WorshipGuitarist

I must enjoy going to the post office, because I’m always selling and buying pedals. This week I sold my Teese Wheels of Fire wah and my Catalinbread Silver Kiss. These are both nice pedals, but they didn’t quite fit for a couple of reasons.

The Teese WoF is a little too tweakable for my playing style. There are three external knobs to control volume, bass, and q (it determines the peak of the sweep) as well as an internal trim knob for the Foxrox fuzz buffer. I could never manage to get a full wah tone at unity volume that didn’t overload or sound too thin or full or whatever. I’m replacing it with the Teese Picture wah. It’s supposed to be an extremely faithful reproduction of the old Italian wahs that Hendrix and Clapton used in the 60s. The sparkly blue enclosure looks pretty freakin’ sweet, too.

The Silver Kiss was hard to part with. On one hand, I love the tone. Great medium to high gain tones are there, but the EQ is voiced a little too brightly. Even when the high knob is at or below 9:00, there’s still a little too much fizz for me. Supposedly, the MKII corrects this issue, so I may end up re-buying one at some point in the future, but for right now I wanted to try something different. To replace it, I ordered a Barber Small Fry. A buddy of mine has one, and it sounds great when he uses it. I’ve heard/read nothing but good things about it on the online forums, and I’m pretty stoked to get it.

This weekend may be interesting, since I’ll be playing without a wah (not that big of a deal), and no dedicated distortion boxes (kind of a big deal). I’ll have a couple of boosts to use, so that should be enough. Hopefully, my new cab will be here either today or tomorrow, so I should be able to report on that next week. Stay tuned.

In honor of National Talk Like A Pirate Day, I have two questions:

1) How do you pronounce the word Caribbean? Is is “cuh-rib-bee-yuhn” or “care-ruh-bee-yuhn” or what?

2) Pirates vs. Ninjas - who wins?

Discuss.

There are a couple of uses for boost pedals. One use is to create a pure volume increase without changing your basic sound. Another use is to push the preamp section of your amp to create a more distorted tone without drastically effecting the overall tone of the amp. I want to focus on the second part.

There are two stages in which gain is added to your signal in a guitar amplifier. The first is the preamp stage (12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, etc) and the second is the power amp stage (EL84, EL34, 6L6, 6V6, etc). If you have a master volume control, you can crank the gain and turn the master volume down. This causes your preamp tubes to get hot and start clipping, while your power amp tubes stay relatively cool. I don’t have a master volume on my amp, so the details on your setup will be a little different if your amp has one.

I start by turning the amp up to about 1:00 on the gain knob. As I mentioned, I don’t have a master volume control, so my volume increases as the gain increases. This setting allows me to play lightly and get a nice clean tone, but I can also hit the strings harder and get some crunch.

Stepping on a boost ramps up the signal that I’m sending to the preamp. When this beefed-up signal hits the preamp, it causes it to clip (or distort) more than it did before. If I had my amp on a lower gain setting, or if I had an amp with more clean headroom, the boost would simply increase the volume without adding any gain.

Basically, I’m using the boost as a kind of distortion pedal doesn’t color the basic character of my amp too much. Does that make sense?

I don’t think that I’ve ever posted anything about this here, but my wife and I have been foster parenting a little boy for the last 8 months. He was brought to our home directly from the hospital when he was 2 days old. We got into the foster parenting thing with adoption as the end goal, and it looks like it’s finally going to happen. Right now, everything is on track for National Adoption Day (November 17) to be the day.

We have another son who is 5 years old, and we are all very excited for this to be happening. We’re planning a big turnout at the courthouse on the 17th, and we’re having t-shirts printed that have his Mii avatar printed on the front. We’re hoping that the judge will wear one. It should be a good day.

Here’s a quick update on the boost situation. My buddy finished the boost over the weekend and had it ready for me to try out on Sunday morning. I got it set during sound check and used it during both services. In fact, it’s pretty much the only pedal that I used for dirt. I tried the Silver Kiss for some added gain during a solo, but it changed the character of the amp a little too much.

The boost that he had ready for me this weekend is kind of a dirty boost, as opposed to a clean boost. It not only boosts the overall volume output, but it adds a little gain. I had to set the level pretty low with my Les Paul, or else it gets a little too “woolly,” for lack of a better word. [Have I mentioned that I love that LP? It is an amazing instrument.] I need to try out the boost at higher levels with my ‘94 Strat.

He’s working on a mosfet clean boost this week, and I think that I’ll probably use both of them. One for crunch and one for leads. Maybe I’ll look at some stacking options. If this works out, I may just eschew distortion pedals altogether. It seems silly to use solid state pedals (transistor and diode clipping) for distortion when you’ve got a great tube amplifier just begging to be cranked.

Speaking of which, I’m really beginning to love the Reeves Custom 6. I think that I’m finally figuring out how to use it properly. Playing with a loud tube amp is very different from using modelers or a clean amp with pedals. I have it turned up to about 1:00 on the gain (no master volume on this amp), and it can go from clean to crunch depending on your pick attack. Stepping on a boost makes the signal hit the preamp stage harder and causes it to clip (or distort) a little more. It’s pretty amazing how versatile this setup is.

I got a new empty cab from Avatar Speakers on ebay this weekend for a pretty ridiculous price. I already have a 12″ speaker cab, but it’s not that great. I’m really eager to check it out and hear the difference. I wanted to get a 2×12″ cab, but it’d be too big for the isolation box that I’m using right now.

I guess that’s it for now. I hope that someone is able to glean some insight from all my rambling… =)

Wow, this is just too horrific for words. I was searching for some guitar ensemble pieces for my guitar class and came across this arrangement of Enter Sandman for jazz ensemble.

Our long-time drummer has gone off to school, and it’s really tough without him. He was just solid. He could listen to pretty much anything and play it right away. We never really had to worry about him not being able to play something.

Our new drummer is a high school student. He’s not bad, but he’s not nearly as confident. He used to be on the drumline in the marching band, so sitting behind the set hasn’t always been his main thing. He’s getting better all the time, but he still doesn’t play aggressively enough for my taste. He’ll be graduating this year and going off to school next fall, so we already need to start thinking about his replacement.

Anyway, we had practice last night and we were drummerless. It was really tough to try to keep things together. I don’t know why we even had practice. We’re doing a lot of upbeat tunes this weekend, and it just sounded like chaos without drums. Hopefully everyone will be at soundcheck early enough to go over everything. We’ll see…

Well, it seems like I just posted about getting a Lovepedal CoT50, but I just sold it in search of something else. It’s a very cool little pedal, but I couldn’t quite bond with it in a live situation. I was hoping that it could be my medium gain rhythm pedal, but it didn’t quite work out like that. It only has the one control (labeled ‘bias’) and as you turn it up, both the gain and volume increases. For me to get the amount of distortion that I wanted, the volume would be just a little too loud. I really liked the tone that I was getting out of it, but there was just too much of it. If I backed the bias control down so that the volume was right, the tone was a little too thin. Oh well, the search goes on…

Anyway, I like to push my amp so that it’s kinda gritty, so I rarely play totally clean. I can be pretty clean if I don’t dig in too hard with my right hand or if I back off the guitar volume a little. I’m looking for a pedal to really slam the front end of my amp but doesn’t totally color the tone too much.

Having said all that, a boost seems like the thing for me. Here are a few of the options that I am considering:

1) Catalinbread Super Chile Picoso
2) Barber Launch Pad
3) MI Audio Boost ‘n’ Buff
4) ZVEX Super Hard On - meaning that it’s super hard on your amp =)

Right now I’m leaning toward the Super Chile Picoso. It’s pretty small and not too expensive. I have the Catalinbread Silver Kiss and I’m pretty happy with it. [The Silver Kiss can be used as a boost if you lower the gain control, but I really like it as my high gain pedal. Maybe I could get another one...] I’ve heard a lot of positive stuff about the Barber, but it’s kinda big and my pedalboard is already pretty cramped. The MI Audio is supposed to be pretty cool, and it has the added bonus of being a line buffer when the boost is not engaged. The ZVEX is supposed to be awesome, but it’s by far the most expensive choice.

A fifth option is that a buddy of mine is working on a homemade boost. He’s our rhythm guitarist and he’s been dabbling in pedal design lately. He told me that he might have a prototype ready for me to check out tonight, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ve been playing around with a fuzz face clone that he designed for the last week, and it’s pretty nice. I’m not a big fuzz guy, but it’s been pretty fun to play around with.

In other gear news, I’ll be ordering a new speaker cab for my amp pretty soon. I’m currently using a 1×12″ closed-back cab, and I’ll be getting another 1×12″, but this one will be open-back. I have not been happy with my tone lately. For whatever reason, my current cab kinda squashes the bass frequencies, and it’s especially noticeable with medium- to high-gain rhythms on the E and A strings. Pretty much any “chugga chugga” palm-muting parts get totally lost on the bottom.

Here’s the new cab that I’m getting:

It should match my amp: a Reeves Custom 6 (in orange, of course).

Does anyone else find it hard to listen to the music that you grew up listening to?

I’ve still got a lot of music on my iPod from high school and I usually skip those tracks when they come up on shuffle. This list includes anything from Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, and Hendrix to Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, The Black Crowes, and Soundgarden. Well, I still listen to a lot of Soundgarden, but I can pretty much always skip the other guys (unless it’s a less-heard track like “Spanish Castle Magic” on Axis: Bold as Love).

Even though all that music has left a huge impact on my playing and writing, I’m just not very interested in listening to it unless I’m in a sentimental frame of mind. Am I alone here?

I just realized that I never really finished up the whole CAGED series that I started earlier this year. I made it through all the shapes except for D. I’m planning on finishing up with D and wrap it up with a little discussion about how I use them together.

Stay tuned!