One Axe to Rule Them All

One of the biggest problems with being a guitarist who takes transit is having to lug your guitars on the subway, buses and streetcars of an urban centre. Add to that that I have a day job that I commute to and then head straight to practice from, that means my time spent on transit exactly coincides with the time of day during which these eco-friendly get-there machines are most ass-rammed. This is painful enough when you have to take a single guitar, but heaven forfend you decide that you need a second guitar at practice.

I’ve been toting my Esquire around in addition to my Les Paul, or leaving my Les Paul at the rehearsal space because I wanted to have that snappy spank of a maple-boarded Tele-style guitar for some of our material. I’ve also occasionally lugged a Strat along for the quacky tones only a Strat delivers. This is fine if I’m getting a ride, but is a huge pain in the poop chute otherwise.

Recently, I decided to see if I could convert my backup Les Paul – a 1982 Tokai Love Rock – into a do-it-all guitar. I wanted a guitar that could play the dirtiest of dirt and the cleanest of clean; one that could give me the full-bodied bloom of humbuckers and the thinner chime of single-coils. I decided to contact Jon Moore, a Canadian pickup winder to pick his brains about what I wanted to do. He recommended I use a series/parallel wiring scheme to switch my humbuckers from their traditional sound to a more single-coil flavoured sound. As an alternative to the coil-split method, series/parallel wiring also give you the added benefit of hum-cancelling in the single-coil mode, which is a huge bonus. I’ve had some guitars in the past with coil-splits, and yes, in the split mode, they can get very noisey, especially with higher-output pickups.

I decided on a slightly modified version of Jon’s Ultimate Rock Set, which combines a Hybrid Vintage-voiced pickup in the neck with a super-hot AlNiCo 8 pickup in the bridge. While I liked the sound of an AlNiCo 2 magnet in the neck, I was concerned about the output difference between the two pickups, so Jon suggested I go with an unoriented AlNiCo 5 magnet which will give a similar tone to an A2 magnet, but have a slightly higher output. I received a package with the pickups, 2 CTS 500k audio-taper pots, 2 Push/Pull 500k pots and a pair of .022 paper-in-oil NOS Russian capacitors.

Once everything was wired up and ready to go (many frustrating hours later), I gave the guitar a whirl and all I could say was...wow. I was hugely impressed with how well the modifications turned out. First of all, there really isn’t enough I can say about JS Moore’s pickups to show how much I like them. I’ve had a set of his Strat pickups before which I absolutely loved, so my expectations were high to begin with, but these humbuckers were an absolute home run. I’ve had high-output pickups before, but none of them captured the woody tone of a Les Paul so well before. There’s instant Clapton-Beano and VH Brown tones in here. Ditto the neck pickup; warm and organic sounds abound. You never get the sensation that you’re playing a pickup, you’re playing a guitar, with all its ancillary components contributing to the overall sound. The fat warmth and sustain of the mahogany body, the snap and spank of the maple top, everything is “picked-up” and sent to the amplifier, just as it’s supposed to be.

By this axe, I rule!

In terms of versatility, the 500k CTS pots give me the option of rolling the volume up or down slightly to increase or decrease the amount of overdrive created by my amp. This lets me constantly vary the amount of drive in a song to create louder and heavier passages to contrast the quieter cleaner passages much more than I would be able to with a channel-switching amp that has “clean” and “drive” settings. But the true stars here are the two Push/Pull pots in the tone position. In single-coil mode, with the volume rolled back to 5 or 6, I have a brilliant clean sound that I can overdrive slightly by strumming harder. Rolling up to 7 or 8 gives me a great bluesy drive and at 10, I’ve got a rich, sustained overdrive. In humbucking mode, I have to roll down to 3 or 4 before the pickups really clean up, but going up from there just adds more and more overdrive and compression, giving me a huge lead sound.

I’m able to now play everything from Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and the Rolling Stones to Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam and Buckcherry on one guitar. Sure, I’ll still take a backup to gigs, but for practices, the Love Rock has become my one and only. I’m sure the Gibson is unhappy about these developments, but I have some plans in mind for her too.

Rock 'n Roll Doesn't Have To be Noise Pollution II

Have you ever ran into a situation where no matter what you do, how low you turn down your instruments and PA system the neighbors still complain that you're too loud?

Well that happened to Molly's Chamber recently. We were told, under no uncertain circumstances, that any amount of noise we made while practicing was unacceptable.

We were beside ourselves, trying to figure out a solution that worked for everyone in the band, as well as the people complaining. After a few days of thinking and suggesting solutions, Saro sent us all a link to a website. http://www.jamhub.com/. This website changed everything!

JamHub is a silent rehearsal studio, and the answer to our prayers. Not only did it solve our problem of being too loud, it also allowed us to hear each other better while practicing, causing our practices to be more productive.

How does it work? Each musician has their own section with one instrument input, one mic input and one headphone output. After plugging everything in, each musicians section has it's own "Solemix"which allows them to mix the levels being sent to their headphones. This allows all the musicians in the band to hear clearly what they want to hear, at the volume they want to hear it, without any sound being produced except through the headphones. This solves several problems, not the least of which is eliminating the possibility of disturbing the neighbors. Oh and as an added bonus you can record with it too

So if your band has a similar issue, have a look at a JamHub...I'd bet it would be just what the doctor ordered

Keep Rockin'

The Chamber

Slip Slide Meltin'

So lately I've been learning some slide. Like many guitarists, I've owned a slide for years without actually learning how to use it, instead pulling it out every so often to mess around with and make some horrible noises. Now that I need to cover a few songs involving slide parts, I figured it was time to really get down to work.

As a reference, I have lots of slide players that I love to listen to, so I know when something sounds like a good piece of slide-work, and when it sounds like I'm skinning a cat. My top two fav sliders are Duane Allman and Sonny Landreth.

Both these chaps were/are monsters of slide and both did a lot in terms of developing innovative slide techniques. Duane was instrumental in bringing slide into Rock and his work as a session player may have been more important that his Allman Bros. work. Landreth changed the way slide is played entirely, developing a technique involving fretting chords behind and ahead of the slide to allow for a more riff-oriented blues sound that retains the singing quality of a slide. Granted, I'm nowhere near as talented and either of these dudes, not by a long-shot, but listening to them really helps get your head around how a slide should be used.

I've settled on using a skinny steel slide on my pinky finger, letting my use the rest of my hand to either play chords or lead lines when I'm not sliding, but also it gives me a much larger area of my hand to use to mute the strings behind the slide. So far it's working out pretty good, but I got a lot of work to do on my technique before I can start to really explore the slide's potential. Not that I necessarily want to become a slide player - as much as I like the way it sounds, it prefer using it as a texture sound to accent some songs, not as my go-to sound.

The Break

No, this isn't about a break-up with a girl; this is about something much, much worse. In a fit of unspeakable clumsiness, I did this:

How, you ask?

Funny thing: I was just leaving the house for work and leaned my LP in its case up against the wall to fish out my keys from my pocket. While doing so, I saw the case fall flat on its face out of the corner of my eye. I thought nothing of it and almost left for work without taking a peek inside the case, but something nagged at me and I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

Hell of a way to start the day, eh?

Balls.

On the plus side, luthier Gord Mylks of the Kingston Guitar Shop is even now working furiously to repair the damage. He is optimistic and I'm still distraught. Hopefully she comes back to me as good as before.

All in the Family

I love Tube Screamers. I love the sound associated with Tube Screamers. I love the belligerent shade of green Ibanez chose to paint them. Some of my favourite players have rocked Tube Screamers and have laid down fantastic tones that are considered benchmarks of how certain styles of music should sound. For example, SRV single-handedly created the blues rock genre and the pair of Tube Screamers he used are as integral to the Texas Blues sound as his fluid style and vicious attack.

The association with SRV is as much a curse as it is a blessing, as many mistakenly consider the Tube Screamer as a pedal for the blues. This unfair pigeon-holing of the TS conveniently forgets that many hard-rock and metal bands from the 80’s stuck TS pedals in front of their Marshalls to get some really heavy, gritty and ballsy rock sounds. Mike and Stone of Pearl Jam have both used TS pedals in the past as part of the Alt Rock vanguard, but so has Tom Petty. If nothing else, the TS pedal is perhaps the benchmark for versatility.

The reason for this is its intended usage. Unlike other overdrive and distortion pedals, the TS is intended to work in harmony with your amp to naturally push it to overdrive. This, of course, is referring strictly to tube amps. Nothing can make a solid state amp sound good, not even pickups wound by God. The TS certainly has a flavour to it, which is a mid-heavy sound that helps your guitar cut through the mix and sound huge, but most of the tone you’re going to be getting is that of your amp. A Vox will still sound chimey, a Fender shimmery and a Marshall will sound like angels making love to 2nd order harmonics.

At one point recently, I had the fortune of owning two original 80’s TS9 pedals, an 80’s SD9 and a 90’s TS9DX, which had been modded by Analogman. It was more to satisfy my curiosity than out of any insane desire to run all four at once (though the thought did occur to me with startling regularity). Having previously owned a reissue TS9, as well as many TS clones and variations (Fulltone Fulldrive, Boss OD-1, Boss SD-1, Goudie 808, etc.), I wanted to see if the vintage mojo associated with the original pedals was based on a legitimate tonal superiority, or just nostalgic hype.

After much noodling and knob-tweaking, I came to the conclusion that the original TS9s both sounded much better than other TS pedals I’ve had in the past. Whether using them as a booster, or as a drive pedal, they had an immediacy and an organic quality that I hadn’t encountered previously. They cleaned up better with volume control changes on the guitar and reacted better to picking dynamics. I wasn’t surprised by this, since I had heard as much from countless others, but it was somewhat interesting to hear the difference for myself.

A pleasant surprise was how fantastic the Analogman pedal sounded. In the stock mode, running the original JRC4558 op-amp chip that is the heart of the TS’s sound, it sounded fantastic compared to its vintage cousins. Switching to the other modes yielded a bevy of tonal options impossible to attain with the original. In terms of overall usefulness and variety, I found the Analogman TS9DX to be the hands-down winner. It was capable of doing so much more than the stock 80’s TS9s because of its 4 different modes, especially the 3rd setting, which switched the pedal to asymmetrical clipping similar to a Boss SD-1.

The SD9 was an awesome monster. Right from the get go, this pedal was a Marshall stack in a box. Using it like a traditional TS pedal, with the drive rolled all the way off and the volume set for a bit of a boost, this bad boy turned a completely clean Traynor YGL3 into an older Marshall just pushed into overdrive. Think Clapton’s JTM on the Beano album, or early AC/DC sounds. With the drive turned up to 9 o’clock, there was some definite 70’s rock sounds starting to come out, and the closer to 12 o’clock that drive knob went, the more 80’s metal started to come out of my amp. This pedal is 1.5 lbs of arena rock.

As much as I liked the TS9DX and the SD9, I still run the two TS9s on my board. I don’t need one pedal to do it all. I’d rather have two pedals I like set to slightly different sounds so that I have some options. Also, I don’t need a pedal to make my amp sound like a Marshall, because I play one. For me, I set my JTM45 to a good amount of drive on its own and judicious use one or the other TS9 to give me some tonal variations. I run both of the Tube Screamers with the drive all the way down and the tone knob around 11 o’clock, but one of them has the volume dimed while the other is just past the noon setting. I can go from a few different rhythm sounds to a couple different lead sounds, as well as the jaw-dropping sounds I can make with my Les Paul, the Marshall and both Tube Screamers turned on. With that setup, I can hit that middle note in Parisien Walkways and hold it for almost as long as Gary does.