ENGL Fireball IR | Not just for metal?! In depth Review & Demo

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This is the ENGL Fireball IR Pedal: a brand new digital preamp “amp in a box” pedal based on the German brand’s legendary Fireball tube amp!

Get the Fireball IR at Thomann:
At Sweetwater:

The Fireball IR is an all-digital, all-in-one solution for guitar players: it’s a preamp pedal with a built-in IR loader and cab sims, and it has a headphones output too. This means it really can be the one box you use for silent home practice, recording, and playing live – with consistent tones each time.

And tones are what ENGL is known for! Especially high gain ones. The Fireball (which you can currently get in 100-watt and 25-watt versions) is one of the company’s most well-known metal and hard rock amps, with copious amounts of gain on tap. It has a clean channel too, of course, for when you need it, but even the clean channel crunches up nicely.

The Fireball IR Preamp Pedal replicates the two channels and has a decent control set for them too. You get a three-band EQ (Bass, Middle and Treble), Volume, Gain, Presence and Noise Gate controls, and there’s also a switchable Mid Boost. When you switch channels or turn off the Fireball IR, the pedal remembers your knob positions for next time – which is almost like having a preset for the clean and dirty channels.

On the IR and cab sim side, you can load up to three IRs of your choice into the Fireball IR. The pedal comes stock with three ENGL IRs: the ENGL E212VHB V30 (a 2x12 cab), the ENGL E412VSB V30 (a 4x12), and the ENGL E412XXL V30 (ENGL’s iconic oversized XXL 4x12!). The Fireball IR has a USB-C Out, which you can use to connect to your Mac or PC to hook up the software and load up your own favorite IRs.

Being an ENGL product, the Fireball IR – which is designed and engineered in Germany, but built in China – is built like a tank, and it should set you back around $249/€249 at time of launch.

Is it worth it, though? There’s certainly a lot of preamp pedal competition out there these days from the likes of Strymon, Universal Audio, Friedman Amps, Victory Amps, and so on.

With this video, we’re going to see how the Fireball IR performs. Of course, we’ll wrangle all the heavy tones out of the pedal that we can, but I’m not an exclusively metal player, so we’ll dive into lower gain tones – and the Clean channel – too. I’ll also use the Fireball IR as a pedal platform and see how it handles external overdrive pedals and reverb.

We’ll play riffs in as many genres as I can with the Fireball IR, from metal, hard rock and progressive rock to classic rock, indie and alternative rock, and even some clean blues, folk and pop stuff. I’m using the excellent and versatile 2025 Ibanez AZ Standard HH AZ24 model for the playing here.

After the riffs, I play some loops into the pedal and really get to twist the knobs to hear all the different tones you can get from it. Here, we’ll use my Epiphone Les Paul and my Fender Telecaster to check out the Fireball IR’s two channels in as much depth as we can.

Then, we’ll try the Fireball IR in its alternative usage scenarios: running it into the front end of an amplifier as a standard overdrive/distortion pedal, and then running it into the amp’s FX Loop to act as a preamp.

Let me know your thoughts on the Fireball IR in the comments!

Here are some links to the various playing samples and info bits:

00:00 Hello!
00:11 Introduction to the Fireball IR
02:20 Specs and features
04:58 Today’s rig and plan

07:23 Clean tone reference and turning on the Fireball IR
08:01 Metal tones
10:46 Hard rock tones
13:43 Punk and alternative rock tones
15:57 Clean tones
18:16 Clean ambient tones with the TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Reverb
19:33 Indie rock tones
20:36 Indie rock tones with the Greer Lightspeed overdrive pedal
22:28 Classic rock tones
24:04 Classic rock tones with the Greer Lightspeed

25:31 Lead Channel loop
31:59 Clean Channel loop
37:04 Fireball IR into front end of amp loop
40:16 Fireball IR as preamp into another amp loop

43:02 My thoughts
44:14 Things I like: tones and versatility
45:05 How good is the Clean channel?
45:49 Tones the Fireball IR can’t do
46:36 Am I bothered that this is a digital pedal?
47:01 The Fireball IR as a drive pedal and as a preamp
47:42 Price, build quality, looks
48:10 Things I don’t like
50:47 What other similar products are out there that you should consider?
53:23 My conclusions on the Fireball IR and why you should buy it

Backing music from the YouTube Audio Library: Duck In The Alley – TrackTribe.

#ENGL #ENGLAmps #ENGLFireball #FireballIR #ENGLFireballIR

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@ENGLampstv