I woke up this morning feeling like crap so I called in sick.  I slept away almost the entire day and I’m just clearing the cobwebs now, so I figured I’d give a quick recap of last night’s band practice.

We’re a soul band now, dontchaknow?  We had a request from our singer for an Al Green song.  It was a last minute thing and the bass player didn’t have time to learn it all, but we muddled through it.  I hope it happens, I really do.

For me personally, it was a mixed bag.  First and foremost, I took my little Vox MV50 amp and my new 1×12 speaker cabinet to test drive them and make sure that they are loud enough to use in place of my Deluxe Reverb if need be.  Oh were they ever loud enough.  With the attenuator off, I nearly blew down the walls.  It was awesome.  I also brought my little ABY switch and for the first time in human history, I played through two amps at a practice.  The drummer asked why and I answered, because it’s awesome.  And awesome it was.  The Deluxe Reverb was behind me, and the MV50 was off to my left.  I was surrounded by speakers and they were pushing the air hard enough that my pant legs were being blown around.  Awesome.  Just awesome.  Unfortunately no one else could hear anything so after the first few songs I took down the Vox and went back to my Deluxe Reverb on it’s own.

From the moment I switched to one amp until the end of practice, I was struggling.  It took about 30 minutes of goofing around with two amps to completely spoil me to the point where I couldn’t make the one amp alone sound good.  I was monkeying with pedal settings and amp settings the whole rest of the night.  It was really frustrating.  I also may have decided that my Russian Fuzz pedal clones are not workable in the band setting.  I just can’t get enough output to fit into the mix.  It’s not a mid scoop thing, I need more output to compensate for that, it’s just a sheer volume thing.  Even when no one else was playing, I couldn’t get the output level to match what was coming out of the D&M drive.  I think next rehearsal will see the return of the Triangle Big Muff clone.  The mid scoop is much more dramatic on that pedal, and therefore takes even more volume to compensate, but at least the output level is there.

Hopefully I will now be able to add a couple of song files, just for fun.  This first one (assuming it embeds) is the one song that all four of us were playing on that had both amps.  The second song is just there because I used my cheap ass little Mooer flanger pedal for the first time and despite being a disgustingly cheap Chinese knock off of an EHX Electric Mistress, I think it sounds great.  The last song is just there because I like soloing over the chord changes.  It’s one of those songs that I really don’t like to listen to, but I really enjoy playing.  Weird.