Earlier this week, we played for/with a local intermediate school orchestra on their last concert of the year. Our bass player is the orchestra teacher, so we kinda did it as a favor to him. We played a couple of songs with the orchestra – Smoke on the Water and Kashmir – and then we played a mini concert for the kids at the end of the concert. This was our biggest audience so far, and they seemed to be really into it.

We set up a little handheld mp3 recorder back at the soundboard and we got some stuff recorded. You can’t really hear the bass or the other guitar and we overload the mic a couple of times, but you’ll get the idea.

Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart (Stone Temple Pilots)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hysteria (MUSE)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

No One Knows (Queens of the Stone Age)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The Middle (Jimmy Eat World)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Slither (Velvet Revolver)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

This is the first time that we’ve actually heard ourselves, and it’s nice to be able to hear what we need to work on. Obviously, tempo is a big issue. Pretty much all of these songs were too fast, especially the first one. I think that Greg (our drummer) was just overly excited. =)

Anyway, feel free to leave constructive feedback.

A few months ago, in a haze of Gear Acquisition Syndrome I sold my Timmy overdrive pedal. That was a mistake, and I have regretted it. I’m back on the waiting list, but it’ll probably be another 6 months before my name is up. In the meantime I decided to take matters into my own hands.

There are a handful of websites where people disassemble boutique stompboxes and reverse engineer them. It’s nerdy, but it’s kinda cool. Okay, it’s not really cool at all. Anyway, I managed to find a layout for the Timmy overdrive. This ended up being a more involved process than I am used to. I usually buy a premade circuit board and put solder the right components in the right place. This time, I started out with a piece of stripboard. It looks like this:

That piece is too big to fit inside the enclosures that I use, so I cut it down to a more manageable size. Then I used a layout that someone else designed based on the schematic. This involves cutting certain traces on the bottom and creating new traces on the top as well as soldering the components into place.

Here’s the finished product from the outside. It’s not much to look at, but I don’t really care about the visuals.

Unfortunately, the insides aren’t much better.

You might notice that one of the capacitors (the blue one) is way bigger than the others. This is a result of me screwing up my parts order. Instead of ordering 2 1uF box capacitors, I only ordered one. I found the big blue one at Radio Shack so that I could at least finish the project. I’ll clean things up a bit once I get that smaller cap. It was really hard to cram four potentiometers into this small box. It took me forever to keep it from shorting out whenever I put it together.

It works, but I just finished it about an hour ago so I haven’t had a lot of time to mess with it. Based on the limited time that I have spent with it, I think it sounds pretty close to the real deal. I’m sure that a couple of the components that I’m using are the wrong material or value, so it may require some tweaking. At the very least, it should tide me over until the real deal comes along.

It’s been a while since I posted an updated picture of my pedalboard, so here it is.

I’ve had most of this stuff for a while, but the newest addition is the Mayo. It’s a clone that I built of the (now discontinued) Skreddy Mayo, which was a tweaked version of the Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi. It uses different capacitor/resistor values as well as different transistors. It’s the same general sound as the BMP, but it’s a little smoother/less raspy. It’s noisy, but it sounds great for thick leads as well as Smashing Pumpkins-type rhythm tones.

I have a couple of other DIY projects in the works. I built a clone of the Barber LTD Silver (David Barber released the schematic when he discontinued the pedal), but it didn’t sound quite right so I gave it to Maury in the hopes that he could get it working for me. Up next – I’m about to start working on a clone of the Timmy pedal. I used to have a real one, but I (foolishly) sold it. I’m going to get another one, but I figured that I would build one while I wait on the list.

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 am going to take this opportunity to embarrass my friend Jakeb Stunz.

About 6 years ago, some good friends of ours asked me if I would be willing to give their son guitar lessons. I guess he was probably 10 at the time, but I’m really bad with judging how much time has passed. I agreed, thinking that he would probably quit after a few months (like many students do). Well, not only did he not quit, but he managed to be one of the most committed students I have ever taught.

Whenever I gave him something to work on, he came back the next week having practiced the crap out of it. I have gotten pretty good at telling when a student is faking it through a lesson, and I never got that from him (maybe he just got really good at faking it). If he didn’t practice, he told me so and I didn’t have to waste our lesson time looking at him practice. I watched Jakeb become a talented, confident guitar player over the next several years, and there’s only so much credit that I can take.

Anyway, the Stunz family moved to Singapore in June 2009. It’s a great adventure for them, but it really stinks for those of us who call them friends. They came back to town last week for Spring Break, and Jakeb was able to play with the church band again. It was good to see them again, and I was glad to have the opportunity to play with one of my favorite students.

Well, the board is pretty much together for now. I haven’t taken a pic yet, but I’ll get around to it eventually.

My signal goes Wah -Volume (tuner out – pitchblack) – io – PURE – DE-7 – DD-20 (w/external tap tempo)

Here’s the roundup:

Wah – it’s a Crybaby. It’s not “the best wah ever,” but it’s passable. I will eventually buy a new one or slap some new guts in this one, but for now it works.

Volume – I use this for swells and for killing my signal for silent tuning. It doesn’t have the smoothest taper, but it’s completely noise free and it works well once you learn where the sweet spot is.

Pitchblack – it’s a tuner, and it’s black. What’s left to say? It’s really easy to read on stage, and it’s pretty accurate (+/- 1 cent).

RAILhead Effects io – I have written a lot about this pedal, but I’ll write a little more. This pedal, as I understand it, is designed to be played in front of a clean amp. I think it’s based on a Marshall preamp gain stage (but I may be mistaken), and it gives you a reasonable facsimile of the fabled Van Halen “Brown Sound.” It’s basically a Marshall-in-a-box, and it is awesome. Discovery of the weekend: this pedal gets a really cool light overdrive tone when you roll off the volume knob on the guitar.

RAILhead Effects PURE – It’s a clean boost. I forget how many decibels of volume it adds, but it’s a lot. You can use it in front of an overdriven amp to push the preamp tubes, basically making the amp more distort more. If you have the headroom, it gives you a volume boost. I’m not really using this one very much at the moment – it doesn’t really fit in with my setup right now. I’ll probably replace it with the low gain overdrive that I’m working on (more on that later).

Ibanez DE-7 – This one is surprisingly awesome. I bought one because it’s known for it’s ability to self-oscillate and make crazy noises when you set it for high repeats and play with the delay time knob. Well, it does that and a lot more. The “echo” mode is a really great analog-sounding delay. The repeats are really warm and dark, and it just sounds fantastic. I used this all day yesterday at church and even managed to get some dotted-eighth type sounds (even though it doesn’t have tap tempo). Really cool, and cheap. They’re like $70 new and you can sometimes find them used for like $50. When I play with TLP, this one will probably go in the amp’s effects loop and I’ll just switch it on for solos or whatever.

Boss DD-20 – this is the working man’s delay pedal. It’s got presets so you can have up to 4 different delay settings to cycle between. This is really handy for going from an ambient/reverby kinda sound to slapback to dotted eighth to reverse (or whatever). It also has a jack for using an external tap tempo switch. It isn’t the best-sounding delay I have ever used (that would probably be the Damage Control Timeline), but it sounds pretty nice. It is extremely functional, and very affordable – I think I paid $150 for mine.

I’ve got a Voodoo Lab ISO 5 mounted underneath the board (Pedaltrain PT2) powering everything.

I still need to add a low gain overdrive. I used to have a Timmy, but I (stupidly) sold it after I bought my M13. I should probably get back on the waiting list, but for now I’m going to build my own. David Barber made the schematic for his now discontinued LTD Silver publicly available about a year ago, and a lot of DIY pedal guys have made circuit boards available. I bought one and ordered a bunch of parts, so I’ll need to dig out my soldering iron and get to work once everything shows up.

A couple of other things on the radar: the Strymon Brigadier Delay and the Strymon blueSky Reverb. I really want both of these. If/when I get the Brigadier, it will replace the DD-20.

Well, it was an interesting experiment, but the M13 is now history. There were a lot of really cool sounds in that box, but ultimately it wasn’t for me.

First of all, the delays and reverbs are really great. Not as good as the Damage Control Timeline that I used to have, but much more flexible. If you want to run 4 delays at a time, you can do that on the M13. Likewise, there are lots of great reverb sounds. I will definitely miss the particle verb setting.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of drawbacks. For one thing, not all of the effects are great. The overdrive and distortion tones leave a lot to be desired. Ultimately, I was able to get some decent tones after much tweaking and EQing, but I still wasn’t blown away. I didn’t really care for the wah and filters either. I’m getting much better wah tone out of a used $40 Crybaby. The modulation tones are pretty hit or miss, but I don’t really use chorus, tremolo, flanger, or phaser (except for one song) anyway.

Finally, the thing is huge. It isn’t part of your pedalboard – it is your pedalboard. That’s fine if you’re totally sold on all the effects, but I wasn’t. I sold it a few days ago, and I’m in the process of reassembling everything. I still had some of my old pedals, and I ordered some replacements. My new board will look something like this once everything comes in:

Volume (Boss FV-500H)- Wah (Dunlop Crybaby) – tuner (Korg Pitchblack) – Distortion (RHFX io) – Boost (RHFX PURE) – Delay (Ibanez DE-7) – Delay (Boss DD-20 w/external tap)

As always, the pedalboard is a work in progress. I would love to pick up some of the new Strymon stuff. The Brigadier delay and Blue Sky reverb look really cool.

Bottom line: pedals are more fun than multi effects, and they usually sound better.

I didn’t spend a ton of time playing through the amp, but I played enough to realize that this is a versatile guitar. I used my existing settings on the amp, and I can tell that they’ll need to be tweaked a little.

Basic tone – these pickups don’t seem as fat as the WCRs that were in my Les Paul, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They are very PAF-sounding, and they really sound great when you split the coils. Not all humbuckers sound good when you split the coils, but these do. I’m hesitant to even consider changing the pickups for that reason. The split coils sound almost like a tele, which really doesn’t make sense.

The volume controls work really well. Many of the guitars that I have played have been pretty worthless unless the volume was all the way up. As soon as you lower the volume on those guitars, the treble goes away and you’re left with mud. Not so with this guitar. These volume controls clean up extremely well. On my amp’s high gain rhythm channel I was able to go from a big crunchy rock tone to light breakup just by turning the controls down a bit.

One little issue that I have with the guitar is that the volume controls are backwards. I mean, the bridge volume control is up front and the neck volume control is further back. I was constantly turning the wrong knob. I think I’m gonna have to switch that around before too long.

Anyway, I’ll probably write some more about this guitar as I discover new things about it, but so far I’m liking it.

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.

So far, so good!

I did it. I bit the bullet and decided to trade my LP for the Paul Reed Smith. It’s a goldtop PRS DGT and you can read about it here. I showed Jack a picture of it and he asked “so how is that different from your old one?” I’m gonna have to work on that boy. [Side note: Jack and I had a guitar lesson this evening and he's actually starting to catch on a little bit. We're working on a simplified version of the main riff to Smoke on the Water and he's making some progress. Pretty awesome.]

This is the exact guitar that I’m getting – you can check out some more pics here if you’re interested, and I know that you are.

This was a somewhat painful decision to make. I loved the tone of my Les Paul, but I didn’t love playing it. Keeping it wasn’t really an option because of the fat neck. I may (and probably will) get another Lester in the future, but it will be one with a modern neck carve.

I had a lot of options on the table, but I decided on the PRS in spite of the fact that I’ve never played this exact model. I kinda took a leap of faith, knowing that I can easily trade or resell it if I decide that I don’t like it. Remember that I paid $1450 for my LP 3 years ago, and this guitar usually sells on the used market for ~$2000 ($2500 new). Not a bad deal.

I really think that this guitar is going to work for me. At least for a while. It should be here by Friday. Once I’ve had a chance to play with it, I’ll post some kind of review.