I’m not even sure why I have this blog. I post like once a month. Maybe. Usually when I post, it’s only about new gear that I just bought. Yawn.

Speaking of which, I just bought some awesome new gear! I sold my bassman (why did I think I needed another amp?) and bought a Deluxe Memory Man Tap Tempo. It is amazing.

Other recent acquisitions:

• Walrus Audio Voyager – It’s pretty much a Klon from what I can gather. As an overdrive, it’s not very good, but it’s an awesome boost.
• Diamond Tremolo – it sounds awesome, but I’m still trying to figure out how to use it.
• Timmy – it’s awesome. Pretty much every pedalboard needs one of these.

As usual, I have been buying/selling/trading gear. Most recently, I traded my Duesenberg. It was pretty cool, but it was really expensive, and it didn’t feel like it was worth the price that I paid for it. I was under the impression that they were handmade in Germany, but it turns out that they are manufactured in Korea, while the final assembly is done in Germany. I paid like $1900 (used) for the guitar, which is way too much money for a Korean factory guitar. It didn’t really feel any nicer than any of the other MIK guitars that I have played that retail for about a third of what I paid for the Duesenberg. I started to worry about the guitars losing it’s value, so I just wanted to get rid of it.

Anyway, this is what I traded for:

It’s an AVRI ’61 Jaguar and a Bassman ’59RI LTD 4×10 combo. These guys sound like they were designed to be played together. The Jaguar is a pretty bright guitar, and the Bassman can be a pretty dark amp, so they really balance each other out nicely. However, I am not a big fan of the 7.25″ radius fingerboard on the Jaguar. It frets out on bends higher up on the neck unless I raise the action significantly. I’m still kinda figuring it out. I really want to like it, I just need to continue to tweak it.

I’m revamping my pedalboard situation quite a bit. I sold my big bradycase pedalboard and got another Pedaltrain – a PT3 this time. The Brady was just too big, bulky, and heavy. Another thing is that it’s not really good for someone who rearranges their board as frequently as I do. Everytime I wanted to move a pedal, I had to drill a few more holes and reroute patch cables under the board. The Pedaltrain is much more convenient. I still need to get a road case for it – my pedal collection is too expensive to carry around in a soft case for an extended period of time.

I recently discovered a newish pedal manufacturer – Walrus Audio. I bought their Voyager pedal, which is a boost/overdrive. From what I understand, it’s a Klon clone with different clipping diodes and an internal 18v charge pump. I also got their Iron Horse distortion (which should be coming in today). Again, this one has some clone rumors swirling around it. It’s supposed to be similar to a Rat with a switch for different clipping options and (again) internal 18v conversion. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do some demos or a review in the near future.

It has been a while since my last post. That’s kind of becoming the norm around here. I need to stop waiting so long between posts.

Hmm, let’s see. I haven’t bought or sold any guitars since my last post, but I have bought and sold a bunch of pedals. My most recent acquisitions are a POG2 and a Teese RMC3 wah. Here is the current board:

I really want to like the POG2, but I’m having a hard time figuring it out. It seems to have quite a bit of boost to it, and it adds some noise to my signal. The effect is cool, but I think it may be a little overkill. I may end up going back to a Micro POG.

I have been playing with a clean tone a lot recently. I used to run my amp overdriven and push it further with overdrives and stuff, but I have moved away from that recently. I still use overdrive a lot for rhythm, but I’m finding myself going clean more often than not. A lot of the nuance gets lost with too much overdrive.

I want to get back into playing classical guitar. I really enjoyed it in college, but I pretty much quit playing after graduation. It was too much effort to keep the nails grown out to the proper length. However, I have been itching to get back into it. Unfortunately, I don’t even have a nylon string guitar anymore. I guess that’s something else to put on the list.

I guess the thing that has prompted the renewed interest in classical guitar is related to my new job situation. I am now teaching at 2 school, from grades 7-12. The top group at the high school is working on some pretty serious literature, and it made me realize that I have been slacking off lately. I mean, I am a classically trained musician, and I barely even practice anymore. It’s shameful, really.

Another thing that kind of inspired me was the discovery of a band called Punch Brothers. They are a bluegrass ensemble fronted by Chris Thile from Nickel Creek, and they play some pretty progressive music. It is virtuosic, clever, extremely melodic, and fun to listen to. I was watching some youtube videos and I came across a performance that they did of the third movement of the Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 3. That’s one of the pieces that we are working on with the high school group. I decided to start learning the violin 1 part. Most of it is really high and fast, and it is really stretching my chops. I have learned about 12 measures, so I’m about 25% of the way there.

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In non-guitar news, we legally adopted the girls a couple of weeks ago. Brittany and Katie are now officially Hintze girls. Here’s a pic from adoption day.

Here it is:

As you can see, I installed the new black pickguard. The tone improved instantly. As I was screwing it on, I could hear the transparent bloom of string separation. It had notes of almond with a chocolatey finish. It also looks way cooler. Like someone on facebook commented: It went from a tuxedo t-shirt to a tuxedo.

Anyway, here’s my basic review.

First of all, the neck is great. As I have mentioned, I’m a big fan of the 25.5″ neck scale. It feels snappier and it doesn’t feel as cramped higher up the neck. I also like the flat 12″ radius. It feels so nice for playing lead. The neck profile is very comfortable for my hands. I hate fat necks, and I don’t really like the super skinny shredder necks either. This one is slim without feeling too skinny. It feels good. It is strung with 11s, but it’s not hard to play, partly due to the bigger frets. They’re not jumbo frets (like on my old PRS DGT), but they’re bigger than typical frets.

The sound: My first impressions were mostly positive. The neck P-90 is full-sounding without being too thick, and the bridge humbucker is nice and chunky without being too harsh. However, the in between setting was awful. Seriously. It sucked. I’m not sure what they were thinking with the wiring on this thing. The middle pickup selector put the pickups out of phase and split the humbucker. The resulting sound was thin, too quiet, and über-twangy. It sounded okay with a totally clean tone, but it was completely unusable with overdrive.

I cracked it open and decided to do a standard 3-way wiring setup. The result is much more pleasing and usable to me. It bridges the gap between the neck and bridge. On two-pickup guitars, I usually spend about 95% of my playing time in the middle position, so it was really important for me to get it working right on this guitar.

This guitar has a tremolo system. I don’t usually like trems, but I was really curious about this one. It’s kind of a variation on the Bigsby, called the Vibrola or something like that. Supposedly, it’s smoother, more stable, and easier to restring than a Bigsby. I have no firsthand experience with a Bigsby, so I can’t comment on that comparison. I can say that while it is very smooth, it is not 100% stable if you use it too vigorously. Some retuning is necessary every now and then.

At this moment, I am pretty happy with the guitar. It plays very well and sounds excellent. It has a very cool tone, and it looks and feels very unique. Some people think that they look gaudy and cheap, but I like the way it looks, especially with the black guard.

I have already gone back and forth with myself about the possibility of selling/trading it. I definitely wanted to get rid of it before I decided to fix the wiring setup. At this point, though, I’m pretty pleased with it. The only guitars that I would be interesting in trading for it would be luthier-built instruments like a Suhr tele or something like a Koll. I have no interest in another Gibson-type instrument. I think I’m done with Les Pauls. I mean, I wouldn’t mind having one, but since I’m not rich and can’t really justify owning a bunch of guitars, I have to limit myself to guitars that I actually play frequently.

For now, the Duesenberg is staying. However, I can’t say for how long.

I sold my Les Paul.

It is a beautiful instrument to look at, but I don’t enjoy playing it. I have pretty much decided that I don’t like the Gibson 23.75″ scale length – I prefer the Fender 25.5″ scale. In addition, I dont’ really like the tones that I have been getting out of it lately. It’s just a little too thick. A little too dark.

I was initially thinking about getting a Gretsch Duo Jet. I really want a guitar with filtertrons, and I have wanted a Gretsch for a long time. However, upon looking at the specs I discovered that they have a scale length of 24.6″, somewhere in between the Fender and Gibson scale lengths.

I was researching other Gretsch-like options and I came upon a company called Duesenberg. Apparently, they’re a German company that sources the bodies and necks from Korea and do the assembly themselves in Germany. I have heard a lot of great things about these guitars. I happened across a guy selling their Starplayer TV model on The Gear Page and was really interested in it. The Starplayer TV is a semi-hollowbody guitar with a P90 in the neck, a humbucker in the bridge, a Bigsby-like tremolo that supposedly is very stable, and a 25.5″ neck scale. It’s supposed to be a mixture of a tele, a Les Paul, and a Gretsch – three of my favorite things. I decided to take a chance and go for it.

This is the one that I bought.

It has a sparkly gold pickguard, which I hate, so I ordered a new black one. That’ll improve the tone, right?

Anyway, it should be here on Thursday. Fingers crossed!

For most of my life, I have been a skinny guy. I think I was like 130 lbs when I graduated high school, and I probably didn’t gain much weight in college, either. I’m 34 years old now, and I have put on a lot of weight since my school days. A lot of it is muscle, but a lot of it is… not muscle. Anyway, at the beginning of this summer I was close to 200 lbs. To me, that was unacceptable.

about 6-7 weeks ago, my wife and I decided that we were going to get in better shape. We decided to start watching what we eat and drink, and most importantly, we decided to start exercising regularly. We have been members of a gym for several years now, but we have never really taken advantage of it. We have certainly taken advantage of it over the last month or so.

I have been going to the gym 8-10 times a week. I have spent most of my time on the treadmill, but I have also done some basic weight training. I usually set the incline really high and the speed somewhere between 3.5 – 4 mph. It’s not very fast, but my goal is to get my heart rate up for an extended period of time. I usually walk something like 45 mins to an hour twice a day. According to the treadmill computer thing, I burn about 1200-1400 calories a day.

On Friday, I weighed in at 184 lbs. I don’t know exactly what I weighed when I started, but I think I have lost something like 12-15 lbs in the last 6 weeks. That’s kind of a big deal, I think. I can really tell a difference in the way my body looks and the way my clothes fit.

I have another week of summer before I have to go back to work. I have committed to continue exercising, even though I know that I won’t be able to continue the same regimen that I have been doing recently. I don’t want to go back to where I was, and I am confident that I won’t.

Ok, so I’ve been busy. In the two weeks since my last post, I have done a lot of selling and buying (pretty much in that order).

Sold:

Tim – really nice boost/overdrive, but I wanted a new flavor.

Strymon El Capistan – amazing tape delay simulator, but it had to go for reasons listed below.

Suhr Riot – cool high gain distortion box, but didn’t really play nicely with my amp.

Pedaltrain PT2 – a little too small.

Lollar Strat pickups – Nice tone and well-balanced, but too low output and didn’t match up with my other guitars.

Boss RV5 – Really cool modulated reverb, but kind of a one trick pony.

Lots of good stuff in that list. However, it had to go to make room for better stuff.

New/better stuff:

Strymon Timeline – full review coming soon. Suffice it to say that this delay is pretty freaking awesome. This is why I sold the El Capistan.

Lovepedal Amp Eleven – Some people say that it’s a Tim clone. Maybe so. Regardless, I prefer it to the Tim. The overdrive is smoother and the boost sounds better to me. It sounds really, really great in when boosted by the Sparkle Drive.

Brady Cases custom 32×18 board – I have always loved Bradycase pedalboards, and when this one popped up used at like half price on The Gear Page, I had to jump on it. It’s a little too big right now, but I’ll grow into it. Besides, I have too much money wrapped up in pedals to haul them around in a soft case.

Strymon blueSky Reverberator – I had one of these a while back, but I sold it to fund other gear. We’ll see if it sticks around this time.

Diamond Compressor – Holy crap, this thing is awesome. You can dial in subtle compression all the way up to squashed chicken pickin’ tones. I’m somewhere in between, btw. I love the tilt EQ – it’s great for adding just a little sparkle.

Fulltone Clyde Standard wah – I have been needing a wah, and this one popped up cheap on TGP. It’s a little bright, but I think I can tone it down a bit with an internal trim pot.

Voodoo Lab Sparkle Drive – I’m really liking this pedal at the moment. It’s a tube screamer clone, which ordinarily would be an instant turnoff. I think that tube screamers tend to be overly compressed, muddy, and mid heavy. However, this pedal has a clean blend which allows you to add your unaffected clean signal in with the overdriven tone. It allows you to have the fat overdriven tube screamer tone, yet still retain the brightness and “sparkle” of your original clean tone. I kept it on full time yesterday.

Lava Cable Mini ELC pedalboard kit – These cables are really cool. They are super easy to put together, and if you build them right, they won’t crap out on you like the George L’s do. I like that they’re really low profile and the connectors don’t get in the way, so you can put your pedals really close together if you need to.

That’s pretty much it for now, but I’m on the lookout for new stuff. I kinda want to add some more dirt (maybe a Rat and a fuzz) and I really want to get a true bypass looper pretty soon. I will probably build that one myself, but I need to figure out if it would actually save me any money to do it that way – all those parts really add up quickly.

Here’s a picture of my board, pretty much as it is at the moment. I still need to get my io distortion back from Maury at RAILhead Effects – he’s fixing it up for me (apparently, I was a little too hard on it).

I’m thinking about swapping pickups on my current favorite guitar: my G&L ASAT Bluesboy. This guitar has a humbucker in the neck and a standard tele pickup in the bridge. Currently, I have Lollars installed.

I love this guitar, but I have always had some issues with balancing the volume levels between the neck and bridge. The neck pickup has always been too loud in comparison. My solution has been to live in the middle position with a blend of both pickups, but this has been kinda unsatisfactory lately. There is also a significant tonal difference between the neck humbucker and the bridge single coil. The neck is a lot darker-sounding than the bridge.

Anyway, I’m thinking about turning this guitar into a more traditional tele by putting a regular tele single coil pickup in the neck. It would require a new pickguard, but that’s only $30 or so. It still wouldn’t be totally traditional, since it is semihollow with an f-hole, but still. I would probably install the old neck humbucker in my Les Paul, since it still has the stock burstbuckers in it.

Any thoughts?

When I first started playing in church, we were meeting in a temporary location and I was hauling all of my own gear from my house. I would pack up my guitars, pedalboard and my amp and make 2-3 trips to get everything, getting all sweaty in the process. Once we settled in a semi-permanent location, I kept using my personal gear.

Over time, I got kinda tired of 1) hauling my amp back and forth every week or 2) leaving my amp at the church building so that I couldn’t use it at home. I talked to our worship pastor about it, and he offered to buy an amp for me to use out of the worship budget. I didn’t want to spend too much, so I picked a Vox AC15CC1, and I got him to order an Eminence Red Fang alnico speaker. I have been using it for 4-5 years now, and it has been a good amp for that purpose.

Recently, I decided to trade my Fryette Sig:X head/cab. I wanted a combo, and I wanted something significantly simpler than the Sig:X, which is covered in knobs and switches and special features. It’s incredibly deep, almost infinitely tweakable, and it truly sounds amazing, but I just want to be able to sit down and play without really worrying about where the knobs are.

I was looking at Matchless and Bad Cat amps, but most of them were just a little bit out of my price range, and would have required me to sell something that I probably would have regretted selling. I stumbled upon an auction on ebay that seemed like a really good deal. The amp in question was a Top Hat Club Royale, a 20-watt class A EL84-powered 2×12 combo. I have always heard great things about Top Hat amps, and I know or know of a lot of guys who play them, so I figured it was worth a shot. The amp came with a nice ATA road case, and was priced lower than most similar amps without the case.

It showed up on Thursday, and I kinda went back and forth with myself about whether or not I wanted to bring it up to church to use on Sunday. It’s a heavy amp – it weighs something like 110 lbs with the case. I also wasn’t really sure if it would fit in my car.

I decided to give it a shot. I was able to get it in my trunk and get it set up in the amp room this morning. I kinda guessed with some volume/gain settings and got ready for soundcheck. I was pretty much floored at the difference between this amp and the AC15. No contest. The Top Hat just sounds so much… more. It’s huge and clean and big and full and sparkly and “chimey” and whatever. It’s just in a completely different weight class.

The AC15 is a good amp. The Top Hat is a great amp. It really makes a huge difference.

In case you’re curious – for pedals, I primarily used my RC Booster (always on) with the Tim in front for light/medium gain overdrive tones. I used a Suhr Riot for one song that needed a heavier rhythm tone. I just got the RC and the Riot this week – I really like both pedals. I sold the Memory Lane 2, by the way. Great pedal, but I’m just gonna have to get the Timeline.

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Oh, it also didn’t hurt that I was using my new custom molded in-ear monitors today. They fit perfectly and sound incredible. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned anything about them here, but I bought some Ultimate Ears triple driver headphones on ebay several months ago. They sounded really nice, but they were huge and stuck out of my head like Frankenstein bolts.

I found this company online that takes the drivers out of your current universal fit monitors and installs them in custom molded enclosures. The whole thing costs $90 (plus $30 for an upgraded cable – highly recommended).

I just got them back this week, and I totally love them. Like I said, they fit perfectly and isolate almost all of the ambient room noise. The fidelity is outstanding. I highly recommend the process. The company that I used is inearz.com, a division of Fisher Hearing.

First of all, if you haven’t visited the new page that Strymon has put up for the Timeline, please do so now.

Click here and come back in about 30 minutes.

If you have been following my exploits/follies in the pedal swapping biz, you noticed that I sold a ton of crap to raise funds for this pedal. The Freaking Holy Grail [Yes, I capitalized "Freaking"].  Anyway, I sold all this stuff, and then I got impatient. I decided that I wanted to spend my money right now and that I could wait for the Timeline. I ended up buying a really great pedal – the Diamond Memory Lane 2 – a true analog delay pedal with tap tempo.

It is an awesome-sounding pedal. I have had it for a couple of weeks now, and I totally dig it. It sounds unbelievably good, even if the tap tempo is a little weird. I love the fact that you can control the EQ of the feedback. Lower settings get a really dark-sounding delay that fades away almost immediately. Higher settings give you a really bright-sounding repeat (not digital-sounding) that kinda hangs out and lends toward self-oscillation. I also really like the modulation. Yes, it can get out of hand and cartoonish really quickly, but it can also be really musical and amazing.

The tap is weird. It bases the tempo on only 2 taps, which is not really very accurate. Most delays use a little microprocessor to average your taps really accurately and kinda “guesstimate” what you really intended. The ML2 is not like that. You pretty much have to tap in sets of 2 until the tempo is right. If you’re not a really accurate tapper, your tempo is going to be off.

Anyway, I’m getting off point here. I had decided that I really liked the ML2 and I had come to terms with the weird tap thing, and then I visited the Strymon Timeline page. Oh man. All bets are off. I have to have this thing. Strymon is just magical. I think that they might actually be wizards or something.

Now that I have heard the Timeline, I have put my Memory Lane 2 up for sale (and I think that I have a buyer for it). I still have my El Capistan, and it can serve as my only delay for the time being. I just hope that I get in on the first run before they sell out. I am so fickle. I need to spend more time playing guitar and less time obsessing over gear.