Ramblings of a mad musician

Well Well Well.  The last gig of the year is fast approaching!

DECEMBER 17th Miami Shark Bar Gold Coast Australia.

Doors 8pm FREE ENTRY!

We are opening the show at 8.30 PM followed by A Bid Farewell, Sending Artax and The Passenger headlining the show.

Also there are a couple of more gigs coming up in January 2011 as we kick off the year with a bang

Jan 8th Shed 5 Gold Coast (All ages gig)
Jan 13th The Globe Brisbane.

The Cilikis Progressio Project has been recording (well RE-recording)

The drums have been completed for 10 out of the 11 tracks plus about 3 tracks have had the guitars and bass work done for them.

There is still plenty (and i mean PLENTY) to do for the tracking so this process is far from over but never the less the mixes are sounding fat as you can get. Very impressed for recording this ourselves.
The guitar solos and harmonising will be done at a later date when time permits of course, plus still debating weather or not to use the rather large sounding small fella, the Orange Dual Terror, for a little amplifier, it has a tonne of nuts and grunt with its tone.  The Marshall DSL will still be the amp of choice for the rhythm guitars as nothing (and i mean NOTHING) compares to that raw voice Rock ‘n Roll.

My custom guitar effects have been used for some recordings so far and sound fantastic!  I used my custom compressor on the weekend to record this funk’ish/rock/country’ish/disco/70s stick movie style song.

Its a mishmash of Paul Gilbert meets Isaac Hayes meets Satriani meets Stevie Wonder meets Brad Paisley meets “Yes” type of song that sounds like it will raise a few eyebrows and definitely shows the versatility and creativity of the boys.  Being instrumental means having to come up with alot more musically creative means in which to keep the listener interested and this track will definitely do that.  Ive been listening to the desk mix in the car and cant help bop along as im driving with all these ideas going off in my head for melodies and leads etc.

Schools out!

My teaching finishes this week for the year until February next year so I am available for private guitar lessons if anyone is interested.  Its $40 for a 45 minute lesson (generally 45 minutes is plenty of time depending on the student and what they want).   So if you are keen, buzz me!

Cilikis Progressio Project links

If you want you can get more details about the Cilikis Progressio Project at any of these web links:

http://www.facebook.com/CilikisProgressioProject

http://www.twitter.com/TheCPP

http://www.reverbnation.com/TheCilikisProgressioProject

Our MySpace does not get used that much thanks to Fairfax media turning it into an unusable circus of advertising, poorly coded Flash and Dynamic HTML coding  and flogging big name artists (you know the ones that should be sweeping the red carpet rather than be standing on it?)

Every guitarist has their own little struggle with this never ending quest.  Every guitarist has his or her own ideas on what pure, clear and concise tone is and how to achieve it.  Every guitarist has their own idea on what is a warm tone and what is not.

I am, no different!

Ive been bombarded with emails, messages and what not about ideas for tone but all those aside, it only ever comes down to one thing:  What ever it is you want in tone, only YOU can decide.

SO, A few months back i started on this quest we guitarists head down in search for what is our own complete and perfect tone.  After spending a lot of time reading and experimenting with electronics learning the ways of guitar special effects designing and implementation, i have finally created my first analog pedal that has added a great deal to my tonal options.

My Own Custom DIY Clean Boost Version 1

Basically all it is, is a boost pedal based on the Ibanez Tube Screamer.

There are a couple of design changes that I made by reading articles in books and on websites and lots of tinkering.

All that aside it still is a chopped down version of the Tube Screamer with a few mods.

First off, there is no tone knob.  The reason is that I didn’t want to have my guitar signal attenuated by the pedal at any stage nor have the ability to do that.  If i want to change my overall tone, ill use the amplifiers settings.  I want a clear full unaltered signal being sent to the amp.

Secondly, i reduced the opamp’s gain to about +15db or by a factor of eight.  I didnt want any clipping of the signal so I decided to use just enough boost from the opamp to give me a nice big clean signal.

Thirdly i replaced the input buffer BJT with a FET buffer with a high input impedance of 1Mohm and a number of changes to the capacitors and resistors to have as little frequency roll off as possible especially the bass.  A nice lift on the bottom end to keep it FAT sounding plus as little high frequency roll off so as to keep as much of that Marshall sizzle as possible.

And that is all it really is.  Fairly simple eh ?

Well at a gig a number of weeks back which was going to be the first real test of it, the pedal failed due to a resistor in the voltage divider almost touching and causing a short.  I pulled it apart and tested the other components and they all are working fine, so i fixed the short and re-boxed the electronics and tried again and all turned out fine.

So today the 22nd of August, rehearsal rolls around   Time to give the booster a run at rehearsal volume.

My score? 10/10.

I was impressed! The pedal did exactly what i wanted it to do and MORE!  I mean this thing really pushed my tone above and beyond what i expected.

I tried a number of different tonal options with it while playing such as pedal on with Marshall Ultra gain channel on and guitar volume down to about one quarter and was blown away!  I was able to use my guitar plectrum on different angles (ala Paul Gilbert, Vinne Moore etc..) and could hear every little change.  That is one thing i could not adequately achieve with a digitally altered signal.

When the pedal was on for leads, the OD1 channel just lapped it up and saturated so much more than i expected.  Every single little nuance could be heard right down to the plectrum attack angle.

On the Marshall Clean channel, i was equally impressed!  There was (as expected) a large volume boost as opposed to the OD channel with more saturation, but never the less, the clean channel showed its own characteristics clearly and concisely!  Once again i could every little pick direction and touch.  Every time the pedal was on, OD or clean, it literally changed the way i played!  That was NOT what i expected.  Headroom had opened up so much that i was able to use my other pickups with a far greater level of satisfaction.

To say the least, i have made significant changes to my own tone over the past 3 – 6 months and extremely happy with the results thus far.  Ive ditched the use of digital effects (with the exception of a few others like Chorus and Delay) for my playing as they just cannot keep up with tone i want.

I look back on my use of digital gear like amp modelers etc, as an experiment that just would not and could not succeed…

Time has come to build my own pedal board to accommodate my new pedal and my return to individual effect units, so that will be the next project me thinks then another clean booster project but with a slight difference.  Basically it will be the same thing but i will use it as a volume cut instead of a boost, to save me having to use the volume knob when needed where i don’t have the time to pull back the volume control.

The quest for my ultimate in guitar tone continues!  The race that never ends is at least heading where i want it to go, to guitar tube tone bliss

In the past few weeks or so, i have thrown myself head first into the world of “Do it yourself”.

I can hear people thinking, “Brendan!  DIY??? BWAHAHAH!!”

Yes thats right, im not the outdoors “Fully Loaded Man” type of person and really, who cares.

Never the less, its lead me down the track of re-learning all the stuff i learned in school and at home with numerous electronics kits and what not.

What ive been looking for is the right box to “enhance” my Marshall tone and found that in Australia, enhancing your tone is totally and utterly abhorrent’ly overpriced.

At first I thought, “Hmm, these pedals are rather expensive.”  Then i looked at the price of the Australian Dollar vs the US dollar and was gobsmacked.  At the time there was about 8 cents difference in value yet prices of parts and equipment in Australia are almost TRIPLE the cost they are in the USA.

I mean, REALLY, i can buy a unit from the USA, have it shipped here in less than 4 days (considering it takes 2 WEEKS to get book from a shop in Sydney) for almost a 1/4 the price of buying it here in Australia.

Thanks to our wonderful distributors and resellers, which i must say are in a tight spot.  Yes they need to make money too but there is ZERO need to try and extract a full dole cheque out of some unemployed musician trying to make a success of him or herself just for a simple effects unit that has less components in it as a TV REMOTE!! Which also explains why you can talk down the price of equipment at a music shop too, but you still need to have the money to begin with <end rant!>

I digress

I set about searching for more pedals and different designers etc and stumbeled across http://www.diyguitarist.com/

I saw all the pedals and variants he has built and it got me thinking, “This looks like something to investigate”. I moved my search in to schematics for effect pedals and found that there really wasnt much too them.  Ive never opened a pedal and had a look at the PCB before so it never crossed my mind to investigate and try this out myself.

After all the reading I did on Pauls website,  it lead me to the word of DIY, DO IT YOURSELF.  So i set about searching for more information on DIY effect units on Google and was swamped!  The wealth of information is staggering for the diy guitarist out there and there is SO much to learn.

I continued to search for some more information, videos and documents on DIY guitar effects and  found this video on youtube (a first of many DIY vids) belonging to Brian Wampler of Wampler Pedals http://www.wamplerpedals.com

I saw this video and BANG! i was hooked.  In the past three weeks ive had my head buried in books, schematics and even maths!  It has consumed alot of my time but has been a great experience of learning.

I bought a copy of Brians e-book on how to build effects and found what i needed to get started on building and designing my circuits, starting off with Brians Clean Booster circuit.

I tried this circuit out today with the Marshall and the Sunn T412 at rehearsals and OH MY! What a boost, albeit without any buffering or any other effects in the way or long cables.  The “thump” this thing gave to the sound was impressive to say the least for a basic prototype.

I made some changes to the original design in the ebook using the suggested LM386 IC plus added a high pass filter above 19kHz and a low pass at around 105hz.  This removes alot of rubbish not needed and trying to tighten up the tone to get what i want out of it.

Its quite basic at the moment but im sure it will get better as i go with the development of the unit, never the less, all this electronics stuff does not stop me from sussing out other pedals more for tonal ideas.

Stay tuned for the developments as i progress trying to make my tonal presence more alive sounding than dead digital

Wampler pedals have a couple of really good boutique pedals that are quite interesting:

EGO Compressor

PlexiDrive

Pinnacle Reissue

These are all great sounding overdrive pedals although along with your atypical Australian pricing.

Stay tuned for the next part of my quest for a “more than satisfactory” tone.