First of all, I’m just going to pretend that it hasn’t been three months since my last post. In that post I mentioned something about a new amp. I still have the Bogner by the way. I’ve had the same amp for like 4 months. Kind of a big deal for me. The amp is great. It’s a little tricky, but it’s great. [By the way, I have updated my gear page with new photos and stuff. Check it out up at the top of the page.]
Tonight at practice I was playing my Les Paul Special. It’s a great guitar, but it’s a lot different than the G&L ASAT that I usually play. The Special has P90s, which are really fat-sounding single coil pickups. They have similar output to a humbucker, but rawer, noisier and more ballsy. I love P90s.
Anyway, I wasn’t happy with my clean tone tonight. It was too bassy and boomy, and when I turned an overdrive on, it got even worse. I played with the EQ settings on the amp for a while and couldn’t find anything that I was happy with. The problem was that I was tweaking with my eyes rather than my ears. I was looking at the controls and saying “that setting looks like it should work” and then I was confused when it didn’t.
So I tried something radical. I trusted my ears. My ears were telling me that there was still too much bass, so I turned the bass down some more. I ended up turning it down to about 8:00. That’s almost all the way off. My other controls were weird, too. My treble was just under halfway and the mids were at like 9:00 or something. If you had shown me this setting, my eyes would have said “that’s gonna sound like crap,” but my eyes would have been wrong.
It’s a little depressing to think about all the gear that might have worked out if I had been willing to tweak with my ears.
That’s all I got for now. Hopefully it won’t be another three months before my next post. Maybe I’ll post tomorrow. Probably not.
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Doesn’t the same go for guitars and such? Just because I expect such-and-such a brand to sound better than another, when I play them, my ears will favor the more well-known brand. But if I do a blind test, then the Guild sounds better than the Gibson, every time.
Sooo since ur talking about gear n stuff. I was thinking of asking if you have ever played an ESP or an Ltd guitar and if so what are your opinions on them?