I did it. I snuck in some guitar playing. Dinner is going to be late tonight so I went straight from work to the new Les Paul.
I worked on rhythm parts for two really terrible songs. Les Paul Standard 50s into a Rock Your Repaired Amp The Klone overdrive pedal into a Vox AC15. Life felt good for a few minutes there. Excellent.
Up next is some hamburgers cooked on the grill where life will continue to feel good for a few more minutes.
Baby steps, babie. Baby steps.
More proof that I ain’t no prophet, right?
In the last post I wished everyone an easy Friday at work. Within 10 minutes of punching in this morning I got hit by a metaphorical bus known as one of our biggest customers. Everything is under control now, but yikes, eh?
Why does Apple’s podcast app suck so bad? Specifically on iPadOS. It keeps crashing and losing it’s place and what the hell, bro? I already listened to that Loki Episode 2 podcast, I don’t want to listen to it again, and I was halfway through this other Loki Episode 2 podcast so why are you starting from the beginning again? Also, where the hell are the new episodes of podcasts I subscribe to? They aren’t all a day late, are they? Come on, Apple. You want to lose to some crap fest like Stitcher? Or, heaven forbid, Spotify? Crud, babie. Crud. Get your podcast catching ass in gear, okay?
So, Loki… are they going to pull a fast one on us and have the TVA end up as the bad guys? If you think that’s a spoiler, read the title of this post again. No spoilers here, unless we’re talking about Fear the Walking Dead. I’ll spoil the shit out of that dumpster fire (no I won’t). Those of us who are still watching deserve it. Masochism, babie. Masochism.
I need to play guitar this weekend. I need to cut the grass, but I need to play guitar. Do you get where I’m coming from? While I need to watch the new Rick and Morty episode this weekend, I need to play guitar. Yeah, you’re picking up what I’m putting down.
Okay then. Back to work, fat boy. Back to work.
This video is a commercial but given the subject matter I don’t mind sharing it.
Gibson guitars and Alex Lifeson from Rush once designed a Les Paul model together. It was called the Axcess Les Paul, or Les Paul Axcess, or whatever. Despite Alex being pretty much the guitar god to me, and Les Pauls being my favorite guitars by far, the Axcess didn’t really do it for me. The look was just a little off, and a Les Paul with a Floyd Rose bridge just bothers me on a fundamental level. I watched Alex play them more times than I can count and he always sounded amazing, but that one just wasn’t for me.
He’s working with Epiphone now to make an affordable Axcess model. I’m sure it’s great, but again it’s not for me. This video is a four minute intro to the new guitars where he basically tells his entire history with Gibson. It’s pretty cool. The music playing is pieces of the two new instrumentals on his new website. It’s been kind of a busy week for old Lerxst.
For the record, Gibson did once release a custom shop copy of his ES-355 in a very limited quantity for an absolutely stunning price. I’d kill to get my mitts on one of those, but I’d likely have to sell my body for medial experiments in order to afford it.
The Mesa Boogie California Tweed is probably the only non-Fender amp I am seriously GASing over. It’s crazy expensive, but I hear it’s worth every penny.
It’s way out of my price range, even if we didn’t have two tuitions to pay for. Robbie just likes fantasizing about groovy gear sometimes.
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.
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.
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,
I took another music memo file from last month and worked it into a song. The one from earlier is lame. This one is lamer. Possibly lamest. Time will tell.
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.
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.
Inside the Red Head's Head 