Gear wish list

If I had more money than I knew what to do with I would:

- Switch out the pickups in my ES-137.

- Trade my peppermint fuzz for a fuzz that doesn't suck.

- Get a strat (style) guitar - possibly build one from parts.

- Get a Class A EL84 amp.

- Get a 6V6 bluesy amp.

- Trade my Les Paul for a better one, or just upgrade all the electronics in my current (though the feel of the neck is part of what I don't like).

- Get a guitar with P90s like a Les Paul Jr or a Jazz Master.

That's it :)

Using a Musicom Labs EFX to switch presets on a TimeFactor

Using a Musicom Labs EFX to switch presets on a TimeFactor is a beautiful thing, especially if you use a lot of delays. Being able to call up any combination of pedals, and call up a delay preset makes changing songs so fast. But, if you're like me, you got a Musicom and a Time Factor (TF) and stared blankly at the two manuals wondering how the heck they work together. I've received enough messages on the gear page to realize I wasn't alone in this. There's good news though! It's way, way easier than you think and the two pedals will work together right out of the box. The hardest thing is understanding what's going on and both manuals assume you understand MIDI already. I'll help explain what's going on with the MIDI and give you the basics on how to use the two together to call up presets on the TF for any preset on the Musicom. I won't get into the anything advanced, just the very basics to get you rolling. Here goes.

The first thing is understanding what's going on. For now, ignore anything in the manuals about control changes (CC) and program change channels (choosing a channel 1-16... both products use channel 1 by default and you don't need to change anything). All you need to know about is program changes (PCs). When you want the TF to change banks based on the Musicom, there needs to be some communication between the two, that communication is a PC. A PC is actually just a number, 1-128. When you change banks on the Musicom you can tell it to send a PC to the TF. The TF receives that PC number and knows to change presets.

The TF needs to know what preset to switch to based on the PC number it receives. If you read the TF manual you'll find there's a table in the TF where is PC number is mapped to a preset in the TF. By default the TF's table is set up like this:

PC number - TF bank
================
1 - 1:1
2 - 1:2
3 - 2:1
4 - 2:2
5 - 3:1
6 - 3:2
... etc ...
39 - 20:1
40 - 20:2

Since there's only 40 presets in the TF, PC number 41 through 128 won't do anything. You won't need to change that table and actually, you won't need to do anything to the TF at all, it's all set up the way you need it out of the box.

In fact, the only thing you need to do is plug a MIDI cable from the Musicom to the TF and tell the Musicom which PC number to send on any of it's presets. It's worth mentioning that the Musicom can send a PC number of 1-128, or you can set the musicom to send "NoN" (or "---" on the older musicom) which means it won't send a PC number and the TF will stay on whatever bank it was already on.

There are two versions of the Musicom EFX out there, so I'll give instructions for each. Hope this helps! If you have more questions write it in the comments. Good luck!!

EFX MKII (the wider shorter new one):

1) Select the preset you want to be in. Make sure you're in preset mode (not edit mode)
2) Hold down the MODE button until the screen displays PC1
3) Press the PS3 button to chose a PC number - the screen will display NoN or whatever number you had previously chosen for this preset.
4) Use the bank up/down buttons to chose NoN or a number 1-40 (whichever TF preset you want)
5) Press the PS3 button again to save the number
6) Press the mode button again to be done.

Original EFX (the more square older one):

1) Select the preset you want to be in. Make sure you're in preset mode (not edit mode)
2) Hold down the MODE button until the screen displays PC1
3) Press the PS4 button to chose a PC number - the screen will display "---" or whatever number you had previously chosen for this preset.
4) Use the bank up/down buttons to chose "---" or a number 1-40 (whichever TF preset you want)
5) Press the PS4 button again to save the number
6) Press the mode button again to be done.

Filmosound modded amp

I was being so good! I hadn't bought a piece of guitar gear in 9 months. Considering I built me rig from nothing in the previous 3 years... that says a lot! The key to not buying gear is to stay away from the gear page and craig's list. I know the rules, but the other day I slipped. I went on to CL innocently enough, I wanted to see if anyone was selling Ikea shelves so I could get them cheaper. as soon as I had typed craigslist.org my fingers just naturally finished with "/msg". Oh well, now that I'm here I might as well see what the gear world is doing. "awesome vintage squire -$200", pass. "Free huge grand piano if you pay $400 to have it moved", pass. "Hand Built Point to Point Super Charged Tweed Deluxe Style Tube Amp", Oh? What's that? Click.
Here's what it said:

Hand Made, Hand Wired, Point to Point all tube guitar amplifier. This amp is much like Fender's late '50's Tweed Deluxe. Two 6V6 in a push pull configuration, 12AX7 driver/phase inverter and 12AT7 in the preamp position. Although this amp is much like a tweed deluxe, significant tweaks have been made to make the amp more usable and more fun. The amp is in the head configuration, so you can use any speaker combo you like. The amp has 8 and 16 ohm speaker taps. One volume and one tone control and a fat/lean switch to accommodate a variety of pickups. Additional circuit alterations have been employed to make the amp "hotter" and more dynamic than a stock 5E3. Very touch sensitive and versatile for a simple amp. Quite loud for 15 watts. Pure tone. Built into an old film projector chassis. No circuitry from the original Filmosound (because stock filmosounds sound awful). All new quality components, 50 year old iron, old stock tubes.

I'm interested... what's the price? Cheaper than either of my delays? Hmmmmm. About 3 hours later I was knowledgeable about Tweed Delux and Filmosound amps, had planned out a matching cab and speaker to pair with this head, and had come up with plenty of reasons why I needed this amp. The only thing left was to find out if it sounded good. Luckily for me, there was a youtube video of one of his earlier amps:



Sweet.

I think I've mentioned before that ever since I got my Tele (G&L) I've wanted a Fender style amp. I just hadn't found the right tone/price combo. I was pretty excited to try this amp out. I went over last night and it sounded good! I brought it home but one of my roommates was sleeping so I'll have to wait to hear it with my pedals and cab. Right now I'm going to use my 2x12 with scumback's but I'd like to get a 1x12 with a Weber 12A100 (clone of a Jensen P12R).

Are you wondering what's the deal with filmosound? I was too. Filmosound made projectors in the 50's with a built in tube amp and external speaker. Apparently you can plug a guitar right into it and it sounds ok. Anthony, the guy who built this amp essentially gutted the filmosound amp and rewired it and upgraded components so it's more like a Tweed Delux. It still has the original tubes and transformer. He's not the first to do this, but he's possibly the only one doing it now and from what I can tell there are probably less than 50 in existence made my anyone. Here's a good read if you're more interested in this style amp:

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/showthread.php?t=156790

Here's the blog of the amp builder who sold it to me:

http://atmarsamps.blogspot.com/

Here's what it looks like!

The secret to good tone

Bad tone = bad hands + transparent gear

Bad tone = good hands + non-transparent gear

Good tone = good hands + transparent gear

.

What am I doing?

I'm not really a sermon guy. When I go to church I usually politely listen and think about what the preacher is saying, but it's not how I absorb things. I'd rather read a book, talk with someone one-on-one, or learn from experience. Sometimes I'm really inspired by sermons but when I think back months later, it really didn't create any change in how I do things. I've probably heard around 1,500 or 2,000 sermons in my life and I remember about 10 of them. So like I said, sermons aren't my thing, but I politely listen to them... until sometime around January. That's when I started getting annoyed by sermons. The downside of being involved in the service is you hear the same sermon two to four times in a weekend. Plus another one for some sort of mid-week gig, plus one or two more for my own church Sunday night. I started to almost resent that I had to sit through sermons - so I knew it was time to take a break and figure out what's wrong.

I finished off all my committed dates and told each of the churches I was taking a break - a sort of sabbatical - until late summer or fall. I'm still going to my own church and playing there once a month, but I'm not playing anywhere else or going to any other churches. It will be a nice break!

With that said, I might not be writing too much over the next few months either. I'm playing guitar less (still maintaining!) but working on my rhythm with some drumming stuff and spending a lot of time training for a couple triathlons this summer. I know I'll never stop making music but I'm going to enjoy spending some time doing other things for a bit.

I'll be back and I'll keep reading your blogs in the mean time! Thanks for the nice words from those of you wondering what happened to me :)

//mike

Reliced guitars

For a few years now Fender Custom shop has been building relic guitars that are new but look like they were tossed around a stage for 50 years. It's pretty sweet and while it might be a total poser move, I'd rather have a fresh guitar that looks beat up than an a guitar that was ACTUALLY beat up for reliability reasons. I'd have a hard time believing an old guitar that looks like the one above didn't have it's neck cracked at some point. It'd be a diffrent story if I had worn it in myself, but I guess that's a different story. The only problem with the custom shop relics are the price tag. $3,500 for a strat is a little hard to swallow, especially when you can get an early 70s vintage start for about the same price.

To fix the price problem, fender started making some guitars that had "wear" painted right on. The quality was about as good as a T-shirt and you could spot the fake wear from the other side of guitar center.

The latest Fender creation is the "Road Worn" series that is still trying to find some cheaper ground while looking reliced. These guitars and assembled and road worn in Mexico and while they look much better than the screen printed previous versions, the quality isn't right. It's a MIM strat at 1.5x the price with OK but not great looking relics. I got to play one earlier this week and like a lot of reviews I saw, the frets were pretty sharp.

I like the look of relics and I'm keeping an out for a good blues Strat so I decided to check and see if any other companies are making relics that are better quality than the road worn but less expensive than the custom shop. Here's what I found:

Nash guitars - About half the price of a custom shop guitar ($1700). Available at a bunch of places inclusing musictoyz.com. They make start, tele, esquire, and P bass relics. Used to do custom order but not anymore apparently.

Rebel Relic - out of Amsterdam. About the same price (1400 Euro [$1775 by current exchange]). They do strat, tele, eqsuire and will do custom jobs too, including basses.

Ebay - I found a coulpe guys on ebay that take stock guitars and do some work to relic them. They actually do a pretty good job.

I also found sites selling reliced hardware.

I'm still saving up and buying the /13 when I'm to my goal, so it's all just looking for now! I wonder if relic guitars will be a fad like buying jeans with holes?? Hmmmmmm.

Look out Aviom

Aviom is a "personal monitoring system" a lot of churches use for their musicians. You can use them with wedge monitors, but I think most use them with in ears. The great thing about them is you can control the level of each instrument, on your own, by twisting knobs. Much better than yelling to the sound guy or making air traffic control signals during a song to let the sound guy know how he can adjust your monitor. It's also great with in ears because the mix is a lot more finicky when you can hear everything so clearly, you can get buy with a less than stellar mix in a wedge than in an in ear.

So far Aviom has pretty much had this market to themselves... until now. RSS (by Rolland) has introduced the M-48 personal monitoring system. From the specs and what I've heard, it basically blows the Aviom out of the water. RSS makes a digital mixer called the V-Mixing System which is a pretty popular digital mixing board. The M-48, while it will work with any sound board, will specifically work really slick with the V-Mixing system. I'm not an expert on digital mixing boards, so I'll leave it at "it works well together" and let sound guys dig into it for them selves.

How does this effect us as musicians?

• Instead of being limited to 16 channels like the Aviom, you can have 40 inputs and chose the 16 you want from the 40. With Aviom you can only send the same 16 to everyone, with the M-48 you and the drummer could have 16 completely different channels if you wanted. For instance, maybe the drummer wants each drum individually so he can mix them, but you just want a sub mix of all the drums (as one channel) that you can easily turn up or down with one twist. You can!
• Built in reverb for any channels you want. This is especially good for vocals and it's a classic studio trick to add extra reverb to a vocalists headphone mix while they sing, it makes the singer more confident.
  
• Built in limeter. This makes sure no noise gets over a certain volume - essential for in ears so you don't blow your eardrum if something feeds back or the sound guy accidentally has the gain way up one something during sound check.
• Built in room mic. Yeah, built in to the little module in front of you. That way you can hear people talk and get a feel for the room.

No word on official pricing yet, but it's supposed to be "competitive with Aviom" in cost. The only bummer is that they waited so long! I think most churches that are going this way have already bought themselves an Aviom. If you have an Aviom it would be really, really hard to justify ditching the Aviom to buy this.