Category: Guitar

Lunch Break

Lunch break on a Wednesday. We’ve been talking about the desks in our new building today. March 13, 2020 was the last day at our desks in the Waltham building. Two months ago the Waltham building was sold. Now we have desks in another building but prior to this morning none of us had gone to check it out. One guy went today and reported back that none of our stuff from Waltham has made it to the new desks yet. Uh oh. The upside is that some of us might be getting new monitors out of the deal. I had two when we left. They were both old and less than good. This could work out for me.

Wait… didn’t I write something about not talking about work?

The AC folks have come and gone. The window for their arrival was between 7:00 and 11:00. They knocked on the door at 10:50. His first question was, would you like me to wear a mask? Yes, yes I would. Thanks. It was just a routine cleaning and the AC in the wall in the bedroom clearly benefitted from it because it’s working like crazy now. It’s actually cold in here. I haven’t spent much time in the rest of the house yet so I don’t have any news from that front yet.

The tech said the wall unit in the bedroom was pretty old. Huh? It was installed three years ago. How is that old? Was it sitting on some warehouse shelf for a decade before it was installed in our house? Worse… was it used?

My father is in the hospital again. Day two. My brother is with him. The idea is to move him back into a rehab so that he can get back to a point where he can take care of himself better than he can now… which he can’t. He asked to have some of his more common aches and pains looked at while he was in there. Good idea. No real news on any front yet. Hopefully he’ll be in a new rehab quickly and he can get back to working on getting better. I am scared and worried and stressed and wracked with guilt and I am just overwhelmed with it all… and I’m not the one in the hospital bed. I can’t even begin to imagine how he feels. I hate this. I want my dad to be better again.

So Covid is over, right? The world is opened up again, right? People are still getting sick and people are still dying, but it’s all over, right? I’m thinking about things that I can do that were put on hold. Vacations would be first on that list but we have two college kids now and we are out of money. I already had a haircut, but I need another one because my hair grows faster than light. I need to get my eyes checked. Jen has done that already but see the previous sentence regarding money. I may have to ride out my old glasses for a little while longer. There is a guitar and an amplifier that I’d like to trade in. It depends on how much I can get for each item, but if I can get a used ’68 Deluxe Reverb or a used Les Paul Junior in exchange, I might. I don’t know how that will go.

Okay, time to clean up my lunch and get back to work. The hope is we will be watching episode two of Loki by 6:00pm. Four hours or so from now. Fingers crossed.

Wish my dad good luck, okay? Thanks.

More Les Paul Fun

We’ve seen a lot of this before. In this video, Joe Bonamassa is going to get a bunch of different sounds out of a Les Paul without stepping on pedals or messing with his amp.

I know all of this. When I was in high school I had this super loud, solid state Peavey 2×12 with a built in chorus (that I never used). It had a clean channel and a drive channel and a foot switch to swap back and forth. I didn’t use a lot of pedals, apart from a wah wah, and that amp foot switch did all of my clean/dirty work for me.

Then in 1988 or ‘89 or so, we did a gig in a parking lot. I put that huge Peavey into the back of the mini van along with the rest of the band’s gear. The foot switch was plugged into the back of the amp and in the process of squeezing everything in the plug got squashed and was unusable.

I had a ton of switching channels to do, but now I didn’t have a switch to switch with. My work around was to use the drive channel, but set my neck pickup volume way down low so that it sounded nice and clean. Then instead of using the foot switch, I just flipped the pick up switch.

These days I have pedals for all of that so I generally keep all four knobs on the guitar up full. It bothers me a little though when I see people refer to cleaning up with the volume knob as a trick. It’s just the most obvious thing there is, right? Anyone whose messed with an electric guitar through a distorted amp figures out that lowering the volume on the guitar cleans the signal… don’t they? Why does Mr Bonamassa (and countless other YouTube guitar players) make it sound like it’s news to us? I don’t get it.

I have nothing but respect for Joe Bonamassa and I would literally kill to have his chops. I actually have his signature Cry Baby Wah on the band pedal board right now. Someday I’d like to try out his signature Fuzz Face too. Joe may tell us to use the guitar instead of pedals, but I’ll be okay using pedals with his name on them for now.

This post seems to have rambled a smidge. Sorry, I’m really tired.

Have a good night, friends.

Les Paul Tips

I can’t sleep so I’ve been putzing around YouTube looking for cool ideas for things to do with your Les Paul.

First things first, this dude is playing a copy and that offends me. He has an SG and another Les Paul on the wall behind him. Are those cheap copies too?

Anyway, he lists five things and literally every video I’ve looked at tonight lists exactly the same things. The first two are things that I figured out on my own back in 1987 when my Peavy amp’s foot switch got smashed in my car. I thought they were common knowledge. No one taught me, I just figured it out after about 0.68 seconds worth of research.

The third and fifth tricks are things I use occasionally. I learned about “woman tone” (terrible name, Eric) from a Clapton biography back in ‘86 or ‘87. The kill switch thing… I forget where I learned that… it might have been that same Clapton biography or maybe a guitar magazine column. I’m thinking maybe Rik Emmett’s column? I learned a few things from him, but most of it was way above my skill level.

The forth tip is the one that’s interesting to me. I first learned of that from a That Pedal Show episode last year and I’ve been playing with it lately, but it’s not making that much of a difference. I’m guessing it will be a bigger effect at higher volumes. I want to try it at a Lizardfish practice, assuming there someday is another Lizardfish practice.

Okay, I might try to sleep now. Class dismissed,

June Tune

I played guitar a little last night. Nothing specific, just noodling. Today I forced myself to work on a new song idea. Well, sort of new. I played a little lick into Music Memos last month that I never used. I worked it into the first and so far only June song so far. Two minutes of bad pop rock.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

Les Paul Lessons

This week’s That Pedal Show is all about Fender Strats. I tried to love my Strat but I just couldn’t connect with it. It’s a killer guitar and I got some great sounds out of it. It just doesn’t feel like home though. I watched the episode but it took a few sittings to get through it. As soon as it was done I went back to the Les Paul vs ES-335 episode from last December because I needed to feel at home again.

I took out my new Les Paul and noodled along. I am pretty sure I am going to have to start talking to a therapist soon. Until then, playing guitar will have to do.

Les Paul Standard 50’s into a Ryra The Klone into a Vox AC15. In case you were curious. Recorded with the iPhone mic, which means you likely won’t be curious.

Sleepy

We are hoping everyone in both houses gets a good nights sleep. Everyone but me, that is. I’m taking the first watch, so to speak.

I’m pretty sleepy though, and I’m losing the fight to stay awake, not even a cool video on Burst Les Pauls can keep me going.

Graduation is tomorrow. Time to rest up, I think.

Gear Lust – Budget Fail

Last night I posted a video from the Five Watt World YouTube channel. Tonight I’ve been watching more and more of their history videos and it’s sending my Gear Acquisition Syndrome into orbit.

I watched videos on Fender Deluxe amps, Klon Centaur overdrive pedals, Marshall JTM45 amps, and Vox AC30 amps.

We now have two college tuitions to pay for. All the money is gone. Isn’t it funny how the gear lust increases at approximately the same rate as the available savings diminishes?

Funny ha ha, or funny boo boo?

You be the judge.

Thinking About Tomorrow

I have not played the guitar in a while now. It’s the weekend so you’d think I would be in the clear, but there’s a lot of stuff to do.

The grass in front of the house is getting long. The grass in the back and on the side have yet to be mowed at all this year. I’m super tall, six and a half feet tall or so, and I am literally scared to go into the back yard because the grass is so tall I am afraid I’ll get lost*. Seriously. That’s how badly it needs to be mowed. The weather looks clear, though slightly on the scorching hot, inferno, hell fire side of the temperature gauge.

More important, in the afternoon we have a high school band concert. The final high school band concert. I didn’t think we were going to get one, thanks covid, but we are. It’s going to be outside in the parking lot and my step son is playing with every single ensemble. Piano in some parts, and percussion in others. He’s awesome, the concert is going to be awesome, it is also going to be held in the parking lot because of covid in the scorching inferno hell fire temps, but it’s all kinds of awesome.

If I can sneak some guitar time in, I will. I’m not holding my breath though.

On an unrelated note, I got a notification on my laptop to reboot for a Mac OS update. I cancelled the notification because it was in the way of a window I was trying to use, but once I was done I rebooted my computer. When the computer came back up I was prompted to take a Mac OS update. What is this, Windows?

*When I said I was literally afraid to go into the back yard because I would get lost in the tall grass, I was not being literally. Allow me to stand here and watch your brain explode. Boom, babie.

Another unrelated note, I think the V key on my ancient apple keyboard is dying. Uh oh.