Gibson Firebird

That Pedal Show on YouTube released a new episode yesterday and it is about 90 minutes exclusively on the Gibson Firebird.

I haven’t quite watched all of it yet, but I’m down to the last few minutes.

Seriously… for the good of society (as well as my bank account) please… whatever you do… don’t let me go near a music store for a few days at least. If I walk into a Guitar Center (or something similar) I am absolutely not going to be able to stop myself and I am 100% walking out of that store with a Firebird.

For the love of all that is good in this universe, don’t let me go into a music store.

Band Practice

Overall, tonight’s band practice went well. Well… as well as could be expected. My fingers hurt a lot and my arms got really tired, really quickly. My playing was pretty piss poor, but on the whole it went well. We probably won’t practice next week, but we should be back the week after that. There was serious talk of looking for a gig around Halloween.

I’m loving the Les Paul Standard into the AC15. Last time I had some pedal issues, but I cleared it all up tonight. The Ryra Klon clone into the Mr Vermin Rat clone was -chef’s kiss-. The Tri Pi ’70 Big Muff clone into the Ryra though… -chef’s kiss times 10-.

Practice Prep

There will be a band practice tonight. Oh, happy day!

Homework for this week was to learn a song. It is arguably the worst song every written. “I Was Made for Loving You” by Kiss.

Oh my, what pandora’s box of hellness are we opening?

Serial Numbers

A few years ago I found a website that lets you use the serial number from your Gibson guitar to get information about your Gibson guitar. At the time I had two Gibson guitars. I’ll look them up again, then I will look up my two newer Gibson guitars.

First, my Les Paul Custom:

Your guitar was made at the
Nashville Plant, TN, USA
on September 18th, 1978
Production Number: 27

Next, my ES-335 Pro:

Your guitar was made at the
Kalamazoo Plant, MI, USA
on December 5th, 1979
Production Number: 127

Okay then, those are my two older guitars which might technically be considered “vintage.” Now let us check on the two guitars from the 21st century.

Start with my SG Standard:

Well… this is weird. There are two hits.

Your guitar was made at the
Nashville Plant, TN, USA
on March 10th, 2012
Production Number: 286

Your guitar was made at the
Nashville Plant, TN, USA
in 2018
Production Number: 2258

Right. I bought this one new after Gibson declared bankruptcy in 2018. It actually has a stamp on the back of the headstock right under the serial number that says, “Made in USA 2018 Model.” I guess that means it’s a 2018.

Okay, now lastly my Les Paul Standard 50’s:

Your guitar was made at the
Nashville Plant, TN, USA
in 2023
Production Number: 210004

Huh… right… so the guitar that my wife bought me for my 50th birthday back in 2021 was made in 2023… huh… so looks like the app doesn’t know how to handle the serial numbers from 2021. I guess I should Google it to see if I can find anything…

Turns out they changed the serial number format in 2019 and now we have this info:

It was made on November 16, 2020 and is production number 42.

I can tell by the look on all of your faces that you are fascinated by this.

Finally!

1,591 days

The search for a new singer for the band is over. The new singer is our old singer. He’s back and it’s fantastic! It probably means we won’t be changing the name now, but I can get over that.

It was like riding a bike tonight, especially given that my guitar playing sucked. Well, I was doing fine for about 25 minutes and then my fingers decided they were toast and they stopped doing what I wanted them to do. I expect that my sloppy playing on Stevie Wonder’s Superstition will cause the ghosts of Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughn to haunt me tonight.

That’s okay, We’ll get back into shape soon enough. I seriously want us to book a gig for October or November, just to push us back into form. We had one practice tonight and now we’ll be off for the next two weeks. We need to spark some serious motivation, you know? Let’s book a gig!

As for gear notes, I played my Les Paul Standard through my Vox AC15. I have a sneaking suspicion that is going to be my primary rig for the near future. I put my clone of a ProCo Rat pedal onto the board and completely forgot that it, like the Vox amp, has it’s tone control backward (it cuts rather than boosts) so when I was trying to make the tone less trebly I was actually making it more trebly. I’ll fix that next time… if I remember that I did things backwards. We’ll see.

Big Night for the Band

There is a high potential that tonight will be a big night for the band. If things work out the way they seem to be working out (and there are still a couple of hours for it to go wrong), tonight will be the first band practice with all four of us since before the last gig on February 1, 2020.

Now I know I’ve said this a bunch of times before, but it sounds like whatever was keeping our singer away has been resolved and he seems to be fully on board again. Like I said, it could all blow up any minute now, but at this particular instant in time, it’s happening.

I put new strings on the Les Paul Standard. I’m nearly ready to go. I just have to pack a few things into a bag to take along with me. My fingers are firmly crossed.

I also used the Gibson branded multi-tool that came with the guitar for the first time. Cool, eh?

I had to take the back cover off of the pickup selector switch to spin the whole thing a little in the counter clockwise direction and then tighten it all up. The switch came a little loose recently and when I tightened it by hand from the face of the guitar, the switch moved a little and it was facing in a new, slightly awkward direction. I think it’s all set now. In further 2020 Les Paul Standard 50’s news, is there a little issue brewing with the nut near the high E string? Maybe. It’s tough to tell. At least I have a relationship with a luthier now so if it needs help I know where to take it.

New Mix

I mixed a song a couple of nights ago but didn’t get around to posting it to my alonetone or hearthis.at accounts so it just sat there on my laptop. Now it is out there for the whole wide world to ignore.

I think it kinda sounds like crap, but the song itself is okay, I think. You can probably hear the edits in the chorus because I wrote a melody without leaving any space for that pesky little breathing thing. Oops.

The lead guitar was through a nearly cranked amp. That was fun. Noisy as hell, but fun.

The Collector

Daily writing prompt

Do you have any collections?

View all responses

Collections? You mean like, do I collect bad decisions? Failures? Things like that?

I was a baseball card collector when I was a kid. I was pretty obsessed. I still have them all. They are in a box somewhere in the cellar. I haven’t added to the collection in ages though. I can’t really say I still collect them. I collected music on vinyl/cassette tapes/CDs. Most of them are gone. I had ripped them all so now all of that music lives simultaneously in a hard drive and in my iTunes Match account. Is that even still a thing? Streaming services are pretty evil (from the musical artist’s point of view) but they are so effin’ convenient from the listener’s perspective that I can’t really stay away. I want to, but I can’t. Thanks, Apple Music. I used to have a pretty significant collection of books. Mostly paperbacks in the horror genre. Thank you, Stephen King and Clive Barker. Almost all of them are gone now. I used to have a significant VHS/DVD/Blue Ray collection too. Almost all of those are gone too.

If I had to fess up to having a collection of anything these days it would probably be electric guitars. I have four. They are all Gibsons. A 1978 Les Paul Custom, a 1979 ES-335 Pro, a 2017 SG Standard, and a 2020 Les Paul Standard ’50’s. I would very much like for this collection to grow, but it’s so expensive. I could extend this to guitar gear in general as I have a few amplifiers and a slew of effects pedals. It feels cooler to say that I collect guitars though.

I could also say that I collect office desks. I have four, technically. One for personal computer stuff in the cellar. Right next to it is a work from home desk that I don’t use very much anymore. Another is upstairs in my step son’s currently unoccupied bed room. That’s where I work from home for the most part. Then there’s one in the actual office. I’m sitting at that one right now.

We have two cats… does that count as a collection? Probably not.

Yeah, let’s go with guitars. That’s my answer for today’s question. Thank you and good night.

What Am I Doing?

What am I doing? I don’t know. I feel like the universe is in a weird place right now (yes, I know that mathematically that sentence does not make sense). I don’t know.

I had the opportunity to play my guitar tonight and I sat on my ass on the couch watching TV. I watched an episode of Torchwood. I’m trying to get back into that. While I was on the AppleTV app formerly known as HBO Max I figured I’d maybe start watching The Leftovers again. I watched the first episode. I’ll go to my grave saying that the second season of that show is television perfection. The first and third seasons are great too. The first season is just so soul crushingly depressing though. It is tough to get through and I suspect that watching one episode is part of the reason why I feel like I am in a screwy state of mind right now.

The point of all of this though is that I could have played guitar tonight and I did not. Ugh.

I had two slices of a small pizza for dinner tonight. The second one came back for another view. Oh yeah, TMI Alert here. Yeah. It went down, but it didn’t stay down. Shit. I ate too much too fast and paid the price.

I’m on the youtubes right now watching a photography channel. It’s a pro photographer telling me I should use Aperture Priority instead of Manual Mode. But what if I want to use Manual Mode? I use Aperture Priority a lot with one of my film cameras. The term Aperture Priority wasn’t invented yet when the camera was built, it’s called Auto on the camera, but it’s the same thing.. I use it because the light meter inside the view finder is often hard to read. I like using Manual though. It makes me feel like I know what I am doing even though I don’t really know what I’m doing. The video also says to keep the aperture away from the extremes. Don’t use f2.0 or f16, use f5.6 or f8. You don’t get the blurry background as much as you do with f2, but you get some which is more than f16 gives. The video says the images will be clearer in the middle ground apertures. I think I had figured that one out on my own and was starting to come around to this way of thinking. Then again… I really dig all that blurry background.

Miss Robin Sparkles says hello.

It’s Monday night, just about bed time. Almost 10:00pm. At this time four days from now we’ll be about seven hours into our road trip to Florida. That’s the main reason why I am in such a weird headspace tonight. I just want to go. I want to leave now. I don’t want to worry about work or anything outside of travel. I just want to go. I have a shit load of stuff to do before we go, but I just want to go.

Ugh… I should just go to bed.

Looking ahead to tomorrow. There is likely going to be an NHL predictions post for the third round. I am hoping the Edmonton Oilers will win their game seven tonight against Vancouver. If that happens there will be exactly one team that I kinda like in the Conference Finals. If they lose, there will be three teams I hate one one team I don’t care about. My heart is officially no longer in the NHL playoffs at all.

Also, expect lots of posts where I talk about how I just want to jump in the car with Jen, my wife, and head out on our trip. I have vacation-itis right now. Big time.

Music Fail

I wrote a post the other day detailing all of the musical stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend. Care to guess how much I accomplished? Go on, guess. Did you guess absolutely nothing? If you did, you guessed correctly. Good work.

Nothing.

There was a facebook messenger chat yesterday where our former singer, who I wasn’t sure if he wanted back into the band or not, started talking about where to book gigs. Does that mean he officially wants back in? Feels that way to me! Here’s hoping our singer search has ended. I’ll let you know.

Anyway, I took pictures this morning in the hopes they will guilt me into playing some guitar tomorrow before work. Cross those fingers, Mr. Red Head.