I was in the cellar tonight, working on my pedal board. I took everything off and then rebuilt it (in a new signal order) one pedal at a time in the hopes of finding where the awful noise I was hearing last Sunday came from. I never found the noise, but that may be because my amp was down as low as I could get it and still hear it.
The first pedal I put in place was my tuner. I plugged it in and played through it, knowing that it wasn’t the culprit, but also wanting to be methodical. I started noodling around because my ES-335 going clean into my Deluxe Reverb sounds pretty wonderful. To my surprise, I did hear a weird noise. What is that sound? It was a high pitch sort of rattle. It was intermittent. Is there something wrong with the spring reverb? Is it related to how hard I pick the string? What is that? I stopped playing. The noise stopped. I started playing again. The noise came back. Okay, I’m getting pissed off now. I stopped playing again and the noise stopped… for a second, then it came back without me playing.
It was not my amp. It was not my guitar. It wasn’t even in the house.
It was a bird.
Singing along.
Inside the Red Head's Head 