I've been living the dream of selling off cheap stuff to fund expensive stuff. In the last few months I've been extremely happy with both my new amps (the Valve Jr. that I modded, and the Blues Jr. that I had BillM mod for me), and I've really settled on a pedalboard configuration that works pretty well for me. Not perfect, mind you, but well. For instance, I could see myself getting one of those Line 6 M9s to take the place of my DL4, tremolo and chorus pedal, while also giving me more mods and delays and pitch shifting and all sorts of fun sounds. Mostly because it's pretty rare that I use stuff like my chorus, and I feel like it's just eating up space, but I want to have access to it when I need it. But the biggest area where I've changed things out has been my guitars:
Two new members of the family, with three gone. Basically, I swapped my Gretsch out for a short-lived Strat (sounded okay, but it had noiseless pickups in it which weirds me out in a single-coil guitar) which then got traded for that Tele. It's a 1989 MIJ tele. I was average on it until I put it head-to-head against my Squire Classic Vibe 50's telecaster, wherein I discovered that this one sounds way, way better. Less brightness, better depth of tone, more usable. I'm still not in love with the colors, but it sounds great.
But then that gave me leave to sell off my Classic Vibe since I really, really don't need 2 teles. Then, I sold that along with a my Epiphone Les Paul, some pedals that have been sitting around, some guitar cases, and a lot of other random stuff that I'd been trying to sell for ages, and splurged on a Gibson ES-335. And I love it. And it was way easier to justify having sold over a grand worth of gear, specifically with an eye towards getting this guitar. And, of course, I got a good deal.
Not that I'm done, by any means. I'm just not very good at being "done" at buying gear. But I'm feeling myself starting to settle in, just like I did with my pedal board, just like I did with my amps. I've got parts on the way to push the ES-335 over the top: PAF pickups and 50's style electronics so that this thing will sound like an original 1959 ES-335, with all the bite and mojo and tone faeries and etc. And I can see myself taking a Fender American Special strat and replacing the electronics in that with the electronics in my current strat and then going from there. I know, I know. I said I'd keep it forever. But spending so much time with it, I love how it sounds, I just can start to see a lot of the flaws, all errors in terms of construction and materials. The pickups are incredible, just incredible. It just doesn't feel perfect yet. Besides, if I were going to have a "backup" electric, I think it would be a strat; my playing just seems to fit a Strat the best.
I am a lot closer to completing my gear journey than I was a month ago. At least, that's what I keep telling myself....
...it's not exactly like I haven't been drinking. I mean, it's been the holidays! I've just found not very much drive to continue in my quest for making every drink ever. I'm sure someday I'll come back to it, but in the mean time, I thought I'd feature a few more drinks. The first one is this: the Champs Elysees.
It's funny how drinks come in and out of style. I mean, here in St. Louis, there really aren't many craft cocktail bars around. Unfortunately, it's still way, way easier to get a delicious craft beer in this town than anything resembling an exquisite cocktail. That is, of course, unless you're at my house! But supposedly, this may be one of the next big cocktails get revived, so I thought I'd give it a shot. And I've been looking for something to do with my Chartreuse....
The Champs Elysees:
1 1/2 oz. brandy or cognac
3/4 oz. lemon juice
1/2 oz. simple syrup
1/2 oz. Chartreuse
1-2 dashes aromatic bitters
Shake and strain into cocktail glass.
If you're looking for an analog, this cocktail is quite similar to the Sidecar. It's built very similarly, but where the sidecar uses triple sec as a sweetener, the Champs Elysees opts for equal parts Chartreuse and simple syrup. The Chartreuse is an herbal liqueur, so it has a very definitive sweet component, and it makes for a fairly balanced cocktail. The cocktail is definitely tilted slightly towards the "sweet" side, but not overbearingly so. The herbal nature of the Chartreuse offers a lot of complexity to the Sidecar, and the dash of bitters, just a bit of spice. It's a good thing, too, as brandy is good but not particularly assertive, so it makes a good base for more intense flavors.
I'd highly recommend this one. It's a good introduction to Chartreuse and it's delicious!
Ok. So. Sorry about disappearing for all of November. And like most of December. On the plus side, it means that I've been really busy playing and working retreats and finding as many jobs as I possibly could and could not be bothered to do anything else. Certainly not much drinking and writing about it. I'm way behind on that project, and so it might scale itself to a life-long goal, rather than a scant year or two....
But it wasn't all work! Gear has moved around, as it is wont to do. The biggest changes include some trades: I traded my Musicmaster amp for a 1981 TS9 and a cmatmods Signa Drive, and I traded my Gretsch for a Strat. I've updated my pedalboard that I used for leading (which I'll show you guys in a later post) and I picked up, modded, and am now in love with, another Epiphone Valve Jr.
If you remember way back, I had a head/cab Valve Jr. back in the beginning of my guitar-playing days. I mostly got frustrated with it because of the fact that it is a head/cab which for whatever reason just seems like a big hassle to me. But then I found a little Valve Jr. combo on Craigslist for $75, and I thought to myself, why not?
Pictured: the most cumbersome 5 watts ever.
I figured, worst case, it will teach me a lot about amps and soldering and general electronics work, and if I screw it up, I'm only out a little. So I grabbed this little guy and a soldering iron and got to work.
I used the kit from Watts Tube Audio, choosing to go with the "Voxy" mod simply because I like AC30s but am almost never in a situation where I can crank one to get power tube distortion. I also planned on adding a "bright" switch because I like that. So I drilled a nice hole for the switch. Note to self: no matter how much of a pain it is, REMOVE THE CIRCUIT BOARD BEFORE DRILLING IN THE CHASSIS. I drilled right through a little capacitor on the stock board, which I was going to remove anyway, but it kind of gave me a wake-up call. Don't do that.
For the bright switch, I did a lot of research to figure out the best way to do it. One of the easiest ways to do it is to wire a small capacitor (in the order of pico-farads) across the volume pot and give it a switch. It's the same idea as a "treble bleed" mod that a lot of people will do to their amps or even their guitars, just with a switch. The idea there is that the resistance in the volume pot at any position other than wide-open sucks some of the highs out, so the treble bleed switch just adds those back in. The effect is lessened the more the amp is turned up, but that's just because those frequencies start to poke back through anyway. The first capacitor I used was apparently not rated for high-voltage applications. It was promptly destroyed and fuzzed out. So that was fun. Lesson learned, I got a 100pf capacitor rated at 250v, and it's been working fine.
So I got to soldering the board up. That all went well enough until I plugged it in and turned it on and promptly fried a power tube. To this day, I'm not sure if it was just a tube that was on it's way out or what, but it started sparking and generally doing a lot of scary things that you don't want to see in an amp. I triple-checked my wiring, reflowed some solder on some sketchy joints, installed a new power tube, and this time brought it up to full-voltage slowly (using a variac), and it seemed to fix the problem. I left it at full voltage for a while to make sure nothing died, and when I was satisfied, I screwed everything back in.
The only other major change I made to the amp was installing a 12ay7 tube in the pre-amp slot, rather than the stock 12ax7. If you don't know anything about tubes, that's okay. Basically, 12a_7 tubes are all electrically compatible. The important part is that a 12ay7 tube has a lesser gain structure than a 12ax7, meaning that an amp with one in it doesn't get quite as dirty as it would normally. I did the same thing with my Blues Jr. and it expanded the amount of control that I had over the volume. And also, the tube I used was a nicer NOS tube, so it just sounds better (and smoother) in general, since a lot of the distortion you're getting, even full-out, is preamp tube distortion. But now I get more use out of the volume knob, and can actually get a clean tone out of humbuckers, something that was all but impossible with a 12ax7.
Here's a quick video. It's just a really simple showcasing of what the amp can do, just my Tele straight in (or rather, through the JHS buffer and my pedal board, but with no other effects on). I play the same phrase on the bridge, middle and neck position, with me toggling the bright switch and turning the volume up. Since the amp is only 5 watts, I can turn it all the way up and not get things hurled at me. It's still loud, mind you, but it's not uncomfortable to be in the same room with.
I took it out to a Mass last weekend, and my sound guy was blown away at the clarity. I played it with the bright switch engaged, and used my Tele and Strat, and we put a '57 in that taped-off square, pointing towards the center of the speaker. When I went to plug it back in afterwards, I noticed that it kind of stopped working. Or, more specifically, that the tubes weren't glowing. So I made sure to go over the connection between the power transformer and the tubes (kind of a sketch one anyway) with a lot of solder, and now it's nice, clean, and reliable.
I should probably do a proper demo, putting some effects and stuff on there, but I just wanted to get a baseline tone out there. That's not even my clean tone, since 99.7% of the time I also have a Dynacomp and a BBE Sonic Stomp going. But expect more videos in the future, since this was way easier to do than I would have thought....
I'm not sure if this was obvious or not, but I'm a Cardinals fan. Now and forever. And last night I got to go to game 7 of the World Series and celebrate with 50,000+ fans (in the stadium and on the streets of St. Louis) as we won our 11th World Series. There really are no words for the way that this silly, frustrating, glorious game makes me feel, for the emotional roller-coaster that has been the past two months. Living and dying with every win and every loss. Cheering with everything I have and barely being able to even hear myself in a crowd of tens of thousands. Seeing people in this great city put aside their differences, if only for a short while, and cheering, united. No black, no white, only Cardinal red. And to be able to hug random strangers in the stands, to high-five everyone you meet, to feel such an incredible surge of fraternity with everyone in the city, just incredible.
This year in particular taught the lesson that nothing's over until it's over, and that fighting and striving and never, ever giving up, on your dreams, on yourself, does pay off. And that, win or lose, it's how you played the game that matters, and there's always a tomorrow to redeem yourself, if you have the courage to reach out and take it. There's always the next season, the next game, the next inning to turn everything around and go from the underdog to the champion.
In spite of my sporadic posts (which is, I promise, the last time I'm going to talk about that), I've actually been quite busy with moving around guitar gear lately. Too busy, in fact. Maybe one of the reasons why I haven't been posting much is because I could never figure out what gear to talk about, since I was getting so much new gear so often. And it's come to the point where I'm now doing one of the most difficult things I've ever done related to guitars:
I'm down-sizing.
I looked up the other day and I had 9 guitars. 9! I don't have 9 sets of hands! How could I have that many? The fact is, it just kind of happened over time. But it made me realize just how much money I had tied up in cheap guitars, with about four different plans to upgrade them and make them my own. But I can't justify 9 guitars. So I'm selling off two of them to make some money to, you know, actually upgrade some of the others.
Best example: I've had an Epiphone Les Paul forever. But what I really want it some kind of ES-335. So I bought and Epiphone Dot, with the thought that I'd eventually upgrade all of the hardware and the pickups and end up with a very good guitar. But what I've realized is, that was kind of my plan all along for the Les Paul. So what am I going to do? Sell the Dot and another guitar and finally make the upgrades that I've wanted to make. I still want an ES-335 someday. But if I upgrade the pickups on my cheapie Les Paul, then someday when I do get a nice Gibson ES-335, I can just swap out the pickups and have a guitar to drool over. And in the mean time, I can get pretty good tone from my Les Paul, and I can then sell it with the original pickups and not lose any money.
I'm not sure why it took me 9 guitars to figure all of that out. I've been putting money in to my pedalboard for years, only having recently slowed way down and concentrated more on upgrades than on buying new things because they're shiny. Amps are the same way; I got nicer tubes and am on the waiting list to have Bill M mod my Blues Jr., and in the mean time I've been digging my Musicmaster way, way more for how clear of a tone it puts out. And that's even with a 35 year old speaker. Something about the hand-wiring, I'm sure.
So yeah, this isn't an exciting post. More like a "responsible" one. How boring.
Apparently I can't stay away from red guitars. Well, this one was only semi-intentional. I've actually had this baby since the beginning of the summer; I'd saved up lots of money and decided that it was time to take the plunge, and I must say, it's awesome. I put on strap locks and it's good to go. Months of working later, it's still just as great as it was in May.
I really, really like working with it, since it never feeds back, but it does open up a few interesting points. One, you never realize just how much of your own monitoring of your guitar playing comes from the sound of the guitar hanging around your belly. I never use monitors if I can help it, just because most of the time it's just me, and I can monitor myself by turning the house sound up loud enough to fill the room, but when I'm playing with a band, I need a lot of my acoustic in the monitor mix just to hear myself. Also, this guitar has a surprising amount of low-end. Even though it won't feedback at high levels, it's big and boomy without any eq-ing, but just a few slight tweaks and you get great acoustic tone.
And, of course, there are the handful of times that I need a legit acoustic guitar, with no amplification. Luckily for me, those time are few and far between. On account of how I'm such a huge rock star. Boom.
I figured I needed to put SOMETHING up here, so here goes. A lot of my gear has made rapid shifts in the last few months, what with buying lots of guitars and getting other ones setup, but the pedalboard has been relatively constant for a while now. Actually, strike that. It's been completely consistent. I can't really even remember the last iteration of my 'board that I put up here, but this one is only one pedal off from what I've been rocking for about 2 months, so there's that.
The main thing that's changed has been the positioning of a lot of the pedals. I usually find myself using the overdrive pedals to give me a different flavor, then use the RC booster almost entirely as a solo boost, which is why it's extremely easily accessible there at the bottom of the board. Next to it is the CE-2 because I love that pedal but it's on/off switch is really, really old, so sometimes it doesn't exactly respond when it gets stomped on. So it's in the bottom row so that I'm not all off-balance in the event that it doesn't go on or off right away. The sonic stomp and the Dynacomp are both always on, so their position doesn't matter as much; I really liked the Dynacomp in the position that I've had it in forever because it's out of the way, but I've been running out of room so I had to get creative. I did take off the speed-knob attachments though, so now it's nearly impossible for me to turn those knobs accidentally with my foot while I'm going for another pedal. And I was able to work a legit fuzz in to the board. I really like this one so far, but I need to play with it a lot more to really figure out how to dial in the fuzz sounds I like. But this one (the Barber Trifecta) plays nice with buffers, so it was nice to not have to put it first in the chain or anything like that. But as for the signal chain:
Guitar -> JHS Little Black Buffer -> MXR Dynacomp -> VOX Wah (Modded for true bypass) -> Xotic RC Booster -> Gravity Drive -> Analog.man TS-9 (modded to TS-808 specs) -> Barber Trifecta Fuzz -> Boss CE-2 Chorus -> Voodoo Labs Tremolo -> Ernie Ball Volume Pedal -> Boss DD-7 (with external tap tempo) -> Line 6 DL4 -> BBE Sonic Stomp -> Boss Tu-2 Tuner -> Boss RV-5 Reverb -> Amp
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this setup. I got another Keeley modded BD-2 that I love, but between that and the Gravity Drive (which is a Marshall Bluesbreaker clone), it didn't make the cut. I had it over my Fuzz, but now that I have a fuzz, I couldn't find the room for the BD-2; it will probably find a permanent home on my leader-board, which is my next project. But this setup lets me do everything I need to do. I've got a low-gain drive (Gravity Drive) and a medium-gain drive (Tubescreamer) along with a dirty fuzz (Trifecta) for when I need that. I've got a solo boost that will further drive whatever drive I have on, or that will make my clean tone sparkle for a lead or push the amp a bit more. I can stack the drives too, if I want (I like both the gravity drive and tubescreamer on at the same time). I can use a Wah and delay for some ambiance, or fuzz and delay for pad work. I can use tremolo, chorus and/or delay to do crazy stuff. My tuner also functions as a kill switch if I need to stop all of my delay or feedback or what have you. And with my buffer, compressor and Dynacomp, my clean tone is rich and full in spite of the 50+ feet of cables between my amp and guitar. The only thing I can't do is POG-type stuff, but I'm not sure what I'd cut to make room. Maybe the fuzz? We'll see how much use it gets.
Oh yeah. I also got a VOX coily cable. Because I want to be Jimi Hendrix. But mostly because it's really convenient to not be stepping all over my cable all day long. I do like what this particular cable does to my tone, though.
So here are the things that have changed in my life since I last wrote here:
Started using my Musicmaster to play out a little more. It's awesome. It makes me rely on pedal-based overdrive since it doesn't have a Master Volume, but I've been doing that anyway. It's also way lighter than my Blues Jr. and it sounds wonderfully hand-wired. If that's even a thing it can sound like.
Took my Strat in for a complete setup and my Mustang in for repairs. Free plug for Skip Goez. He knows what's up.
Am switching bank accounts. Bank of America has earned my ire.
Wrote a whole new Mass for the upcoming changes. The non-Catholics here probably have no idea what that means, but it's kind of a big deal. I will hopefully have some YouTubes up at some point; right now I'm working on finding some compositional software to get it all written out professionally. Any suggestions?
Speaking of writing, I've had two different book ideas pass through my head, and I need to get started on two talks that will be happening shortly.
Have a Barber Trifecta Fuzz on the way that should be here today....and my board has changed, as it is wont to do, ever so slightly since the last update. But I've been playing out a lot more and I like where it's at now. But yes, the fuzz will require shuffling everything around, since fuzzes don't like buffers and as it stands right now, the buffer is the first thing in the chain.
Turned 26. So that was fun.
Still have to do a review of the Gravity Drive. Long story short, it's a Bluesbreaker clone! And I love it.
I never thought I'd do a bullet-point-format post? I guess I am getting to be like Karl....
I figured since I'll be out of town again this whole next week, I should probably actually say something about the previous teaser post, rather than just leave you hanging. Basically, I traded a few spare pedals and a few hundred dollars for a '66 Fender Mustang. And I know I say it with every new guitar purchase, but I'm in love, all over again. I've never played a legit, vintage guitar (unless you count one of my good friend's pre-war Gibson, which is magnificent, but which I've only held and strummed for about a minute), much less owned one. I'll just say, I can see what all of the fuss is about. It needs some going-over electronically, which will be good because it will give me motivation to finally take my Strat in for a professional setup, but man, it sounds amazing, and it plays perfectly. It's definitely cooler than me. Look for some clips once I get it back from Skip.
