I have been told by a few people on the interwebs that I don’t blog enough, so here goes.
I am getting kind of embarrassed about my inability to commit to my musical equipment. I have been through so many guitars, amps, and pedals that it’s not even funny. Part of that is because I can’t afford to just buy stuff when I want it. If a new delay pedal (or whatever) catches my eye, I usually have to sell something else to make room.
I am currently in the middle of flipping a bunch of gear. I have come to the conclusion that I prefer my G&L ASAT (telecaster-style guitar) to my other guitars. I like it so much that it literally makes my other guitars weep. Okay, not really. [For the record, the misuse of the word literally is one of my pet peeves.]
Anyway, what I like so much about my tele is that it just sounds like rock and roll. Even when I’m playing softly, it’s just kinda rude. My PRS is not rude. It is polite. It doesn’t put it’s elbows on the table during suppertime. It uses a napkin. It knows the difference between a salad fork and a main course fork and a dessert fork. It doesn’t sound like rock and roll. Sure, I can plug it into a big, loud amp and play Smoke on the Water and it’ll sound pretty convincing, but it doesn’t feel right. Not to me, anyway. Maybe it’s just too pretty for me to take it seriously.
Anyway, I decided to sell it. I put it up on The Gear Page this afternoon, and it sold about 5 hours later. Right now, the plan is to buy a ’62 AVRI (American Vintage Reissue) Fender Jazzmaster. I’ll probably have to look for a while, since I don’t really want to pay a premium for a new one. Unfortunately, I haven’t really seen any used ones on ebay/craigslist/etc. Do me a favor and keep your eyes open for an AVRI Jazzmaster. I’d prefer one in Olympic White like this one, but black would also be fine.
I also decided to sell my delay. I pretty much decided to sell it as soon as it broke down, but I had to get it fixed first, since no one is going to want to buy a broken delay. It turns out that it was just a fried diode, which means that I (or the guy that I bought it from) plugged it into the wrong power supply. Anyway, I’m getting a couple of strymon pedals to take care of my delay needs: the Brigadier dBucket Delay and the blueSky Reverberator. Both of these pedals sound amazing and should enable me to make some truly spacey, echo-ey sounds. I really considered waiting for the soon-to-be-released El Capistan dTape Echo, but I think I’m more interested in analog delay sounds rather than tape echo sounds. Oh well, I could always flip something if I change my mind.
Oh yeah – I almost forgot. I won a little Twitter contest that Dan over at This1smyne Effects put on a few weeks ago. I’ll be getting his T1M Booster, which is a clone of the ZVex SHO boost with a tone control. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m looking forward to checking it out.
We closed on our new house a week ago, and we have been scrambling to get everything moved out of the old house and into the new place. We’re settling in for the most part, but this place is so much bigger than the old house. We went from around 1300 sq ft to over 2000 sq ft. We have 2 living areas, and one of them is pretty much completely empty right now.
My office is attached to the currently empty “formal” living room. The actual room is about 11′ deep and 9′ wide. I have two enormous closets for guitars, amps, pedals, wires, books, and anything else I want to keep in there.
It’s pretty empty right now, but I don’t want to get too set up until we’ve had a chance to paint. The room is a pretty awful shade of peach. It’s kind of nauseating.
I really want to get a little practice amp to keep in this room. It needs to be something that I can play quietly, so tubes are out, unfortunately. I know that I could get one of those little Vox AC4 combos, but even that thing would be too loud to play after the boys are in bed. I don’t want to get a modeler, since I don’t want to mess with connecting it to external speakers or whatever. I think I’m probably going to get a Tech21 Trademark 30. You can pick these up for dirt cheap on ebay/craigslist. I’ve heard a lot of great things about the Trademark series of amps, and the demo recordings are actually pretty good. It’s not going to replace my real amp for playing live, but it should be more than adequate for practicing at home (either through the speaker or through headphones) or for recording (either mic’ed or through the direct out).
I’m also planning on getting a new computer before too long. The plan is to get a 15″ MacBook Pro sometime this summer so that I can hand my current MacBook down to our oldest son. He’s using our old iMac G5 and it’s kind of on it’s last legs.
I got rid of my DD-20 delay after a couple of months of frustration. I got it because it has presets, external tap, LED display, etc. I had one before and I thought that it could be my swiss army knife, all-purpose delay. It has a lot of sounds in it, but they all seem too harsh and brittle to me. On top of that, it’s not very easy to tweak on the fly. Short of going back to a huge MIDI setup (like I used to have with the Damage Control Timeline) I think I’m just going to have to have a couple of different delays on the board if I want access to multiple delay sounds.
I replaced the DD-20 with the Tech21 Boost DLA. I just wanted to go with a relatively basic delay with tap tempo that doesn’t mess with your dry signal. It has a buffered bypass, but that’s not such a bad thing if it’s at the end of the effects chain.
I would like to be able to tell you how it sounds, but I haven’t even plugged it in yet. We’re closing on a new house in a week, so we’re in the middle of packing right now. All the demos that I watched/listened to sounded really nice, and it’ll probably work out pretty well. I like that it has knobs rather than buttons and menus. I’m not sure if I’ll use the boost feature very much at all, but it’ll be nice to have it just in case.
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I installed my Tremol-no last night. I’m tired of all my strings going out of tune whenever I change one string. I haven’t messed with it a lot yet, but it seems to be a lot more stable now. I’ll post an update once I’ve had a chance to give it a go.
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I emailed Mike at ANALOG.MAN Effects and he said that I don’t have to order the King of Tone pedal right away. That’s a good thing, since I don’t really want to wait another 18 months. I’ll probably buy it once we’ve had a chance to buy some furniture and stuff for the house.
About 18 months ago, I put my name on the waiting list for a pedal called the King of Tone, made by ANALOG.MAN Effects. I got an email last night letting me know that my name has come up. I don’t have to order right away, which is a good thing considering that we’re buying a new house and pretty much all of our extra money is going to go towards the down payment, new furniture, appliances, etc.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about this pedal. Who out there has one? How does it compare to something like a Tim/Timmy? Is it pretty transparent?
FedEx delivered my new guitar today, and I spent about 30 minutes playing it. I haven’t plugged it in, so these are my first impressions of it’s basic playability.
- It weighs less than 8 lbs, so it’s noticeably lighter than my old Les Paul. That’ll be nice on the back.
- The contoured body is much more comfortable than the LP or my G&L. This guitar feels almost ergonomic.
- The neck feels good. It’s thin, but not so skinny that it feels like a shredder guitar.
- I’m not sure about the trem. I have never been a whammy bar guy, so I may need to grab a tremol-no to stabilize the tuning if it becomes an issue.
- It’s strung with 11s, but they feel like 10s on this guitar. I’ll probably stick with the 11s.
- It’s really easy to bend strings. That may be due to the extra jumbo size frets. I was a little concerned about the size of the frets, but it doesn’t seem like a big deal.
Like I said, I haven’t plugged it in yet, so I can’t comment on the electric qualities yet. My amp is at our practice space, so I may have to run up there and plug it in for a little while.
I made a little video demonstrating latch mode on the M13. I haven’t really tweaked these tones yet (especially the overdrive/distortion) so it’s a little rough right now. However, you can see the possibilities that this setup affords. Let me know what you think.
Well, I’m working on the new setup. This is the new board, and it’ll probably stay like this for a while – at least until I can grab a second expression pedal. [EDIT: I moved some things around and put my dirt pedals in the effects loop of the M13 so that they can be after wah/filters/compressors/volume pedal, but before delays. I also cleaned up the wiring a little bit.]
I still have a long way to go in terms of figuring this thing out. There are just so many different doodads and gizmos in here. Delays, reverbs, phasers, flangers, whammy/pitch-shifting, boosts, compressors, overdrives, distortions, wahs, step filters, etc. They’re not all great, but a lot of them are pretty awesome.
I’m a little overwhelmed, but I’m mainly trying to get it figured out enough to use at church this weekend without going completely overboard. I need to remember that the M13 is not replacing my entire board (yet). For now, the M13 is primarily acting as my delay pedal. As long as I can get 3-4 good delay settings, I should be fine.
You know those new amps that I got a couple of weeks ago? Well, they’re gone. Yep, both of ‘em.
I sold the Black Pearl because it wasn’t really a fit for me. It was a really nice AC30-style amp, but that’s not what I want right now. I wasn’t too crazy about the overdrive, and I’m not crazy about getting all my distorted sounds from pedals.
The Bassman was a little different. I was kinda torn about it. On one hand, it had a really sweet clean tone. The overdrive was nice too, but you really have to get pretty loud before it starts to break up. On the down side, it had a bunch of scratchy pots and a couple of noisy switches. It also needed new filter caps and tubes. It probably would have ended up costing me at least $300 to have the work done. I decided that it wasn’t worth it to me, so I sold it.
Right now, I don’t have an amp in my house. Fortunately, that will be remedied tomorrow. I found a ridiculous price on a used Fryette (formerly VHT) Sig:X. The Sig:X is a 100 watt, 3-channel, dual KT88 monster. KT88 tubes are kinda like really big EL34s. They are somewhat similar in character to 6L6 tubes, but they have much greater headroom and provide a much smoother overdrive sound with clearer bass response.
The Sig:X is kind of an intimidating-looking amplifier. It’s covered with knobs and switches that allow you to really tailor your sound. There are three channels (Clean/Rhythm/Lead) but you are supposed to be able to dial in fantastic clean tones from all three channels. This amp is said to be extremely versatile, with the ability to cover a broad palette of tones, which should work really well in the band that I’m in. We’re looking at a fairly eclectic setlist (from folk to Stone Temple Pilots to Primus) and I need an amp that can cover a lot of bases. I shouldn’t need any dirt pedals with this amp, but I will probably invest in an MXR 10-band EQ pedal to put in the FX loop.
I have admired VHT amps for a long time, and I’m pretty excited about getting one. Unfortunately, my speaker cab is currently empty, which is just embarrassing. I think I have decided on a pair of Eminence Wizards (kind of a cross between a Greenback and a V30). The Wizard is efficient, clean, and it will handle the power that the Sig:X puts out. I guess I can just look at the amp until I get some speakers. Let’s see, what can I sell now…
I just saw this over on the gear page and thought I’d share it here. You have to know a little about music theory to really follow it.
The bartender says, “I’m sorry, but we don’t serve minors.” So E-flat leaves, and C and G have an open fifth between them. After a few drinks, the fifth is diminished, and G is out flat. F comes in and tries to augment the situation, but is not sharp enough.
D comes in and heads for the bathroom saying, “Excuse me. I’ll just be a second.” Then A comes in, but the bartender is not convinced that this relative of C is not a minor. Then the bartender notices B-flat hiding at the end of the bar and says, “Get out! You’re the seventh minor I’ve found in this bar tonight.”
E-Flat comes back the next night in a three-piece suit with nicely shined shoes. The bartender says, “You’re looking sharp tonight. Come on in, this could be a major development.” Sure enough, E-flat soon takes off his suit and everything else, and is au natural.
Eventually, C sobers up and realizes in horror that he’s under a rest. C is brought to trial, found guilty of contributing to the diminution of a minor, and is sentenced to 10 years of DS without Coda at an upscale correctional facility. On appeal, however, C is found innocent of any wrongdoing, even accidental. The judge rules that all contrary motions are bassless.
I ordered a set of tele pickups from Lollar last Friday, and they were supposed to be here today. They were packed and shipped the day that I ordered them and the estimated delivery date was today. It kinda sucks that I paid $12 for shipping and it still takes a full 7 days to get here, but whatever. Unfortunately, they must not have made it out of the UPS warehouse until Monday, because the estimated delivery date got pushed back to next Monday. Ugh.
Anyway, I checked the status yesterday and it looked like they had caught up. The package was set to be delivered today. I get on this morning, expecting to see the familiar “out for delivery,” but instead saw that the package was still in Houston and wouldn’t be delivered until Monday.
It’s not a big deal, but I was really hoping to get the new pickups installed so that I could use them this weekend. It’s a minor irritation at best, but it’s still annoying.
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