I did some playing tonight, which seems to be the routine during my little quarantine adventure. Strangely, with 45 songs in progress I currently don’t have any songs waiting on guitar parts. All 45 songs have rhythm guitars complete, and the songs that don’t have leads yet also don’t have vocals yet, and I don’t like recording leads before vocals so… I currently am not waiting on any guitars.

That is so weird.

On a gear front, Prior to our little quarantine adventure I had not been using the pedal board I use with the band, so I have not been able to try the Wampler Plexi Drive Mini at 18 volts. I like to use the Plexi Mini for noisy, distorted, rawk sounds, and I like to use some form of a Klon style pedal for boosting cleanish sounds. I also like to run the Klonish (in the bedroom recording board it’s a Ryra The Klone pedal, and on the band board it’s a Klon KTR) first so that it pushes the holy hell out of the noisier pedal that follows it. Unfortunately, when I put the Plexi Mini after the Klon or the Klon Klone and then into a low (15 watt) wattage amp I end up with a sloppy, awful, over compressed, squashed mess. In the bedroom setup I am only able to run pedals at 9 volts. On the band board I have a couple of 18 volt options and I thought that running the Plexi Mini at 18 volts* would give me enough headroom to clean things up. It worked. Mostly. The Plexi Drive at 18 volts after the signal output avalanche that is the Klon sounded a million times better than at 9 volts, but it was still a little squishy. Hmmmm… will running into a higher wattage amp fix what’s left of the problem? I bet it might. Where is my Fender Deluxe Reverb when I need it?**

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*There are not many pedals that will work at 18 volts. Most are designed to run on nine volts (as in a nine volt battery) and if you give them 18 volts the circuitry will fry. The Plexi Mini works at 18. My Malaise Forever Black Lives Matter can run at 18 volts. The two overdrive pedals I own by the racist frat boy prick in California that the Black Lives Matter is based on can run at 18 volts. That’s it. Any of the rest of the crap load of pedals I own or have owned would melt down (figuratively… and literally?) if I plugged it into an 18 volt power source.

**My Fender Deluxe Reverb has been at Mike the Bass Player’s house since February of 2020. It’s still there. Waiting for me.

I took two of my groupings of random riff ideas and worked them both into song forms, and then added rhythm guitars. Then I added leads to the only song I had that was ready for leads.

Now I am going to exercise for 11 minutes and then I am going to go into a coma due to exhaustion.