Archive for the “amps” Category

I mentioned last time that I traded my Sig:X amp for a bunch of other stuff, right? I got the ZT Lunchbox early last week, and it’s pretty cool. On Thursday, I got the big stuff: the VOX AC30H2 and the Fulltone OCD (v.4).

The VOX is nice. While it’s true that it was manufactured in China, which is not ideal, the craftsmanship is pretty excellent. It is a handwired amp, but it’s not point-to-point or turret board. It is a PCB type of construction, but all of the components are wired by hand, rather than installed by some giant machine. This doesn’t necessarily affect the tone, but it makes the amp less failure-prone and easier to repair if it does break down.

I read a lot of dudes on the internet who bash modern VOX amps because they’re inferior to the UK-built amps from the late 60′s. Well, you know what? The modern ones don’t catch on fire like the old ones did.

This AC30 is quite different from the Custom Classic series that Vox came out with a few years ago. The Heritage series doesn’t have tremolo, reverb, or an effects loop like the CC series did. That’s perfectly fine with me. I’m not a big fan of built-in effects like that. I’d much rather use outboard effects that I can access on a pedalboard. An effects loop would be nice, but it’s not really necessary since I’ll be running this amp clean.

Anyway, I took it to practice on Thursday, and I was having some issues getting it to stay clean. Even though the volume was pretty low (relatively speaking – this is a loud, loud 30 watts), I couldn’t get it to keep from breaking up. I played with it some more on Friday at the house, and I managed to figure it out. The amp has two channels: the top boost channel and the EF86 channel. At practice I was using the Top Boost channel, but I discovered that the EF86 channel is capable of delivering some massive-sounding clean tones that will not break up regardless of how hard you hit the strings. I had the volume at 12:00 (which is really loud), and full chords stayed perfectly clean when I hit them full on.

My pedalboard is currently undergoing some revisions. I picked up a Strymon blueSky Reverberator a couple of weeks ago, and it’s already gone. It’s a really great pedal with some amazing sounds in it, but it’s just too much money tied up in an effect that I’m really not going to use all that much. I’m keeping the Brigadier delay, but I’m picking up a Line 6 M9 to replace the BSR.

I already had the M13, and sold it because it was overkill. However, I really miss some of the weird loopy things that it can do. Things like pattern tremolo, pitch shifting, particle verb, step filter, sweep echo, etc are all really cool glitchy effects that I can use. The reverb sounds won’t be as good as the blueSky, but it’ll be close enough for spacey live stuff.

I also picked up a Musket Fuzz from Blackout Effectors to replace my diy Mayo clone. This thing is awesome. It’s kind of a modern take on the Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi. It has 6 knobs for tone shaping, so it’s really versatile for a fuzz pedal. It can go from mild overdrive tones to wall of sound fuzz. It’s pretty sweet.

I’m liking the OCD more than I thought I would. It’s really open-sounding, even at high gain levels. It’s not overly compressed and you can still hear your basic guitar-amp sound underneath the extra gain.

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In less happy news, I have run into a snag with my Jazzmaster purchase. I found the one that I wanted, checked the seller’s references and sent him payment. Unfortunately, he is now claiming that his paypal account is frozen and he is refusing to ship the guitar until his funds are released. I filed a claim with paypal, told him that I wasn’t okay with waiting and that he needs to ship the guitar as per our agreement. I haven’t heard from him in a couple of days. I know I’ll get my guitar or my money back eventually, but it could be weeks before that happens. Part of me wants to fly out to wherever this guy lives and punch him in the face.

A couple of months ago, I posted about my office/studio in our new house.

Back then, it looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

It’s a little messy, I still need some art hanging on the walls, and I still need curtains/shades, but I’m getting pretty comfortable in here. I kinda forgot how horrible the old color was.

Off topic – that little box on the left side of my desk is new. It’s a ZT Lunchbox, and it’s pretty amazing. It’s a 200W solid state amp with a single 8″ speaker, and it sounds huge. I got it as part of a trade for my old amp. I originally planned on selling it, but it’s so cool that I think I’ll probably keep it. The AC30 is supposed to get here on Wednesday, and I’m still trying to decide what I should do with it. I suppose that I should probably play it before I decide to sell it.

I will soon be the owner of this. It’s a VOX AC30 50th Anniversary Heritage Handwired combo with a pair of Celestion AlNiCo Blue speakers.

I wasn’t really planning to get one of these, but somebody made me an offer I couldn’t refuse (no severed horse heads were involved).

I decided a while back that my Fryette Sig:X is not really the amp that I want right now. It’s a really, really great amp, but it’s not really the flavor that I want right now, and it’s kinda complicated. If I were in a touring rock band playing a lot of big rooms, I would probably keep this setup. However, I’m not touring, so I don’t really need it.

Anyway, the musical direction that I currently see myself going in calls for an amp with a great clean channel first and foremost. The Sig:X has a really good clean channel, but it doesn’t have enough clean headroom to balance well with the distorted channels. I just want a simpler amp, and I want a combo. I don’t really want to mess with the head/cab thing anymore. At least not right now.

The amp that I decided to get was a Mesa Lonestar Classic. It’s a 6L6-based amp, but it’s not a Dual Rectifier. Channel one is a great blackface Fender-style sound (along the lines of a Twin Reverb) and Channel two is a heavier blues-rock kind of tone.

Anyway, that’s the amp that I decided to get once I sold my Sig:X. However, this dude on The Gear Page offered me an even trade for his AC30. His AC30 is worth $2-300 more than my Sig:X. I told him that I was possibly interested, but that I would have to think about it. He emails me back and throws a couple more items into the mix. He offered me his AC30, plus a ZT Lunchbox practice amp (worth about $200 on eBay) and a Fulltone OCD distortion pedal (over $100 used). This deal is really balanced in my favor. I was skeptical, but this guy is legit. He has a lot of references and a perfect track record on eBay, so it doesn’t appear that he’s scamming me.

I’m gonna do it, even though the AC30 isn’t my first choice. I’ll probably just sell all of this stuff and buy a Lonestar and a good roadcase. You never know, I may end up loving it. If it’s good enough for Thom Yorke and Jeff Tweedy, it might be good enough for me.

In other news, I found a white AVRI Jazzmaster with a Mastery bridge that I’m gonna buy, so both of those things should be here next week. It’s gonna be a busy week for gear.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I finally ordered a Tremol-no™ for my PRS. I never use a trem, but the fact that it’s even present causes all kinds of tuning instability. If I detune one string, the rest of the strings go out of tune due to the change in tension on the springs in the trem cavity. Anyway, bla bla bla – the tremol-no corrects this issue.

The tremol-no is a little gadget that replaces the tremolo claw in your trem-equipped guitar and allows you to lock/unlock the trem whenever you’re not using it. You tighten a screw to lock it down and unscrew it if you want to use it.

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I think I’m figuring out how to dial in my amp (a Fryette Sig:X). I was trying to use each channel to do the function that it’s named for (clean/rhythm/lead). However, I haven’t really been able to dial in a really great hard rock rhythm tone on the rhythm channel. The rhythm channel is kinda vintage-sounding and doesn’t get as saturated as the lead channel.

At our last show, I used the lead channel pretty much all the time since we played kind of a hard rock-ish setlist. Whenever I took a solo, I just hit the FX loop button on the footswitch. The FX loop has a volume control, so you can dial it in to give you a volume boost without adding any gain. It’s a pretty cool little feature. Drop a delay pedal (and maybe an EQ pedal with a slight mid-bump) in the loop and it’s perfect for a solo setting on any channel. Even without those things it sounded fine. I’ll probably set the rhythm channel for a Hendrix-style Marshall overdrive tone and hit it with a fuzz for solos.

Just like everything related to guitar gear, this whole thing is going to be subject to change. I might have a different amp in 6 months. I hope not. Shipping amps is a pain. Thinking aloud: I wonder if I could live with a single channel amp? Do I really need a clean channel? The Fryette Deliverance amps look/sound awesome, but they only have one channel and no effects loop. Hmm. I need to just stick with the Sig:X. It’s super versatile and it sounds awesome. I don’t want or need a different amp. The very notion is ridiculous.

The band I’m in, The Lillian Pearl, had it’s first official show on Saturday. We played at “Woodfest,” which is basically a big party in our drummer’s neighbor’s backyard. They’ve been doing it for a few years now, and they asked us to play for them. I guess about 40 people showed up, so it was an okay turnout for a band no one has heard of. We probably would have had more people show up, but there were a lot of social conflicts going on.

It went okay, I guess. We know these songs pretty well, and we didn’t make any huge mistakes that I could hear. Everyone that we talked to said that the sound was great. The cops showed up after 4-5 songs and asked us to turn down, though.

The next big technical thing to work on will be monitor mixes. We’re using in-ear monitors, and none of us were very happy with our mixes. I couldn’t hear the drums at all, so I pulled out one of my earbuds. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked.

Here’s a pic of the amp backline:

From L to R: my Fryette Sig:X, Maury’s Mesa Triple Rectifier, and Doug’s Ampeg SVT-CL. We faced the amps offstage so that they didn’t bleed into the FOH mix too much. I think it worked pretty well.

Here are some other pics from the show that Jenny took.

We played for a little over an hour. We played mostly covers, but we threw in one original. It was kind of a last minute addition, so we’ll definitely need to finesse it a little bit. I think we’re going to focus more on songwriting for a while. We don’t want to be a cover band, so we need to get busy writing stuff.

It was fun, and hopefully it won’t be too long before the next one.

I think I am becoming a “guitar – cord – amp” kind of guy. Of course, my amp has three channels with switchable boost and effects loop, so it’s not like I’m plugging into a vintage Marshall or anything.

Lately I have been using kind of a complicated setup with my effects. I have been connecting my M13 to my amp through the amp effects loop using the 4 cable method. This allows you to put certain effects (filters, compressors) in front of the preamp and other effects (delay, modulation, EQ) in between the pre and power amp. Some effects work better before distortion, and others work better afterwards. It’s a cool setup and it works exactly like it’s supposed to.

If you sensed a big “but” coming, here it is: I don’t really use that many effects, so all the extra cable coming to and from the amp is kind of unnecessary. I use a lot of delay and stuff when I play at church, but I don’t use much of anything with TLP. I use a phaser on one song, and that’s it. Everything else is just the amp. Of course, we’re playing loud stripped-down modernish rock rather than trippy outer space music.

I’ll probably stick with the M13 because when I do use effects it’s just so easy to operate. Besides, the delays sound really great on this thing. I don’t know – maybe I’ll just skip the pedalboard at the next TLP practice and see what happens. Maybe that one song doesn’t *really* need a phaser.

Several months ago, Maury bought a bunch of PA equipment for our band to use for shows. It’s good stuff – Crown power amps, JBL speakers and subs, etc. Anyway, our drummer at the time left before we could play a show, so all this stuff just sat unused for months. FYI: our band is once again fully staffed (welcome Doug!), so we should be getting back into the swing of things very soon.

Anyway, our church band was asked to play for an event this evening, so we’re going to use Maury’s PA setup rather than disassemble the church stuff and then have to reassemble it before Sunday. We’re also going to bring our personal amps (Maury’s Triple Rectifier and my Sig:X) rather than bring the church stuff.

It’s going to be a lot of work, but it should be fun. I’m excited to hear how the PA sounds, and I’m really looking forward to using our amps on stage in a big room. I’m afraid that it might be really loud in there, but hopefully it’ll sound good. I also hope that it doesn’t rain on us while we’re loading/unloading stuff.

My new speaker cab showed up yesterday via FedEx, and they didn’t even wait until 9:30 pm to deliver it this time. Anyway, the box was huge and it took me about 30 minutes to unpack it. It was very carefully packed, and I didn’t want to get styrofoam peanuts everywhere. I really hate those little things.

I got a used VHT Deliverance 412 from a guy on The Gear Page. I initially wanted a 2×12, but they never show up on the used market and a new 2×12 costs more than a used 4×12. This one is loaded with the stock Fryette-designed Eminence P50E speakers, and they are intended to be played with VHT/Fryette amps.

Anyway, I got the cab set up and played through it for about 5 minutes. That’s not really enough time to make much of a first impression, but I can at least say that it doesn’t seem to be louder than my old 2×12, which is a good thing. It definitely has more oomph, though.

This cab is built like a tank, and it is completely sealed. A lot of closed-back cabs are rear loaded with a removable back panel. This amp is front-loaded, and there is no back panel, which means that no air can accidentally escape through the cracks. The result of this is a very tight low end response.

I will certainly have more to say about the cab over the next few weeks as I have more opportunities to use it. For now, I’ll just share this pic of the new happy family.

I recently got a new faceplate for my Sig:X to reflect the name change of the company that makes my amp.

Before:

After:

I’m not 100% sure about the accuracy of this story, but I read about it on the internets, so it has to be pretty much true. Anyway, in 1989 a guy named Steve Fryette started an amplifier company and called it VHT. Before long, VHT gained a reputation for manufacturing cutting edge guitar amps. Apparently, they borrowed some money fairly recently and used the VHT name as collateral. I’m not exactly sure about what happened next, but they lost the name.

Steve Fryette regrouped and started a new company and named it after himself – Fryette Amplification. He retained the rights to all of his designs and products – he just lost the VHT name. The company that now calls itself VHT bears little resemblance to Fryette.

I really, really like my Sig:X. It may not have the vintage look or boutique vibe of something like a Bad Cat or ÷13, but these amps were built for players, not collectors. The control panel of the Sig:X may look intimidating, but it’s not quite as complicated as it looks. My next major purchase is going to be a Fryette 2×12 speaker cab. Their cabs are supposed to be awesome, and they were designed specifically to mate with Fryette amps.

I’m pleased to report that the problem with my amp seems to have been a bad power tube. I got a replacement set of Sovtek KT88s from Tubedepot.com this afternoon and replaced the old ones. I fired it up, and it sounds like it’s supposed to sound. Actually, it sounds way better than it did when I first got it. I would like to put some real playing time on this thing, but I just don’t really have the opportunity right now.

Anyway, I’m glad that it was a $50 set of tubes rather than something ridiculous like a power transformer.