stage. That's a nice touch, but I certainly don't feel like it's a dealbreaker.
In fact, most of the criticisms I've got here are issues the Micro Plus shares with all its competition. It makes your pretty guitars look ugly. It can leave you tangled up in headphone wires. The physical buttons are fiddly, and you've got to flip the dongle up and squint to read the display. And it's so lightweight, at 1.9 oz (54 g) that it feels cheap, plasticky and easily breakable should you step on it, which might not be hard to do.
One possible problem it adds over most similar gadgets is that the tone editing app is so damn good to use that you might well get stuck in the rabbithole tweaking tones, to the detriment of your actual guitar playing time. I certainly have. But that's hardly Fender's fault, and it's hardly limited to digital modelers either, if my burgeoning real-life pedalboard and coincidentally stagnant playing abilities are any indication.
All in all, the Mustang Micro Plus feels like a colossal leap forward from the original Micro, and an incredibly impressive and endlessly flexible musical tool. It gets even more impressive with the price tag – we're talking US$129.99 (AU$289.00 in Australia). That includes a six-month subscription to Fender's excellent Presonus Studio One+ DAW, a professional-grade recording, mixing and music production software package with near-limitless capabilities in its own right.
Fender's knocked this one out of the park in my opinion – it's one hell of a travel rig for practice and recording, a lovely gift of blessed silence for your family, and a beautifully immersive experience you can treat yourself to without guilt. One day, these things will be able to stream directly to a set of wireless earbuds – but right now, this is the state of the art, an affordable and spectacularly fun gadget, and a perfect illustration of just how outrageously spoiled the modern guitarist is these days.
Source: Fender
