Long absence? What long absence?

...been quite a while. Sorry. Maybe. I've been busy making music and such, which is I guess the whole point of this thing, but also, I just haven't had too much turnover in gear or change in drinking. Maybe I'm getting old and boring. Maybe.

I am currently in the process of auditioning drive pedals. Behold!

I traded an '81 TS9 for a Fulldrive 2 and a Fatboost, and am trying to figure out which 3 of the 8 drive pedals that I have are going to make it onto the board. I've been having a lot of fun with the Morning Glory, but I've never really sat down and done a large-scale shootout of pedals, more so just picked one, played it for a while, picked another one, played that one for a while, etc. And somewhere along the line I ended up with 8 overdrives. I've also streamlined the rest of my pedalboards, but that's a topic for another post, probably once I'm done figuring out which drives I want...

...someday I'll come back to this blog....

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....

Splendid.

Ben

Ever feel like everything changes in one week?

So, over the course of the week, I have:
- sold my broken PS3
- purchased a shiny new PS3
- traded my G&L ASAT for a Taylor 314CE-LTD (and am beyond excited about this)
- taken Fishman up on the upgrade offered for their Aura pedals
- moved my compressor and tuner off of my electric board and onto my acoustic board
- Gotten an iPhone4

and all of these are (lame) reasons why I haven't recorded any amp demos yet, and all are things that will likely get written about in the near future. Might as well start now.

iPhone4. Awesome. I've literally had it for just over 24 hours, and I've already used it about six times to find info or use an app. It's incredible. I didn't really want to be this connected to the internet (it updates me whenever I get an e-mail, which is good and bad), but I've already stopped caring. I can take pictures and send them to anyone. I've got like 7 gigs of music loaded on (all of the mp3's I've bothered to collect) and can take them anywhere. It's like a swiss-army knife for the modern world.

I'm still looking at all of the hundreds of apps that are available. I need to decide if it's worth it to pay $10 for a strobe tuner from Peterson (way cheaper than a Strobostomp 2, but how often would I use it?) and look into some sort of dock for my car so I can use it as an mp3 player. It's just incredible that I can fit everything I ever need into a device that weighs less than a pound. Technology rules.

The meaning of life:

It is always a mistake to decide what you are going to do (job/relationships/whatever) before first deciding who you are going to be.

- Andy Stanley