Category: Guitar

50/90 – Day 10

Two of the last three nights have been 50/90 progress free. Am I slowing down? Yeah, probably a little. Is it okay? Well, I’ve got 18 songs in the works and there are still 80 days left… so yeah, I think it’s okay.

If there is a hangup, it’s in the demo recording. I don’t want to use any amp sims at all. I want all of the guitar sounds to be my Fender Deluxe Reverb. All or nothing. I’ll probably change my mind on that eventually, but for now I’m sticking to it. That means no recording in the living room while the kids are watching tv. That’s a big deal. We’ll see how far this goes.

Most importantly, I’m still having fun.

That 50/90 Thing

Remember back in February how I was ranting on and on and on about the RPM Challenge and how I was sketching out music ideas in Garageband without actually recording any instruments and yadda yadda I’m going to have all the songs written but none of the recordings?

So 50/90 started six days ago and it’s the same thing only much, much crazier. In the whole month of February I think I got to 18 songs complete. Now, six days in… less than a week… and I’m at 16 songs. SIXTEEN! I haven’t actually recorded a note, but I have 16 songs in the works. One of them even has lyrics (sort of) and melody (sort of).

I don’t think any of them are any good, of course, but that goes without saying.

Now, having said all that. I went to the 50/90 page and checked to see how other people were doing. Turns out there is one participant who is actually finished. Finished. 50+ songs in less than a week. Now that is just batshit crazy.

Pre-Gig Rituals

I haven’t played a paid gig since 2005. (I wonder if I could find our old website on archive.org and maybe get the exact date. hmmmm) I know there were things I used to make sure I did before I left the house to load in at the bar, but what were those things? 11 years seems like such a long time.

This morning before work I did the ceremonial trimming of the finger nails. Skipping that step has in the past resulted in me having to rip them off mid-set, which pretty much guarantees they’ll be way too low and hurt a lot.

I spent my lunch break performing the ceremonial changing of the strings. Both Gibsons are ready to go, although I only plan on playing one of them. The other is an emergency back up. During the string changing, one of the old strings tasted blood. A clipped end stabbed the side of a finger on my right hand and drew a little blood. Nothing that will be an issue tonight, unless I develop tetanus or something.

I have a little pile of stuff on the dining room table that I will throw into my backpack. Extra strings, extra cables, an extra fuzz pedal, an extra glass slide even though I have no intention of playing any slide tonight. You never know.

What else?

I skipped eating lunch in favor of strings, so I have to feed. I’m working from home, so maybe I’ll order a sub.

I have not yet had the ceremonial vomit. That wasn’t always a thing, but it has happened. Given the 11 year gap, it wouldn’t surprise me if I order a sub and then hurl it later tonight.

Too much information? Yeah.

Less than three hours left in the work day. Then it’s load out of Mike’s house, load into the bar, play three sets over 3+ hours or so, then load out of the bar, load into my house (maybe the garage?), and GO TO SLEEP YOU OLD MAN!

Murtaugh, indeed.

Amplifier Comparison

Song #1 here is through my ’65 Fender Deluxe Reverb Reissue. The rhythm guitar is through the bass big muff and the little solo is through the tone wicker big muff. The rhythm sounds okay, but the lead… doesn’t.

Song #2 is through my Marshall Valvestate VS265. Same pedal configuration. Everything is much toppier. Isn’t the norm for Fender vs Marshall the opposite? At least through the Marshall the wicker big muff sounds okay. I think I might have toned it down a little too.

So the moral of the story is maybe to not use two fuzz pedals and just crank the fuzz on one and use it all the time. Oh, and turn up the bass on my Marshall amp (if it’s not full up already).

Next practice is Sunday. No dicking with gear allowed as it’s the final run through before my first bar gig in 11 years. The goal is to just blow through everything we know in as short a time as possible.

What is That Sound?

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.

Have You Heard My New Amp?

Have you heard my awesome new amplifier?  If you’re one of my neighbors you might have.  This morning around 8:00am?  Muahahaha!

This file is definitely going to get deleted.  The drums and the rhythm guitars will be kept, the bass and the vocal and the little guitar noodle at the beginning are all temporary.  This is my ES-335 through the Fulltone OCD pedal into my Fender Deluxe Reverb super amp.

Same deal with this one. Drums (probably) and rhythm guitar are keepers, everything else will be re-recorded. This is also my ES-335 and my Fender Deluxe Reverb, but it’s through a Electro Harmonix Nano Big Muff pedal instead of the OCD.

Woah!

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The pedals are for the stay-at-home/back up rig. The amp is more fluid. My 26 year old Fender Stage amp is dying a slow and painful death. That is one of the reasons I haven’t been recording much lately. It’s just not working all that well, and when it does work it is not very reliable. So I was definitely in the market for a new amplifier. I’ve been dying for a Fender Twin Reverb forever. Back in high school, the music department had a silver face Twin and that has always been my standard for clean tones. It was beat to hell and probably died a fiery death, but it was great. The problem is, the Fender reissue Twin Reverb is amazingly expensive. I could never justify throwing out that much money.

This week I started looking at the smallest of the reissue tube amps, the Princeton Reverb. It seemed like a smart way to go for a leave-at-home amp, but even that was seriously expensive. I started thinking about worst case scenarios though. If my Marshall should die, the Princeton would not really be a powerful enough replacement. The Twin would definitely work, but that damn price.

So I compromised I went with the Deluxe Reverb. It’s big enough to handle most of the places the band could possibly play, and it’s still small enough that it wouldn’t blow out the windows in the cellar if I wind it up while playing at home recording.

Now I just need to find some time to actually plug the bad boy in and play with it!

Happy New Pedal/New Tube Amp Day!

What’s in the Bag?

Hey Robbie, what’s in that big bag?

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I’ll tell you in a second…

Last night’s band practice wasn’t very good, but it was okay.  We hadn’t played together in about a month and it showed.  I half expected that I would have forgotten how to play every song.  That wasn’t the case, but it didn’t mean I didn’t screw up left and right and get lost now and then.

I had a disconcerting technical issue.  I think I know what it was though.  After 2-3 songs my volume level dropped to almost nothing.  It was weird.  One minute I was roaring like a tornado of Big Muff Fuzz, and the next I was a whisper.  I thought it was my uni-vibe pedal as a light that usually doesn’t light was lit from the minute I plugged in.  I figured the battery was dead.  I bypassed it on the board but it didn’t solve the problem.  Screw this, thinks I.  I pulled my tuner off the board and bypassed everything else.  The signal path was guitar->wah->fuzz->tuner->amp.  The problem persisted.  So I bypassed everything and plugged straight into the amp.  It worked.  So I have it narrowed down to those three pedals.  I am acting under the assumption that the amazing Big Muff pedal has a dead battery.

So what’s in the bag then?  Speak of the devil, it’s my pedal board and all of my pedals from Mike the bass player’s house.  Now I can add all the new pedals to the board, replace all of the 9-volt batteries with the new DC Brick power supply, and rearrange the whole thing to get the most noisy fuzz boxy mess imaginable!  I’ll let you know when it’s up and running again.  There will be an I-am-so-cool-check-out-my-pedal-board picture, I’m sure of it.