Carr Trail Rider Launch
The Carr Trail Rider is the latest addition to the Carr Amps line up. As a major product launch for this year, it was important to get high impact, high quality content on the Coda Music platforms to support both Carr, Coda and the sales of the product. It was my task to make this happen across all the Coda platforms. Photos, Videos and of course some copy to engage the guitar community.
“The Carr Trail Rider may only produce 5 watts, but don't let the numbers fool you.
Designed by Steve Carr, this lightweight boutique combo packs an incredible amount of character into a remarkably compact package. With two distinct vintage-inspired voices, lush onboard reverb and a built-in attenuator, the Trail Rider can be used effectively in the studio, the practice room or on stage.
In the full video on our YouTube channel, we explore both of the Trail Rider's unique voices. From the warm, rich American-inspired character of the T57 to the bright, chime-filled V67, you'll hear just how much tonal ground this amp can cover.
If you're searching for a premium low-watt valve amp that delivers inspiring tones at real-world volumes, the Trail Rider deserves to be on your shortlist.”
The Carr Trail Rider launched in mid-2026 with stock arriving in the UK a short time after the United States. As with most small to medium sized American guitar company launches, the UK is slightly behind on receiving stock and therefore at a slight disadvantage when it comes to marketing material.
I do not let this disadvantage stop me. Despite the lag of stock from the US I endeavour to create great content that engages and excites the guitar playing community.
Steve Carr has a great story. One of hard work and persistence to get to get Carr amps to where it is now. His pursuit of great guitar tones has produced a strong and thriving amplifier company.
One of the Directors of Coda Music took a trip out to North Carolina to visit Steve Carr and take a tour of the Carr Amps workshop. One of the Carr Amps team shot some video of this visit for us to work with.
This presented me with slight problem. The factory tour itself was pretty good, Steve did and excellent job of explaining their process and how the team works. Unfortunately it was all filmed in portrait. This is great for Instagram and TikTok short form videos, but not so great for a ~40 minute YouTube video. Although the video is a little too cropped at certain points, overall the edit into a 16:9 format came out pretty well. This took a long time to edit and put together but I think it was worth it to have the full factory tour up on the Coda YouTube channel and website. This is one disadvantage of not being fully in control of the content creation process, however, it was also a chance to learn some lessons. One big lesson from this was one of communication. Communication is always key to creating great marketing campaigns and unfortunately it fell short here. With a better brief and a better explanation of what was expected we could have avoided these problems and produced a better product in the end. However, I still feel we did well given that Carr Amps is in North Carolina and I am here in Hertfordshire. Expected production outcomes aside, the end result was still good.
Lets see how we did.
We hit the website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok with all that we had.
The campaign got over 7,000 views, engaged nearly 200 people, was viewed for well over 87 hours and attracted 25 people to click through to the product pages on the Coda website.
And the real win. Coda were shipping out Trail Riders the moment they were available.