Tag: Guitar Gear

Amp Sim

The RPM Challenge opened for sign ups for 2025 today. That seems a smidge early, but who cares. I haven’t signed up yet but I will. Soon. I am starting to feel the pull. I am starting to feel the anticipation. I am starting to look at my pedal board and recording setup at home and think about things I might want to change for this February’s challenge.

Last year I went entirely direct input into my USB audio interface. I have two amps with cab sim line outs and I used them both. Over the course of the last year or so there have been a ton of very good amp simulation pedals released into the world. Most are grossly expensive. TC Electronics has a series that is reasonably priced. Do I want to try one? They have one the sims a Fender Deluxe Reverb. I went looking for one on amazon the other day and they appeared to be out of stock. I checked again today at a couple of music vendor sites and they are definitely available. I must have misread the amazonian’s site somehow.

I would only ever want to use a device like this for home recording when there are people in the house. Otherwise I am playing through a real amp and just try to stop me. The demos for these pedals make it seem like they sound pretty good. Should I try one out? Should I take the amp sim plunge?

Or should I just splurge on an expensive new guitar? Or, should I splurge on an expensive new guitar?

Want

This triggered the old Gear Acquisition Syndrome in a major way. Rotary speaker effect is the only tradition guitar effect I don’t have. If this sounds half as good in real life as it does I. This demo then… oh boy is it a good one. Want want want.

Blah Blah Wah

As a lifelong, slightly obsessed, devotee of all things wah wah pedal related, I wasn’t in the market for a new model. Seriously. My Real McCoy Customs RMC10 wah pedal is spectacular.

And then Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson’s gear company, Lerxst, announced a limited edition wah pedal called the Blah Blah Wah and… well… He’s released two amps, a guitar, and now three pedals. I’ve managed to not go all fanboy and buy any of them and goodness knows it’s been a struggle for me.

But a wah pedal… my personal kryptonite… How can I resist?

I’ll tell you how. Two ways. First and foremost, it’s a limited edition. They are only making 500 of them. I’m betting they are already sold out. I kinda hope so. The other way is that it was made in collaboration with Morley and… well… I’ve never really been a fan of Morley stuff. I used a Morley volume pedal for years and it was okay. I didn’t love it. It got the job done. I don’t know how much this new pedal costs (I’m frankly afraid to look) but I’m not sure I’d want to shell out any noteworthy amount of money for a Morley. No offense to the good folks at Morley, I’m sure they make excellent stuff, it’s just not my bag, babie.

So I will likely pass on this new product… but if they do a full production run rather than a limited edition… I’m probably going to cave and get one for Rush fanboy reasons alone.

Stuff Going On

I have two things going on today besides work. First, I had to visit my father to help out with that thing that he needs help with that I am not going into details on. I usually do it after work, but tonight there is the second thing going on. Tonight is the first band practice in about a month or so.

I just got home from my father’s place. All went well. He’s good for the day. Nice. When I got home I logged back in to work and sent off a facebook messenger message to the band. Are we still on? As of right now we are, but one band member may have traffic issues. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.

I also just ordered a capo from amazon. I know I have one somewhere, but I just can’t find it. I’ll have to go with the alternate tuning solution tonight if we play that one new song. I’ll have a capo for the next practice, I promise.

I’m not sure how dinner is going to work tonight. We still need to figure that out. I expect it’s going to be protein supplements for ol’ Robbie, but I want my beloved bride to have something nice.

Okay, back to work with you, Mr. Robert.

Friday

It has been a pretty quiet day at work today (JINX!) apart from my brief stomach rebellion. I have 32 minutes to go until I can punch out for the day. I am starting to day dream about the weekend a little.

Music. I recorded a vocal track for one song on Thursday. I have a couple more songs that could do with some car music vocals. I have to practice for Sunday’s band rehearsal as well. I have nine songs to brush up on. I don’t know if we have a working PA system or not, but I did pick up a replacement for my dead Shure SM58 microphone. If our old, dinky little PA still works I’ll take it for a test drive. My Vox AC15 amp is in the rehearsal room along with my great big use-with-the-band pedal board. It’ll be nice to visit with my sweet RYRA The Klone overdrive pedal again.

I suddenly find myself in the middle of a whole bunch of TV shows. The X-Files epic rewatch continues, and we’re in season seven which means the quality is taking a steady nose dive. Uh oh. Only a few episodes to go until we reach the two season mostly-Mulder-free stretch. Yikes. I have a new episode of Star Trek Discovery (Disco) to watch. I have a new episode of Manhunt to watch. I have 6-7 episodes of Fallout left. I’ve watched the first two. I didn’t expect it to be so… goofy. I never played the video game so I really didn’t know what to expect. Silliness was not on my menu though. I like the show so far even though I don’t really know what’s happening yet. I’m caught up on Star Wars The Bad Batch. There are only a few more episodes left and I am thinking about rewatching the whole final season. I don’t know. There’s so much else to watch. I’m in the middle of Ripley on Netflix too. It’s pretty twisted. I never read the book or saw the movie so this one is all new to me too. I am enjoying it in a sick and twisted kinda way.

What else is going on? I am hoping to spend some quality time hanging out with my wife, of course. That’s the best part of the weekend. She mentioned she’s going to have to work a lot, which is a bummer, but we’ll make time. I hope to cook for her now and then. Lunches and maybe dinners? We use one of those dinner delivery service things. You know, where they send you all of the ingredients and a recipe with (somewhat) detailed instructions and you prepare the meal yourself. We are supposed to get a delivery today. I like it best when we cook those together. I find that both less stressful and generally enjoyable. Mostly. Some of them are still stressful even when we gang up on them. Does everyone think they are stressful or is it just us?

I did not promise myself that I would avoid the sugar free bakery in Salem, NH this week… so when I go out to do errands… yeah, I am probably going to buy some cookies there. I can stop any time, really. I promise I can stop any time. Totally.

Okay. 20 minutes until quitting time. I haven’t had anything to eat in two hours and 56 minutes and my stomach is starting to ask me why it’s empty. Three hours is usually how long it takes for my stomach to wake up after a meal. We’re pretty much right on target. Here’s hoping I don’t mess up with my snack on the drive home. A repeat of The Foamies… in the car… yeah, that would be annoying. I keep a spit up cup in the car, though I have never used it. Here’s hoping we keep the streak alive!

TMI?

Anyone Else Play Guitar Today?

Hey everyone, raise your hand if you were able to sneak some guitar playing in before work this morning.

Robert timidly raises his hand.

Yup, I recorded lead parts for two songs. I now officially have no songs in progress that are currently ready for any guitar tracks. I have to do some MIDI work tonight, and maybe some car vocals in the morning, and then I’ll have some stuff ready to work on.

The Great Guitar Pick Journey of 2024 continues as well. I tried another new one today. Much of my internet research pointed to Dunlop as the brand to go with. I tried Max Grip first (1.14mm) and those were okay, but no as good as the Fender picks I’d been using for ages. They have little grippy things on them that are supposed to keep them from spinning around between your fingers as you play, and that worked but it felt awkward. I am sure I could get used to it but I moved on to option two this morning (for now at least). 

Option two is Dunlop Tortex Jazz III. This one was much better than the Max Grip in all ways but one. The little guy is just tiny. I kept going into muscle memory mode and literally missed the strings. It’s just small. It feels really good in my hand, and the overwhelming majority of suggestions I’ve received in my online questioning said to try them. I’ll stick with it for a while, but I am wondering if they make the same pick only bigger. 

I have two other options that I want to try before I start looking outside of Dunlop, but I haven’t bought either of them yet. One of them is pretty expensive for a pic. We’ll see.

Anyway, here are the obligatory pictures from this morning’s lead guitar playing extravaganza.

147/365
147/365
Dig those shiny new frets
Two amps… I ran them both direct out though. No speakers. Sadface.

The Guitar Pick Journey

A few years ago I went on a journey down the guitar strings rabbit hole, looking for a new brand of strings to play. I eventually settled on one (Stringjoy) and have never looked back.

I think it’s time for a similar voyage, this time searching for new picks. Silly, right? Picks… those little tiny things. How can they make that much of a difference? Well, trust me… they make an epically huge difference.

I put a post on the /guitar subreddit today asking for suggestions. I’ve had over 20 responses in the last hour or so. So many ideas. So many things to try. So epically epic of a journey to undertake.

Bring it on, brothers and sisters!

Thread

I feel gross using the facebook/instagram owned twitter alternative app, Threads. Really gross. 

That isn’t quite enough to stop me right now though. I am such a social media hypocrite/whore.

Anyway, someone asked, “what are your guitar goals for 2024” or something along those lines. I responded with a few. I figured I would port the response over to this post and maybe add a thing or two because I ran out of characters on the app. First, does the embed code work? I tried just sharing a link the other day to see if that pulled anything in, but it didn’t. I found that each post includes some embedding HTML code. Betcha a dollar it doesn’t work…

Post by @reallytallredhead
View on Threads

https://www.threads.net/embed.js

Based on the preview function in the editor, it didn’t work. Oh well. Here’s the text I wrote:

I want my cover band to finally get back together after a covid-hiatus and an exiting singer.

I want to write a shit ton of songs, record listenable demoes of all of them, and maybe have one or two that don’t objectively suck.

I want to play a bar gig for the first time since Feb 1, 2020.

After getting my 1978 Les Paul refretted a couple of months ago, I want to do the same with my 1979 ES-335 along with maybe getting a new wiring harness so that all four of my guitars will be in gig shape.

Me: https://www.threads.net/@reallytallredhead/post/C1ch8b9LyTx

Yes, kids… I just quoted myself. I dun did that.

Anyway, there are a couple of things to add.

I want to replace all of my guitar straps with heavy, leather straps like the one I have on my 50th birthday present Les Paul Standard. I have amazon shipping one for my Les Paul Custom and it should arrive tomorrow.

I want to buy either a Gibson Les Paul Junior, a Gibson Firebird, a Gibson Les Paul Standard with P-90 pickups instead of humbuckers, or a Gibson Les Paul Deluxe. The order I wrote them is from most wanted to least most wanted. The chances of me buying any of these is about 0.0000001%… so there’s a chance.

With all of these goals in mind, mostly I would just settle for playing more. That’s what I really want to do.

Two Rush Items to Note

I have two things I want to comment on that refer to members of Rush.

First, I watched the second episode of Are Bass Players Human Too this morning before work. It focused on Robert Trujillo of Metallica. I knew nothing about this guy as I’m not much of a metal fan, never mind a Metallica fan. I saw them in 1989 when Jason Newsted was their bass player. I guess Robert Trujillo played for Ozzy Osbourne back in the 90’s. I saw Ozzy in the 90’s but Geezer Butler was playing bass at that time. I guess I sort of missed him twice then? Not really.

Anyway, Robert Trujillo is the current owner of Jaco Pastorius’ Fender Jazz bass. The one he ripped the frets out of to turn it into a fretless bass (but what did he put into the gaps? How did that work?). Watching Geddy Lee play Jaco’s bass, even if just for a few seconds, was something that I did not realize I needed in my life. It was a quietly magical moment.

On a side note, Metallica’s bass player owns Jaco Pastorius’ bass, which to many is the holy grail of electric bass guitars, and Metallica’s guitar player, Kirk Hammett, owns Peter Green/Gary Moore’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard, which to many (including me*) is the holy grail of electric guitars. How did that happen? Does Metallica’s drummer own Keith Moon’s kit or anything? That would be too weird for my tiny brain to process.

Anyway, on to Alex Lifeson. I mentioned yesterday that Lerxst has released an overdrive pedal. It’s called By Tor. The first write up I read said that it had two channels that shared drive and tone controls. I don’t think that’s the case. I think one channel is just a volume boost and only has a level control. The other channel is an overdrive which has level, gain, and tone controls. That makes more sense.

Check out this demo from (the youtube legend) Andy from Reverb. I started watching this last night but had to shut it off before I finished. I’m posting it here so that I won’t forget to watch the rest of it later tonight.

*Peter Green’s Les Paul is probably my definition of The Guitar Holy Grail. The only guitar that might challenge for that tile would be Eric Clapton’s 1960 Les Paul Standard that is generally known as The Beano Burst. It was stolen in 1966 and has never resurfaced. I’m sure it’s out there somewhere, but unless some collector gives it back to Clapton we will probably never see it again. The reason it might not supersede Greeny is simply that I prefer the spec of a 1959 Les Paul Standard to the spec of a 1960. The neck is supposed to be thicker on 1959’s. By that logic I would probably prefer 1958’s to 1959’s as the neck is supposed to be even thicker on 1958’s. How’s that for cork sniffing? A little too much, maybe? Nope. It’s never too much.

By-Tor Overdrive Pedal

After announcing two new amplifiers made in partnership with Mojotone and sold under the name Lerxst, Alex Lifeson unveiled an overdrive pedal today, again made by Lerxst/Mojotone, called the By-Tor.

It’s a duel pedal with an overdrive and a boost. You can select the order they run in, which is a nice feature. The two channels share drive and tone controls though. I’m not sure how that works. Also, the price is $300 which is a little too ouchie for me these days. The $2k+ Omega is crazy expensive but about normal for a 50 watt tube head. $300 for a drive/boost feels a smidge high to me.