Archive for July, 2010

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.

I showed up for soundcheck this morning, plugged in my guitar/pedalboard, strummed a chord and – nothing. I spent a few frantic minutes troubleshooting and determined that my new delay (Tech21 Boost DLA) was the culprit.

The LED turns on, but it won’t pass a signal. At first it kinda worked, but I could hear it sputter out and die completely. I’m afraid it’s probably an IC chip or something, but it’s impossible to get to any of the components without completely desoldering the input jacks as well as the DC jack since they’re all soldered directly to the board. It’s a really stupid design, IMO.

I guess I’ll contact Tech21 customer support  tomorrow to see what they can do for me as far as repairing it. My experience with them will affect whether or not I purchase any more of their products.

I made it through the service okay this morning. I still had another delay on the board (Ibanez DE-7), so I wasn’t completely delay-less. I had to do the dotted eighth thing on one song, so I manually dialed in the delay time to be pretty close and just turned up the delay mix for that one song. It wasn’t perfect, and I had to tweak it a little at the beginning of the song, but it worked out okay.

I think that once I get this delay fixed, I will probably just get an Eventide Timefactor or something like that since there are no more Timelines to be had. Why did I sell that freaking thing? Oh yeah, to buy that Line 6 M13 that I already got rid of. Facepalm.