Boss WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core

A tube-based guitar amp sounds and feels its best when the volume is cranked and its power section is really working. Unfortunately, the levels produced are usually unmanageable for anyone without an isolation booth or very forgiving neighbors. The WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core solves this issue, capturing your amp’s speaker output with a reactive load and selectable options that accurately emulate combo and stack-style speaker behaviors. The sound goes directly to the internal 30-watt reactive drive power amp, ready to connect to an external cab for low-volume practice. The same signal is also sent through the unit’s speaker cab emulations and effects processing, giving you a polished feed for direct recording applications.

The companion editor software provides a studio playground for shaping the raw amp sound within the WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core. Choose from 22 BOSS cabinet emulations and five classic mic types (two available simultaneously) and dial in the ideal blend with position, distance, and level controls. Alternatively, it’s possible to use up to two speaker cab IRs at once, either from the included Celestion Digital IRs or selections from your personal IR library. With the time alignment function, you can precisely line up IR combinations for the smoothest tone.

The WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core contains powerful tools to help you achieve world-class recorded tones—with no engineering experience required. Developed with top guitarists and studio engineers, the Mix Assist function lets you apply one of three sound contour curves with variable transient control. This makes it easy to record parts that blend perfectly within mixes, drastically improving your production quality. There’s also an immersive Air Feel feature that uses BOSS spatial technology to recreate the inspiring “amp-in-room” tone that guitarists love. The two Air Feel studio variations deliver realistic richness, depth, and dimension, providing more natural results than the room mics typically used to add space to guitar recordings.

Effect processing plays a vital role in crafting great studio guitar tones. The WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core features a series/parallel loop for inserting your preferred mod and ambience effects, positioned after the amp’s distortion for the clearest sound. There’s also an array of high-quality internal processing, allowing you to apply compression, EQ, delay, and reverb within the unit. You can organize custom setups within the editor—including cab choices and effects—and assign 10 favorites for instant access with the Rig knob on the front panel.

The WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core enables you to use your custom rigs in many ways at once. Record directly to music production software over USB or patch into a mixer or audio interface with the stereo XLR jacks. Hook up an external speaker cabinet (4/8/16 ohms) for daily practice. Or monitor through headphones via the front input, complete with Air Feel for an inspiring spatial experience.

Using the WAZA Tube Amp Expander Core Editor, you can load 64 of your favorite third-party speaker WAV IRs in addition to the 10 included Celestion Digital IRs. Mono or stereo files are compatible, with support for 500 ms length and 32-bit floating point/96 kHz resolution for the finest audio quality. The optional Bluetooth® Audio MIDI Dual Adaptor adds wireless capabilities, allowing you to jam with music streamed from a smartphone and use the mobile version of the editor to tweak rigs and load IRs.