Now officially a cool blog!

Seems I've been called out....

Well, maybe not so much, but Karl just posted some nonsense about this here blog here, claiming something about writing good gear reviews. So I guess to not make him a liar, perhaps I should, you know, write a gear review.

And I will! On the advice of some guys I trust, I got a Studio Projects B1 condenser mic for some vocal work, and it's pretty sweet. But patience, it will be up in a few days.

First, a little honesty. While I may purport to be an incredible electric guitarist with "tone for days", the fact is that I've never actually played electric guitar before. In public. All that has changed! A friend of mine is in charge of music for a small parish in a poorer area of St. Louis, and he called me up asking if I wanted to play with him for something called XLT, a sweet Adoration-fest put on by the Archdiocese. And by "called me up", I of course mean "Facebook-ed me", because, come on. It's the 21st century. And I'm scared of phones.

So I took my Blues Jr., my G&L (this was a worship event, after all...) and my sweet pedal board and made the trek. How was it?

In a word, humbling.

I hacked my way through intros to From the Inside Out and Your Grace is Enough and Let God Arise (which was actually a lot of fun...I love distortion!) all while putting on my best "Oh, what? You were looking for the electric guitarist? That would be THIS GUY" face, and I played with delays and volume swells like it was going out of style. And I considered turning on my tremolo pedal until I realized that a tap tempo is almost more important for tremolo than it is for delay...But the point is, I realized that I need to practice, but also that electric guitar freaking rocks!

I also realized that I really, really want to get tons of gear to make me better, but I'm resisting that urge. But I do want a second delay. I would love to get a Timeline because, well, it's the best delay there is, but to be completely honest, I need something smaller and with presets. So I'm also seriously considering the new M9 by Line 6. Why? Because I really like the simple functionality of Line 6's Dl4, and by all accounts, the M9 is basically a DL4 plus about a hundred other pedals, but the same size. And I'm not crazy about any of the 'drives that I've ever heard from Line 6, but at the same time, I'm basically considering the M9 as a super DL4, so it's going to just be another pedal on my pedal board (handling a lot of delay and modulation), rather than a whole pedal board in and of itself. And modeling makes me really nervous. It still does. But I think if the guys like Jack Parker (David Crowder*Band) and Daniel Carson (Chris Tomlin) use or have used the DL4, I really can't complain about their tone. Don't even get me started on Lincoln Brewster.

Thoughts?