Me wantee – Eventide Pitchfactor

 

Eventide Pitchfactor. 10 of the best famous Eventide Harmonizer effects mashed into a pedal. Coming to Singapore in June apparently. me wantee.

Pedal ditching – Keeley Compressor

Loyal acolytes of this blog (all one of you) will notice that I have been selling off a lot of gear in order to raise money to buy a Mesa Mark V and am over half way to doing it.

One of those items I sold was a Keeley Compressor – easily (in hindsight) one of the most overrated, over-priced and disappointing bits of gear out there.  The thing is noisy, even at the lowest settings, doesn’t seem to be properly grounded (caused a lot of buzz in the signal chain that went away when you touched it with your finger) and isn’t particularly stunning when you turn it on either. 

Fortunately Keeley is trading on a well-established reputation, so I managed to recover what I paid for it.

Lesson 23: Nailing Autumn Leaves rhythm parts

Still hacking away at this tune. Master gave me a chart from an Aebersold set that shows the chords. Finally, I can play a version of it all the way through. The trick for me, with many Jazz charts is to reduce the chords (e.g. an Emaj7 6/9 or an EbmajAdd4) to its basic chord, ie. an Emaj7 or an Ebmaj7 and then work from there.

Consequently, I can now play a straightforward version:

A) Verse

Cm7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7 |

Amin7b5 | D7 | Gm | G7 |

Cm7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7

Amin7b5 | D7 | Gm | Gm |

B) Bridge

Amin7b5 | D7 | Gm | Gm |

Cm 7 | F7 | Bbmaj7 | Ebmaj7 |

Amin7b5 | D7 | Gm C7 | F7 Bbmaj7 |

Ebmaj7 | AMin7b5 D7 | Gm | Gm

We spent some time playing through this till I felt comfortable with the progression and then spent some time trying to make the rhythm less monotonous, including doing some half-step substitutions.  Will continue to practice this. Leaving soloing aside for now and working on the rhythm in earnest – think this will payback well later.

Master did mention some things around tonality, e.g. we are in the key of Bb and have a minor ii V I (Amin7b5 | D7 | Gm) but we also have a ii Vi ii V in Eb appearing later on, so we can tread in between these tonalities depending on some of the emphasis notes in the melody. I hope to explore this more with Master next week.

Mic fail

(courtesy TheGearPage)

CF Martin IV spotted in Singapore

Down by One Fullerton sitting outside OverEasy drinking a cold glass of Erdinger beer, who should I spot but none other than CF Martin IV.  Well, I couldn’t be 100% sure, but it was either him or an evil doppelganger – I’m normally very good with faces, and this a pretty distinctive looking guy – curly red hair, moustache and I had only just seen him in a magazine yesterday morning (some partnership with Roland announcement at NAMM) so his image was fresh in my mind.

(Internet photo)

He was pushing a little girl around in a stroller while his wife traipsed after him as they looked for a restaurant.  One of my colleagues tried to call out ‘Mr Martin, Mr Martin’ to him, but he did not respond. Perhaps it wasn’t him, or he didn’t hear. 

Later I saw him back near our office building and got a good close up look. I’m 95% convinced it was him, though I had drunk 2 litres of beer by then.

In the meantime, while I was surfing the web to find a pic of him, I came across this pic of the stunning gorgeous Nancy Wilson from Heart (the thin sister) with a D-35.

Craigslist tube sale fail

Volcano

Some music written by my 4.5 year old son last night.

3M Dual Lock and latest pedalboard pic

A lot of people use Velcro. When I got my first Pedaltrain Junior, it came with a big roll of ‘industrial strength’ Velcro for attaching the pedals to the board. It did make me wonder exactly what industry do they mean? since I would hardly call the stuff that they supplied particularly strong. I’d lay out all my pedals, stick them to the board and after thrashing for half an hour would stick the board in the bag and prop it against the wall.

The next day, all the pedals would have sagged to the bottom of the bag in a big scratched up mess. Velcro, it seems, even that industrial kind (let’s presume it’s the florists industry or something lightweight) is not up to the job of holding several pounds of metal to a powder coated frame.

Enter 3M Dual Lock.

 

This stuff is the business. You will not find a stronger fastener out there (possible exception: permanent welding). It consists of strips of plastic with a self-adhesive side (and the muthafuckin’ glue they use on that is seriously fucking strong) and a rough side that consists of thousands of tiny plastic ‘mushrooms’ that interlock when pressed hard against more of itself.

The result is a bond so tight that you can pick up a whole loaded pedal board by one pedal and the Dual Lock will absolutely not come apart (I did this with my Jnr that had 10 pedals on it). The downside is, that when you want to pull the pedal off it is bastardly difficult, though I have developed a technique of pulling the pedal up at an angle from one side to get it off.

The stuff ain’t cheap either – SGD $5 (USD $3.50)for 10 cm of it (2 x strips) – enough to attach one pedal to the board. Fortunately I’m loaded.

Anyhoo, here’s my current pedal setup (probably good for about a week before I change it totally) on my newly acquired Pedaltrain Mini. The Metal Muff and DS-1 go into the amp input. The TU-2, Guyatone Chorus and Carbon Copy go into the effects loop.

The making of a Gibson USA guitar

..they left out the part where they drill the shit out of Les Paul bodies to weight relieve them, but otherwise a fascinating read.

http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/309-gibson-usa/ 

Slightly excessive pedalboard here…