velorush

At the risk of non-guitar-gear-posting excommunication, here's the only significant haul of the year: Sitting on the couch Sunday I get a surprise notification from FedEx - a delivery! It was around 24 degrees, so I go to the door, poke my head out and survey the empty front porch. I then, at great risk of hypothermia and/or frostbite, step out onto the front porch, peer to the north and see a large box on the driveway next to the garage door. I suppose it was too much to require the driver to comprehend the (surely) French marking "Fragile" (fra-GEE-lay) on the box. I wasn't holding out a great deal of hope for the contents. I let it acclimate for a day before opening (or to be more precise, finish opening). It was saved by the superior Roland box inside. I sold my JD-Xi a couple of years back - great synth but the mini keys were a bummer. This has full-sized keys and a useful feature set. Sweetwater had them $200 off. I had been not-buying a Fantom for quite a few years ($$$$). This does all I'd want to do with the Fantom at a fraction of the price. And to answer the obvious follow-up question - yes, despite the gaping hole and packing material excreted into the Japanese maple, the Sweetwater candy packet was safely inside.

"The Princess Bride" is among the best efforts ever committed to film.

I (naively, at home) set up for a particular song one Sunday. I ran my distortion into a compressor then into the amp with the idea I could use the volume knob to ramp up the gain during the chorus and back to clean arpeggios for the verse, all the while my overall volume would be more or less the same. Worked fantastically! Got to church the next morning (the building constructed in the 50's with multiple subsequent additions and a spider web of electrical "improvements." The building we have since torn down...), plugged in my Strat with 57/62 pickups (yep, I was asking for it) and ran through the song. The noise was absolutely unbearable! With no time to figure something else out I just sat out of that one. 😐

With respect to compressors, it's not that they're particularly noisy, but in limiting dynamics they by design make low-level sounds louder and high-level sounds softer. Noise introduced previously in the chain is amplified by the circuit. If you've got noisy pickups and/or gain stages (i.e., dirt pedals) in front of the compressor, any noise from the guitar on down will be amplified by the gain stage and then amplified again by the compressor.

The search for a couple of specific Hamers continues, but I was shanghaied last week by the one-two punch of the Sweetwater app and their ridiculous sale and find myself low on funds... I did pick up some cool kit, but Hamers will have to wait.

Pedally has these on Reverb marked down 10% through Monday: https://reverb.com/item/47458384-lpd-pedals-eighty7-plexi-preamp-pedal?bk=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJqdGkiOiIyN2Y4NGExMC0wZmE4LTQzYmYtOGJhZi03NGFjYWNkNzI4MzEiLCJpYXQiOjE3NjU2NDE2MzcsInVzZXJfaWQiOiIzMDQ5MTIiLCJzZXNzaW9uX2lkIjoiNzMxYThmNGUtYmI5MS00N2YxLWE5MDEtODQxYjk1ZTdhMTE5IiwiY29va2llX2lkIjoiZjdmNGEyMjctYmNmOC00YmIwLWE5ZjctZWViOTEyMDdiMjk4IiwicHJvZHVjdF9pZCI6IjQ3NDU4Mzg0Iiwic291cmNlIjoiTk9ORSJ9.b_0PlrKiVxQ14kYlPyr7LqBRECJoifrGRMMij3SVftM Deluxe version (two channels) too: https://reverb.com/item/55567595-lpd-pedals-eighty7-deluxe-overdrive-pedal?bk=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJqdGkiOiI4NDhjMDQyYy0yYjBhLTRlNzYtYTViZS02NWJlMDk2ODY4MDciLCJpYXQiOjE3NjU2NDE2MzcsInVzZXJfaWQiOiIzMDQ5MTIiLCJzZXNzaW9uX2lkIjoiNzMxYThmNGUtYmI5MS00N2YxLWE5MDEtODQxYjk1ZTdhMTE5IiwiY29va2llX2lkIjoiZjdmNGEyMjctYmNmOC00YmIwLWE5ZjctZWViOTEyMDdiMjk4IiwicHJvZHVjdF9pZCI6IjU1NTY3NTk1Iiwic291cmNlIjoiTk9ORSJ9.6qN_BNjh8AzHbjwx0E66YWbIwCSZGjrrmPFsawUbfvI

Yep, that's the sound: ETA: I especially like the low gain sounds.

Seriously? Getting an overwhelming sense of Count Floyd here! Okay, maybe the Vee.

Interesting: the Zuckerbots obscured both the image and the copy in the page, but when I screenshot and pasted here it was visible.

Thank you! Your sacrifice saved me, but now I am aware that perhaps some of these came with an adequate handle and am resigned to starting another endless search for one (to accompany my decades-long search for the right Prototype!)!

Just saw this and thought I'd post here: Amazing! Tragic!

Please tell me it's a Norlinesque boat anchor! I didn't know these ever came with large necks, so I've ignored them for years.

Maybe my "collection," but with what I've seen of yours, agree to disagree. 🙂

Observations: I am having difficulty just coming to terms with what I've scrolled through and parsing that with the very nonchalant quote in the related thread, "I'll be exhibiting about 15 to 20 guitars at the Orlando Show this year," - like anything else done in a typical day: "I'm having my tires rotated," or "I'll be having a sandwich foie gras." And these are the culls? 😲

Maybe there is a reason the "60's unit" was rare... The praise coming out of their mouths does not match the involuntary facial expressions. ETA: £199 is $267.13 this morning...

That's insane! Full report, please! "Xanadu" is a must.

"Practice cures most tone issues." - John Suhr ETA: ... but in practice I find I'd much rather buy stuff than practice!

IMO, it will make a significant difference. The Tone control works by shunting treble to ground. The value of the capacitor determines the frequency at which treble frequencies are shunted. The higher the value the lower the frequency where the shunting takes place - the practical result is, the higher the capacitor value the more treble you'll perceive going away as the Tone control rolls to zero. I like 0.022µF for Humbuckers (and really, most Strat single coils). Hamer's convention was to use a 0.015µF - that always led me to normally run a Hamer Tone control on around 5 and adjust up or down from there. It was actually more useful in most situations. Caps are cheap, so experimentation is an inexpensive means to getting what you want. I personally don't buy into the snake oil and don't spend huge money on the boutique capacitors, but everyone needs a hobby...

Quick question for those of you who own the Character Series: is everyone getting a good bit of noise if the pedal is set anywhere above unity gain? The first time I tried it out I was hooked into the board at church playing my Strat and had a good bit of 60/120 hz hum/buzz. I attributed the noise to the (normally pretty quiet) single coils. Trying it out a few more times at home using the Out into a clean amp I was getting the same issue, Strat or humbuckers. Then I noticed I had it set with a significant jump in volume going from bypass to either channel. When I reduced the output to unity gain the noise seemed to disappear (or fade into the normal presence of the amp). Is that just how these are to be run? Thanks.

I remember watching Andy demo those BITD, so I went looking online for discussion. Apparently SolidGoldFX bought / started manufacturing Diamond Pedals (2023 and later) and the consensus was the SGFX pedals are inferior to the original versions. Then I ran across discussion of a V1 and a V2 of the original pedals (somewhere around serial number 600) and how V2 has this and that whereas V1 does not. That's when my eyes just glazed over and...

Kudos to the seller! He is providing both 1st / 12th neck measurements and weight.

I loved everything about the DD-20 except the size and the footswitches. I cabled in a Boss FS-6 for tap tempo, but all that made for quite a footprint. I have seen where some are offering rehoused DD-20's but the rehousing costs more than the DD-20.

After years of discussion, kicking cans and general directionless what-iffing it appears we are, in a manner of speaking, getting the band back together. With that, and with the sell-off that took place some years back, I find myself in need of an all-purpose delay pedal. My favorite BITD was the Boss DD-20, which I of course sold and 'upgraded' to the TC Novadelay which I used until we stopped gigging (P&W music). Sometime in there I bought the TC Flashback and found the 'Analog Dry Through' to be more than just marketing - I could hear tremendous difference in the unaffected signal between the two TC delays. That led me to sell the Novadelay and so I am left with the Flashback. The Flashback sounds great, but the tap tempo configuration won't work for me in a live situation. I've been looking over the ridiculous number of choices and am now focused on the Boss DD-200. What I like is no menu diving (since there are no menus) and each function has a knob. About the only thing I see missing is the Modulation Rate is fixed (not a deal killer). Sweetwater has them marked down to $259.50 (regularly $274.99). I filtered the choices on Sweetwater to the $200 to $500 price range and didn't see anything I thought would work better for me (tap tempo and ability to save a couple of presets). All that to say, anyone have any experience with the DD-200?

"Play it, Steve!"

I'd not only second this but absolutely recommend using the cardboard template. You'll forego burning the guitar, especially if you're, as it seems, not too experienced at this. An easy way of creating the template is to tape a piece of paper to the control area of the guitar and use a pencil to lightly darken the paper. The holes will appear as darker shapes on the paper. Cut out the holes, then flip the paper upside down (the control cavity is a mirror image since the controls mount from the other side). ETA: template for a semi-hollow - required since the harness has to be completed prior squeezing in through the bridge pickup route. ETAA: I wasn't being anal retentive or even artistic including the F-hole or the outer rim of the body because in this case I didn't want the wiring to show through the F-hole and wanted enough slack so the wires ran out of sight, along the outer rim. If that's your intent (Volume, Volume, Tone, no switch), you're looking for a Jazz Bass wiring diagram: Be aware, however, that the hole for the switch is likely a good bit larger than the holes for Volume and Tone. If that's the case you'll need some sort of sleeve to make up the difference.