Review: Fender Tone Master Pro

While enthusiasts are still fussing over tube amps and drooling over effects pedal collections, gigging musicians are in the midst of a digital revolution. Offerings from brands like Kemper, Line 6, Fractal Audio, and Neural DSP all allow musicians to model tube amps digitally, with results that come astonishingly close to the real deal.

These new digital modeling amps are easy to set up, reliable, and much lighter and more compact than previous rigs. These days, the sounds are also remarkable. Unless they’re in the studio, many modern musicians are using digital options for their sounds, and many of those options are making their way onto hit tracks.

Fender has competed in the digital amp space for decades, but its new $1,700 Tone Master Pro, which launched late last year, is the first truly pro-tier option that we’ve seen from the brand in recent memory. It’s also one of the most intuitive I’ve ever laid eyes on. With classic models of iconic amps and effects, a touchscreen, excellent onboard controls, and a shocking amount of digital processing power, it’s essentially a portable guitar studio. It also has a four-channel audio interface and hundreds of microphone modeling and cabinet modeling options that easily compete with the real deal—even in the studio. It’s even pretty awesome for karaoke.

If I were shopping for an all-in-one guitar solution that works both in my bedroom and on stage, especially if I didn’t want to fuss around in menu screens forever, this is the one I’d pick.

Photograph: Parker Hall

The New Black Box

The Tone Master Pro looks nearly identical to most of the other all-in-one amp/pedalboard solutions I’ve seen. Essentially, it’s a black slab that is supposed to sit in front of you while you play, either on the floor or on a desk. A 7-inch touchscreen sits between two silver knobs on the top of the device, flanked at the bottom by 10 pedal switches and associated LED screens. It’s all very clean and modern, easy to hide while you play on stage.

One quirky and familiar thing I love is that Fender included its classic red power light on the back of the device, so you can easily tell it is on like a “normal” Fender amp. The rest of the rear of the Tone Master is a smorgasbord of inputs and outputs the likes of which I’ve never seen on a guitar amp.

There are stereo outputs in both quarter inch and XLR; four separate effects sends and returns (two stereo) for using outboard pedals and effects with the device; two expression pedal outlets; a mic/line and instrument input; as well as a foot switch control, 3.5-mm aux in, headphone output, MIDI in and out, USB-C, and MicroSD. And also, Bluetooth. If you need more, you probably need a mixing board or a patch bay.

Photograph: Parker Hall

Practically, what that means is there is a vast array of workflows that function fabulously via the Tone Master Pro. You can play live and send separate outputs to headphone mixers and the front of house. You can add in a special pedal in your digital setup using the effects loops, or you can plug a microphone into the XLR jack and use it as a PA for your voice (with added effects to boot). All of these work plug-and-play, with little fussing inside the software.

Amped Up

Booting up the Tone Master Pro takes a little while, about as long as a laptop in the pre–solid state era, but that’s fine. Usually I have cables and guitars to fiddle with and tune while I get my amp set up anyway.

After it gets booted, the display shows off a sleek-looking interface for its default preset. It's a basic sound with distortion, the amp, and a delay pedal that is immediately usable tonally. A cute little photo-real Fender Deluxe Reverb amp sits in the middle of the digital screen, with photo-real pedals on either side (distortion in front of the amp and delay after, like an ideal real-world setup). This is a perfect visual representation of the actual signal flow, and the touchscreen makes it easy to adjust any parameter, or to add a pedal wherever you want.

There isn't much screen touching, though, to adjust sounds. Instead, the 10 foot switches double as knobs. Touch the screen to zoom in on an effect’s parameters, and they get assigned to individual foot switches (or turnable knobs). The LEDs above the switches tell you what parameter you’re adjusting, plus the screen moves the fake knob on the fake pedal as you turn the one on the board.

Photograph: Parker Hall

Click into the Deluxe Reverb (one of a huge array of classic amps, both Fender and otherwise, that have been modeled) and you can use the knobs to adjust the amp's parameters, with corresponding motion on the tiny digital knobs onscreen. It's a coup for those of us who want analog usability and tone but digital stability. When I'm sitting at my desk turning knobs and checking how the Tone Master sounds, I genuinely feel like I'm sitting in front of a more compact, less fussy version of my usual analog setup.

It's so easy to use. There are dozens of usable presets that emulate favorite artists onboard, or you can customize your own. It has a great built-in tuner that takes up the entire 7-inch screen for easy fine adjustment, and includes a 60-second stereo looper for those of us who like to work on one section of a tune at a time. Now that I have a young child, I can also plug in a pair of headphones and practice in silence at night.

It's like Apple made a guitar pedal. The interface alone could be praised for thousands of words. It's so good that even seasoned users of the competition might want to make the switch for sheer ease of use, but to be honest the sound of the Tone Master Pro is equally as impressive.

Perfect Tone All the Time

The key to the musical magic on offer is Fender’s devotion to top-tier hardware. The processing ability of the Tone Master Pro is truly remarkable, from the unnoticeable latency I experience when playing a guitar, through dozens of activated effects, to the ability to choose between tons of real IR models of cabinets and microphones.

Fender recorded 6,000 test samples in studios using the real cabs and mics to get the sounds perfect. You can even select exactly where on the fake speaker cone the fake mic is located, and how far away it is in fake inches. Yes, that's insane. It's also awesome. For those of us without access to tens of thousands of dollars of mics and unlimited studio time, it's fun to explore.

Options like the Tone Master Pro are expensive, but they're not nearly as expensive as the real thing. You can have two pedals or 30, one amp or three. You can add a separate vocal channel with delay and reverb for singer-songwriter gigs and an acoustic guitar amp to go with it, on an entirely separate digital circuit. All of this can easily be controlled by tons of customizable presets and apps for both Mac and PC (which connect via the USB-C port).

What Fender has created is a digital sandbox that lets each guitarist find their ideal setup and tweak it without spending tens of thousands of dollars on outboard gear and guitar techs. If you can't plug in to a normal PA when playing live, Fender sells a $500 outboard cabinet that has a built-in amp to plug the Tone Master Pro into on stage.

Apart from the tones themselves being dead-on accurate, the fact that I can switch between a classic, clean Fender Bassman with a reverb pedal on the verses to a dimed Marshall clone for a solo is something I'd never probably have done in real life without a platinum record and the tour to match. Now I can do it in my garage studio at 1 in the morning for my indie rock record. That's pretty radical.

Studio nerds and touring musicians have been sold on tech like this for years, but I think the Tone Master Pro could really catch on with the amateur who is tired of searching for techs for their aging tube amps but who hates to give up knobs. As someone who's had this thing around my home studio for a few months, I can't tell the difference in my tones between my real Bassman and the facsimile very easily in the mix. I can say I don't miss the hiss of analog or the ruined takes from my dog barking in the room. If this is the ease with which the records of the future are made, the kids will be alright.