Category: Guitar

Sweet Tones

I took my laptop into my room to record some guitars. I had every intention of working out the kinks in the KTR/D&M Drive combo and then without really planning it I unplugged the board and plugged in the new RYRA The Klone pedal. Then I did something that would not have happened without Coronavirus.

I was planning on selling a guitar (my Strat) and some pedals so that I could buy another amp. With the lock downs and all there was no selling anything so all of that stuff is still here. When I took the D&M Drive out of storage I also pulled a few other pedals, thinking I might experiment. One of them was the Keeley Super Phat Mod. I bought that pedal a couple of years ago and I tried but I never really connected with it.

Tonight I put it into the chain after the RYRA and… it sounded really good.

It worked pretty much perfect with the first two songs I worked on. On the third I should have lowered the gain on the Keeley by a lot so the tone is way heavier than it should be. The fourth and final song of the night was just the RYRA because it’s freakin’ awesome.

i still only have seven songs in progress, but now they all have rhythm guitar. As for the guitar itself, I used the ES-335 and it went really well. No issues at all. The intonation is good, a lot of the buzz is gone (not all, but a lot) and it just felt and sounded good.

Robert is pleased.

Do I Need Frets?

As I watched this I looked at my 335 to make comparisons.

This looks bad (but maybe not as bad as I thought. My Les Paul is probably worse):

284/365

This isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It might actually be kinda good:

This teeny tiny piece of research made me feel a teeny tiny bit better… except that my Les Paul looks A LOT worse than this. Yikes. (oh, and I was trying to do a step from a different video to see if my neck was warped, that’s why the strings are touching the frets in this picture. In case you were wondering)

I also ordered a very cheap set of luthier tools from amazon today. At least I’ll be able to take measurements and maybe adjust the intonation myself. The electronics though… I’m not touchin’ that with a 30 foot pole.

June Music Addendum

Yesterday I posted a little recap of the June Music project so far. I mentioned how the Keeley D&M Drive didn’t play nicely with the Klon KTR the way the OCD did. It just dawned on me why.

Light dawns on Marblehead, as the saying goes.

I was running the OCD at 18 watts. That’s why. The D&M runs at 9 watts. 18 watts gives more headroom. It can handle more signal before it craps all over itself. The KTR puts out a tidal wave of signal. An avalanche of signal. A city sized asteroid plowing into the Earth at a zillion miles a minute of signal.

18 watts gives enough headroom to handle the signal level. 9 watts does not. That’s also why dialing back the output level on the KTR made things sound better.

Headroom.

QED

Guitar for Lunch

I spent my lunch break dicking around with my ES-335. There was a horrible buzz on the first and second strings between the 3rd and 5th frets. Bad. I played around with the action, trying to get rid of that buzz. I brought the bridge up a couple of screw turns and the problem is about 85% fixed. There is still a little buzz on the 3rd fret of both strings, but not nearly as bad as before. The 4th and 5th sound pretty good. I also checked the tuning at the 12th fret and the intonation seems to be pretty good still. I was pleased so I took a couple of faux artsy pictures.

282/365

I should also note that I have no idea what I’m doing. Is raising the bridge a little the correct way to deal with some fret buzz? I am guessing not. I probably need to play with the truss rod, but if anyone knows for sure, it’s not me. Maybe I’ll do some youtube research and see if there’s a better way.

A few weeks ago I sent a message to Gibson’s repair facility with some questions on what they can do for my poor, mistreated guitar. They never wrote back.

June Music

I figured I’d give a quick update on the June Music project even though no one else on Earth gives a shit. I give a shit, so here we go.

There are seven songs in the works. All have the MIDI tracks, drums and bass, complete. One has a piano as a placeholder for the melody. Three, as of this afternoon, have rhythm guitars.

Two songs used the KTR and the D&M Drive pedals. It was my first crack at substituting the D&M for the OCD. It didn’t work well. I had the output on the KTR maxed and the drive off. The D&M didn’t seem capable of handling that signal and it got really mushy. I used the ES 335 on the first song I did and wasn’t happy with the sound. The string buzz may have been making it worse so I switched to the Les Paul. It was a little better, but not much. So two songs have less than good guitar sound. It’s good enough to roll with for now. I don’t think I’ll change it. The third song used the Les Paul but just the KTR. I wanted a cleanish sound, so I shut off the D&M. That sounded pretty good.

After I was done I set to some major tweaking and found something that was much better. I lowered the output on the KTR, lowered the output and the gain on the D&M, an added a little treble on the KTR. That was better. I will try recording with that setup. I was hoping to just use the RYRA The Klone pedal this month but the whole racist pedal builder shit made me want to experiment with the gig setup more. I also pulled a couple of other overdrive and fuzz pedals out of storage. I might try pairing different things with the RYRA. We can sort of consider June as Lab time. Let the tinkering continue.

One thing I do know… it’d been over a week since I had played at all. With all of this quarantine, social distance shit going on… playing is good for my mindset. If I don’t play for a longish period of time I start getting under people’s skin. The more I play the easier I am to be around. It’s definitely a good way to work out my quarantinie frustration. I knew it would be, but I think I have some evidence to support that original theory now.

Playing helps me not be an asshole… therefore I should play more.

QED.

Music Day

The guitar was played today and recordings were made.

The Keeley D&M Drive doesn’t play with the Klon KTR as nicely as the OCD did and there’s some mushy, flubby tone on two of the songs to prove it. I’ve got it figured out though. The tone will improve. The new wah was also recorded for the first time. There were many, many takes. I screwed up many, many times.

Fulltone Free

The Fulltone OCD has been replaced by the Keeley D&M Drive and the Fulltone Clyde Deluxe has been replaced by the Dunlop Cry Baby.

My pedal board is Fulltone Free* and while using those two pedals that I had already owned for years prior to Fuller’s bullshit** made no difference at all to the universe as a whole, dumping them soothes my conscience and maybe it’s even the karmically correct things to do. Most important, no one is ever going to come to a bar where I’m playing and see any of that guy’s work in my gear.

I’m not doing business with some racist who thinks that storefront windows are more important than the public execution without trial of a man whose crime was allegedly passing a bad $20 bill while black, and while in his eyes my support for life and equality over business might mean I am both underserving of using his products and unable to piss standing up, I stand by my belief that his words mark him as a piece of shit and I don’t want to have anything to do with him or his company or his products ever again.

I feel better.

Fulltone free, at last.

*My little/backup/stay at home pedal board is over Mike the Bass Players house and has been since January. I understand the irony of the stay at home board not being at home, but that’s irrelevant. That board currently includes a Fulltone OCDge (complete with Fuller’s signature on it). That board still needs to be cleansed, but I promise it will be before I actually use it again. For now, it’s staying where it is until the coronavirus crisis has passed.

**I’ve written about this over and over again, but if you don’t know what I’m talking about here is a story from Guitar World, and here is another from Guitar.com.