Post Musical Equipment Here....

[|iR|Focalor]

What the fuck, amazon.



Inflation is a bitch.

Lol, they also have one of the red RotoVibe pedals listed at $382.77.

[|iR|Focalor]

Fender no longer using ash bodies on production models

I guess this has been known about since middle of last year, but I just found out about it a week or two ago when I went on the Fender website and was attempting to use their build-your-own custom guitar thingy and noticed that ash was no longer an option for body woods.

https://www.guitarworld.com/features/fender-will-no-longer-use-ash-bodies-for-production-line-guitars-we-found-out-why-and-what-woods-will-be-used-instead

Really sucks. I think all the old original Fender electric guitars from the 50's and early 60's were ash bodies. My 2015 American Elite Strat is ash body. Most of them tend to be alder, and alder sounds fine, but ash just has a little more chirp, sparkle, and clarity to it. Kinda sucks. Glad I was able to get an ash body Strat before now.

Pine is what I hear they're trying to use as a suitable replacement for it. I don't think I've tested out a pine body Strat yet. But CLEARLY pine is WAAAAY easier to find and harvest. Here in the south, it grows everywhere you look, and at a pretty fast rate. Personally, I think it's completely unfair that they might charge a similar price to ash, alder or mahogany when it's so much easier to obtain and replenishes must faster than the others.

[|iR|Focalor]

Been cashing in all my points doing online marketing surveys everyday for Amazon e-gift cards. I load them into my account on there as I get them and it deducts from the total whenever I order something. I found out the other week that I could order Guitar Center gift codes with the amazon money.

I've been wanting a way to add some old Mellotron and classic rock electric piano and organ sounds to any music I write in the future. I toyed with the idea of getting one of those Electro-Harmonix Mel9 mellotron pedals for guitar, but after trying one out for myself and seeing how awkward it is to use, and also reading other peoples reviews often stating that it was difficult to use, I decided against it.

I tried finding a set of some WAV samples of some different types of mellotron sounds which I could arrange track-by-track in a DAW like Acid Pro, but they were incomplete sets missing some of the notes, and only covered about one octave, which would've necessitated having to transpose any higher or lower notes, which would've sounded AWFUL.

I heard about a keyboard/synth brand (Nord) that made a great keyboard with sounds including mellotron sounds, but then I got to looking at the prices of them... well over 1000 dollars. Nope, not doable.

So my last best option is a virtual instrument, and the Arturia Mellotron V looked like the most interesting one. It's not entirely cheap though. I paid about 225 for this Arturia KeyLab Essential 49 keyboard, which is similar to the one in the video (which is the more expensive more featured KeyLab 49 mkII). The Mellotron software (which I will buy whenever I get the keyboard next week) is priced at 200 currently on the Guitar Center site, but I've seen it marked down to 150 on Sweetwater as well as the Arturia wite itself, so perhaps I can call Guitar Center and get them to adjust the price for me.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSrketn64s0

This one just shows the tons of sounds presets...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-lWj1Jt8_k

Still not absolutely sure what DAW I'm going to use. I'd much much prefer to use Acid Pro 10, because I'm familiar with Acid, however... apparently Arturia doesn't necessarily work with Acid Pro 10 as its not listed among the "tested and supported" DAW's.

I got a free copy of Abelton Lite Live with my recording interface, and I've opened it up trying to tinker with it, but... I AM UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY LOST. I don't even know where the hell to begin to begin beginning. It looks NOTHING like Acid at all.

This morning I took a look at a tutorial/walkthrough video for Fruity Loops Studio and it kinda looks similar to Ableton. It covered the stepped beatmapper thing, which to me seems like it's geared more towards electronic types of music. Whereas I'm looking to do more intricate acoustic drums with fills and rolls that change and do not repeat during verse sections.

If I get Acid Pro instead, I doubt theres any way to integrate the Mellotron V INTO the DAW like you can do with others, but I'm hoping at least I can record the sound output to a WAV track within Acid Pro... which is what I'm going to be doing with the guitar and bass anyway. I know a lot of modern Youtubers say you should record a naked guitar track and re-amp it through software on the computer, but... I didn't spend 2 grand for this Orange amp and all the pedals I've collected over the last few years to NOT use any of it.

I briefly looked at other DAW's available through Guitar Center, like Pro Tools. But it seemed VERY expensive (TOO expensive, in fact), and I wasn't sure about which version I'd need. 600 bucks for a "1 year subscription"... I have no idea how it works, but that's way more than I want to spend. Acid Pro 10 is at 200 bucks right now, and even THAT is ridiculous.

[|iR|Focalor]

Church lady's got one helluva guitar.

1953 Gibson Les Paul goldtop. Pretty modded. Originals came with a single stopbar bridge, and she's added a Bigsby tremolo tailpiece and probably some type of roller-saddle bridge where the original stop bar/bridge was. She's also got the body routed for 2 addition toggle switches that I guess lead to the two additional jack spaces under the original input jack. (perhaps for an effects loop - players back in the day sometimes added effects loops INTO the guitar itself: Duane Allman, Jerry Garcia, etc) Probably the original pickups though. From what I've heard, the old 1950's Gibson P-90's are a truly one-of-a-kind sound with exceptional warmth and unique dynamics and touch-sensitivity that far surpass any other p-90 pickups ever made by anyone anywhere at any time. They're kinda rare, but ocassionally you'll see one from around this time period in a high end guitar shop. Reverb.com says they typically go for anywhere from 15,000 to 23,000, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. Could be more. I think I saw a '54 goldtop in a shop once for 35k.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqhGqG73aP8

[|iR|Focalor]

You guys know anything about repairing these things? I've had this blue voodoo for 20+ years. Its got a bit of random snap crackle and popping when it's cold but still works ok. I'm pretty sure it's just the pots, can I just go to town on this with some electronics cleaner? I don't play much these days, too many broken bones limiting my range of motion but I still try to dabble here and there. 

edit 3/21/22: forgot to post the fuckin' video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLV3eGgI5F8

Blue DooDoo!

This guys working an old Blue Voodoo 60 just like yours. Hmm, he finds gunk all over the pots... perhaps it IS yours? Probably not. From everything I've ever heard, these things were always really bad about noisy and broken pots. This guy fixing it... Egh... better him than me. I love amps and guitars and shit, and I sometimes wish I could learn the ins and outs of electrical audio and make some kind of career out of it. But then I realize that 96% of the work you'd be doing would be on stuff like this cheapo crappy printed PC board Crate shit, and then I think HELL NO!

I had a Crate GT80 1x12 combo. It was a hybrid design. The preamp starts out with a tube, and perhaps uses a 2nd tube for the dirty channel, but it also uses a mosfet transistor to push the gain. It had a really peculiar sound to it. It was 4 channel, one button going between clean and dirty, and a second button going from solid state to tube, so you had 4 unique options. Clean solid state was clean, loud, and boring. Clean tube with pre-gain up would get a really cool really unique rough textured crunchy vintage overdrive kind of sound. Solid state dirty was 90's metal, basically your Boss MT2 Metal Zone distortion type of sound. The tube dirty channel... didn't sound very good. It sounded like exactly what the amp was: a cheap tube preamp getting pushed with crappy cheap poorly selected transistor, and then amplified through a poweramp that was DEFINITELY NOT tube.

The overall appearance and layout style of the guts of it resembled that Blue Voodoo 60 though. Like he shows in the video, they quickly soldered the things together when they made them without much care for longevity, and as result, the solder was thin in many places, and when the amp gets hot, it can weaken the solder and crack the connections all over the board.

That was the 90's for you though. Marshall even started going that way with the cheapo printed boards and cheapo parts starting with the JCM900's in the early 90's. By the time the JCM2000 Dual Super Lead and Triple Super Lead amps came out, they gotten even cheaper and shittier. By then they started using these really crazily complicated circuits with multiple boards which were connected to one another with these cheap crappy plastic wiring harnesses going 14 zillion different directions. And the weird thing is... for my money, I like the sound of the JCM2000's much better than the JCM900's.

And then you compare that to modern day "quality" amps like my Orange Rockerverb 100 Mk3. This is a 50 watt version in the picture. The 100 watt is only a little more complicated with 4 power tubes rather than 2. The yellow wire on the bottom side... and that series of 2 orange wires that makes a smaller jump... that's where the 2 power tubes in a 50 watt are. In the 100 watt, its the same kind thing in that area, just MORE. Still the main thing to pay attention to is the board. This is a modern high dollar flagship "Made in England" British amp. It is still basically a PC board, but the PC board traces are much more robust and sturdy. Everything is laid out in a neat and organized way that it's dick-simple to follow the path of things. I'm kinda bummed by the fact that the jacks are all still mounted to a PC board rather than connected with free swinging wires on each jack to eliminate the inevitable connection breakage over time from plugging and unplugging, but at least it's all on it's own board apart from the main one.



However, you look at the other Orange amps that are made in China. Pretty much the only Orange's that are made in England anymore are the Rockerverb and AD series amps. Oh... and the expensive PPC series cabinets. Everything else is made in China.

Kinda the same thing with Marshall. Only Marshalls made in England anymore are the JVM series, everything else is made in Vietnam.

I gotta imagine perhaps Vietnam would prefer not to make Orange amps there. Agent Orange? Yeah, they're probably still not happy about that shit.

[|iR|Focalor]

Dulcimers. A stringed lap-strummed folk instrument common throughout the Appalachians. Probably originally an Irish folk instrument that migrated to the Appalachians along with the Irish, Scottish and English immigrants in the 1700's. Relatively simple to learn to play due to the tuning and limited number of strings. Also relatively easy to build due to their smaller size which doesn't usually need any bracing like guitars do. I remember there used to be an old man with a shop down in the old downtown Stone Mountain village here in Georgia who made cheap unfancy dulcimers. They were cheap enough (like $60 up to maybe as high as $150) that dumb tourists who stumbled in might actually buy one. I actually bought one, but it broke and I tossed it out years and years ago. Would love to have another one.

Came across this video giving a factory tour of a more well known dulcimer shop. This guy makes QUALITY dulcimers. Everything sanded and finished meticulously. Interesting video.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeTm0-JAEas

[|iR|Focalor]

Possibly the coolest thing to hit guitar pedals since... I dunno, maybe, EVER.

For the longest time, pitch shift/octave pedals were monophonic. They'd play one note only. If you attempted to play a chord through it, it couldn't detect a single pitch from all the different notes of all the strings, so the rendered pitch would bounce around unpredictably. They were good for solos, that's about it.

But then polyphonic pitch shifting came along. And in more recent years, its become more accurate and usable. It accurately detects ALL notes played in a chord, and plays a shifted pitch for ALL the notes, allowing for full chords and arpeggios.

More recently (sometime late last year) - I'm kinda wondering if the Fart Pedal that came out last year might've been an early beta version of this pedal. The fart pedal plays a non-pitched sample of a fart sound. It's completely useless and has no value for the purpose of making music... but it hasn't stopped lots of people from buying it anyway.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuhV40ciWHw

That's not the video I wanted to show you though. The next one is.

This pedal seems to play a sample of a human voice as well... and it's pitch accurate... and it's FUCKING POLYPHONIC! HOLY MOLY, THIS IS SO COOL!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32UtbDuD6y8

[|iR|Focalor]

New guitar day!

I used to like to sit on my front porch in the evenings with a cold drink and a cigarette playing my old Hohner HW400 acoustic. It was my first "real" guitar (my actual first guitar was a late 50's Sears-made Silvertone piece of junk that was my dads when he was a kid, with missing tuners and only 5 rusty old strings). I've played the hell out of it for probably more than 30 years now. Hohners a cheapy brand, but back when this thing was made, it was actually fairly decent for a low-end starter. Made of REAL WOODS - spruce top, mahogany back and sides, rosewood fingerboard, had pretty good frets on it (they're worn to shit now though). Tuners were cheapy though, nickle and brass gears and pegs, but the tuner buttons were this chromed plastic to save money, and with age the plastic got brittle and some of the buttons cracked under the pressure trying to turn the pegs. Also it was a Korean-made guitar. And at the time, Korean made guitars could sometimes have poor quality control. The construction of these Hohners were good though, but like all the Korean acoustics, they coat the things in a generous amount of polyurethane lacquer, which is basically... like thick hard plastic. It tends to dampen vibrations on acoustic guitars and smothers the tone. Still a decent sound due to the types of real woods and the construction. One thing people always say about the Hohner HW400 when reviewing it... it lacks bass, which is true. Very little. If you're playing with a group, someone better have an acoustic bass to fill it out.

But with its cracked tuner buttons, I haven't been able to change the strings on it in more than 10 years. It sounds pretty bad. There's a fingernail thin gap at the neck heel where it's pulling away from the body a bit too, so I'm afraid if I ever try to replace the tuners and put new strings on it, the tension could be too much for the neck to stay glued. (I don't use a humidifier at all either, so the woods dry as fuck).

I've wanted a "nice" and GOOD sounding acoustic for a while now, and a couple of times I was contemplating spending quite a lot ($1000 or more) on something like a lower end US-made Martin D15 or Gibson J45 Studio. But I can't justify spending that much on one of those things. I'm not a millionaire. I dunno how people afford this shit.

But then I came across these cheap little Taylor Big Baby models that are about 7/8 the size of a full size dreadnaut. Sounds just as big and loud and full as any of the $1000 guitars I played. It's sort of ugly with a bolted on neck, which is REALLY strange for an acoustic, and you'd think it would equate to the thing sounding cheap and bad, but it doesn't at all. To me, it sounds every bit as good as one of the expensive ones. I saved a few bucks by getting a used one. I wanted an older model anyway. The newer ones come with a maple neck, the older ones had a mahogany neck, which sounds slightly better to me (I compared the two side by side once). This ones got a wood face the headstock too, perhaps that's what the earlier models had to make them look more expensive, I'm not sure. I do prefer the look of it though, looks nicer. Most of them I've ever seen have a black plastic card glued to the face of the headstock like many of the Gibson electrics do. With tax and shipping, it was a little less than $410. Should be here by sometime this weekend maybe. Can't wait to play on the porch again. No cigarettes this time. I'm a non-smoker now. Can't die from cigarettes, I got bills to pay.

[|iR|Focalor]

3 cool old amps from the 70's (sort of).

1. White Matamp GT120. (Possibly a modern reissue of an old Matamp from the 70's) I think Matamp made the first Orange amps in the late 60's. I'm not very familiar with Matamp, they're kinda hard to come by, but I guess they made Matamp designed amps under a few other names in the 70's. I've seen pics of some that say "White", "Black", even modern reissues that say "Green Matamp". All I really know is... Peter Greene of the early version of Fleetwood Mac used to play a Matamp and a few Orange's in the late 60's.

2. Orange OTR. From what I've read, this one most likely IS a modern reissue (reissued in the later 1990's) of the popular Orange OR120 amps from the 70's.

3. Sunn Beta Lead. I don't think this amp is from the 70's. More likely from the 90's. But it seems to be based on the design of the old Sunn Concert Lead solid state heads of the 70's.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS035aSskg8

[|iR|Focalor]

Dassa lotta pedals.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4RfLtgJFrQ

[pepp5]

Dassa lotta live pedals and Alex Lifeson at 21:00.  Blah blah.


https://youtu.be/iWRfLuJ_NKw?t=1260