Tag: Guitar

Boss

When I was a kid and starting to become obsessed with guitar gear, there weren’t a lot of options around. My local music stores carried pedals from DoD and Boss for the most part. You could find occasional Ibanez, MXR, or Electro Harmonix pedals, but for the most part it was DoD and Boss. The few pedals I owned were DoD. Every time I took a Boss pedal for a test drive I was massively underwhelmed. Those music store visits back in the late 1980’s lead to a lifetime of not liking Boss gear. To this day I have never owned a Boss pedal because I have never played through one that I liked. The closest I’ve come is a Keeley pedal (the Super Phat Mod) which is a modified version of a Boss Blues Driver pedal. I like the Keeley pedal, but I don’t love it (unlike my Keeley D&M Drive which I absolutely adore).

I have never consciously boycotted Boss, I just never wanted anything they sold…

Until now.

A few years ago a couple of companies released super sophisticated amp load boxes. Universal Audio put out the Ox, which seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Unfortunately you can almost buy a car with the amount of money you need to shell out for an Ox.* Boss released a similar item called the Tube Amp Expander. The reviews I watched made the thing look pretty amazing, though maybe not quite as amazing as the Ox. The price was similar though and I never gave it a second thought.

Not long ago Boss released a new product. It’s a smaller version of the Tube Amp Expander. It’s called the Tube Amp Expander Core. It has all of the functionality I would want but at a much lower price. Granted, $700 is a ton of money for something like this (in my book, at least) and I don’t know if that price is before or after the orange shit clown’s Japanese tariffs. It is a low enough cost to make me consider it, but probably still too high to actually pull the trigger. It would be really cool to be able to run a direct signal out of my Fender Deluxe Reverb and into my Audio Interface, or even directly into my Macintosh.

…….it’s Boss though…. if I tried one out, history dictates that I would be disappointed. Still…….. oh the places I could go with a box like that. We’ll have to see how the economy holds up in the near future. There’s a really good chance the orange shit clown could collapse the whole country which would take the decision to blow $700 on a reactive load box out of my hands, you know?

Anyway, here’s a video that I can drool over as I watch it over and over again.

*Slight exaggeration

Practice: Complete

Just got home from band practice. Lucy did not pull the football away from Charlie Brown.

My finger tips ARE KILLING ME. The last two songs we did I could barely play. My fingers just said, “yeah we’re done for the day” and that was it. Outside of that, things went pretty well. There probably won’t be a practice next week as our drummer is traveling, but after that I hope we can get onto something like a regular schedule.

238/365

Line Check: Complete

Band practice is supposed to start in 43 minutes. As of this moment we’ve all chimed in that we’re good to go for today. Fingers emphatically crossed that nothing changes.

I did a line check with all of the gear I want to bring today. I am massively downsizing the pedals and massively upscaling the amp situation. Also… I’m going to play the SG. I don’t know why. I am just feeling like today should be an SG day.

Everything is working. The new reverb pedal sounds cool. Here’s hoping nothing falls apart over the next 41 minutes and we actually have a practice today. It’s going to be painful. I have no calluses on my left hand finger tips. I’ve only played for about five minutes and already I am hurting, big time.

Bring it on, kids!

I Think We’re On

As of this moment, band practice is on for 6:00pm tonight. I’m swapping out my amp and my pedals so I have a bunch of things to test drive before I go. I might put new strings on one of the guitars while I’m at it. I have to clean the kitchen first though.

225/365

Friday at Last

Work has been good this week. No disasters, no scary moments. I did get a call from a customer (service programmers, like me, are not supposed to get calls directly from customers) but I was able to help the guy and it actually felt pretty good. Nope, this past week was a good week at work.

It was the rest of civilization that blew chunks. My wife and I agreed when we discussed it last night that this week has been the longest six months of our lives.

I need to do something creative this weekend. I NEED TO. Photography. Let’s go out and snap some pictures! Let’s play with the new long lens I bought a few months ago. Let’s play with the 120 film camera I bought a few months ago. Let’s go to the ocean and watch the sunrise and shoot all sorts of good stuff. Of course we should check the weather first… snow and rain today and tomorrow and rain on Sunday. Well you can just bite me, mother nature.

Music it is then! Guitar! I will play guitar this weekend if it kills me! I don’t know if we’re going to have a band practice or not. I’ll post something to our messenger thread later today (when it’s not pre-8:00am so that the other three guys don’t think I am weird and obsessed or anything) and see what’s up. If not then I need to find something else to do.

I do not want this weekend to be spent doom scrolling news sites and reading stories about the collapse of american democracy that will build up inside of me until I have a stroke. No. That would be bad, even if it is more or less inevitable. I must play guitar! I! Must! Play! Guitar!

Gotta

Gotta go to IKEA to return something.

Gotta go to Best Buy to return something.

Gotta go into the city, Cambridge, to pick something up.

Gotta find two 9v power plugs for guitar pedals. I know I have a bunch of them around here somewhere. Probably need to grab a power strip too.

Gotta setup the guitar rig I want to use for the next practice (tomorrow?). Guitar (Gibson Les Paul Standard) -> Duel overdrive pedal (Keeley D&M Drive) -> Digital reverb pedal (TC Electronic Hall of Fame 2) -> Amp (Fender Bassbreaker 18/30 which does not have a built in reverb, hence the digital reverb pedal). We’re going simple for a while. My big pedal board is making a ton of awful, squealy noise and I want to rip it apart and see where it’s coming from (guaranteed it’s the power supply).

Gotta write and record some music. There are only three days left in March and I haven’t written or recorded any music this month. I still want to try and get something in for the RPM Challenge’s Record Every Month challenge. Probably not likely, but we’ll see.

I also need a shower because… ewww, gross.

Delivery

The last time I bought something form guitar center’s website they gave me a delivery date, told me the package was out for delivery, and then didn’t deliver it. They did this two or three days in a row. When it finally arrived they had failed to pack the power cable and when I complained they asked why I needed it… it was a guitar amplifier… was I supposed to use it without power?

I had forgotten about all of that when, this weekend, I ordered a pedal from guitar center’s website. Today is the delivery day. It has been showing as out for delivery since 9:36am. The estimated delivery time says it should arrive between 11:30am and 2:30pm. It is now 2:47 and it has not been delivered yet.

Yeah, I should have known better. I’m never getting that (relatively) cheap little digital reverb pedal, am I. I’m an idiot. Just call me sucker.

ADDENDUM: I got an email notification saying the package was delivered. I guess all it took was me complaining about it on the internet. Heh, as if.