A couple months ago, I had an unexpected revelation. An eye-opening, earth-shaking, revolutionary enlightenment. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating and obsessing, but it was an honest-to-goodness WTF!
I was at a local music shop (ok, I admit it was Best Buy), and out of curiosity, I picked up an absurdly expensive Gibson Les Paul Traditional from the wall-o-guitars, plugged it into a Vox Night Train, and gave it a spin. I’ve never really given the Les Paul guitars much attention. Despite their iconic status and near ubiquity, I’ve always thought the Les Paul was just too heavy to consider. But… More
My pedalboard for the recent Summer Music Project gig was a a bit of a compromise. I couldn’t fit the JamMan Delay on the pedal board so it was hanging off to one side, and I had no space for my fuzz and chorus.
I’ve been planning to build a new larger PedalTrain-inspired pedalboard, and make some new correct-length cables.
Meanwhile, some of this pedal order is dependent on the short cables I had on hand. I would prefer to wire the tuner before the volume pedal, and the compressor before the wah, but that will have to wait for the redo. More
Funny that, for this brief moment, our little band is on the front page of Guitar World!
She included a video of us playing her song “Don’t Take it Easy”. The audio is really bad, as we were using the built-in camera mic, from the back of the hall about 50 feet away. Unfortunately, my Tascam DR-40 digital recorder was sitting in standby for the whole show- gotta press record TWICE damnit! I of course wish I could hear my guitar better, but the important thing in this video is that we can hear Laura reasonably well.
I’m playing lead guitar on all of these, and some definitely push the limits of my abilities- so it’s been a great challenge. Also, and rather more nerve-wrackingly, I sing on most of the songs- mostly harmony with our lead singer Laura Whitmore, but I also had to sing lead parts on a couple songs. I’ve never been thrilled with the timbre and range of my voice, so I spent a lot of time working on the songs. As with anything, it’s definitely true that the more you practice, the better you get, but I have a looooong way to go. I’ll be writing more about voice training in another post.
It seems not that long ago, I was celebrating 100,000 views. Now, I don’t regularly check and obsess over my YouTube channel view-count. But this week, while trying to catch up on my replies to an ever-increasing backlog on my YouTube inbox, I noticed that my view count was in the high nines. Well, this morning, this is what I saw:
This is truly a mind-bender.
I recorded a quick video to say thanks to everyone, and to solicit some feedback for my future projects. I also talk a bit at the end about Jerry Seinfeld’s motivational technique for tricking yourself into getting things done. Don’t Break The Chain!
In my tone capacitor video, I demonstrated the typical use of the capacitor as a low-pass filter in a guitar tone control. On a home stereo, this would be called a treble control, as it is used to roll off the high-end treble frequencies.
But what if you also want a bass control- a high-pass filter to roll off the low bass frequencies?
In the circuit diagram shown here, from the G&L S-500 guitar, you’ll find both a treble and bass control. They call it their PTB system (which presumably stands for passive treble bass, but I’m just guessing here).
When I purchased my Riviera P93, what I really wanted was a semi-hollowbody in the traditional Gibson ES shape, with a Bigsby tailpiece. I didn’t want to invest the extra several thousand dollars in a Gibson, and the only model available from Epiphone was the Riviera P93.
I took a chance on the P93, and as you may have seen in my blog, it turned into quite a project trying to improve its sound. In the end, even after replacing the pickups and electronics, I am ultimately frustrated by the three pickup, three volume, one tone configuration. I would have preferred the traditional two humbuckers, two volume, two tone configuration.
I still haven’t completed my planned changes to improve the usability of the middle pickup, nor have I replaced the buzzy bridge with the roller. Changing these three pickups to two humbuckers is certainly possible, but the result would be less than beautiful due to the different hole-spacing and routing requirements of dog-eared P-90’s versus humbuckers.
A couple months back, Epiphone announced the guitar which I wish had been available when I purchased the Riviera P93: the new Epiphone ES-355…
There’s nothing quite like the experience of hearing the individual source tracks from a song you’ve known and loved all your life.
My first such experience was around the year 2000, while working at Thomas Dolby’s company Beatnik. I developed the mobile Beatnik Player (shown at right) and the Beatnik Editor which was used to produce a web-remix version of David Bowie’s Fame. This was waaay before the days of Rock Band and downloadable “stems” of Radiohead songs. It was mind-blowing to be able to solo the individual guitar riffs and drum tracks, and hear Bowie’s and Lennon’s voices isolated.
When iconic songs are so deeply internalized from a lifetime of listening- as is the case for me with most of the Beatles’ catalog- it’s almost surreal to hear the individual tracks. When listening to Beatles recordings in stereo, I often can’t resist adjusting the balance all the way to the left or right, to isolate the drums and guitars away from the voices, etc. You can get a bigger taste of this with Beatles Rock Band, if you have the patience to play a plastic guitar.
Recently my daughter Emily has fallen in love with Here Comes The Sun. I think they had her at “little darling”, but it’s easy to see how a six year old can be swept away by such an unabashedly optimistic and joyful song. This morning, I happened to come across this video, in which Beatles producer George Martin and his son Giles, as well as George Harrison’s son Dhani, are listening to the source tracks from this wonderful song, and unexpectedly discover a take of George’s guitar that never made it into the final mix. The look of on Dhani’s face is exactly what I’m talking about. Magic. Take a look:
This interface connects to the 30-pin dock, which as I described in my DIY iOS interface project, is the higher-fidelity lower-noise way to get audio into your iPhone/iPad. This is because there is a high-quality 24-bit 48kHz D/A in the interface itself, and the signal is transferred digitally into the iDevice.
Again, my main concern with this type of device is that it hangs off the bottom of your iPhone/iPad on that delicate dock connector, with the guitar cable plugged into that. It makes me nervous that the inevitable kick-the-cord accident will brick your $600 iPad. Also, the iPhone/iPad can’t charge while this is plugged in, so you have to make sure you’re fully charged up.
At $79.99, this is cheaper than the other digital guitar interfaces (Apogee Jam, Sonoma GuitarJack, etc). The iOS app is free, but is tied to the hardware. You currently can’t use the app with another interface.
Intriguing, but I’m not rushing out immediately to get one. Are you?
This unique pedal combines a looper with a nice delay modeler. It doesn’t do everything my old Echoplex did, but it’s a nice leap forward in technology- with stereo recording, tons of memory (and SD card expansion), stereo recording, USB connectivity and software librarian, not to mention some really nice delays.
But before we get to happiness, let’s first talk about a major manufacturing issue, nearly a total deal-breaker. If I hadn’t figured out a solution, I would have had to return the JamMan Delay and seek looper nirvana elsewhere. More
A couple months ago, I had an unexpected revelation. An eye-opening, earth-shaking, revolutionary enlightenment. Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating and obsessing, but it was an honest-to-goodness WTF!
