You are currently browsing the Music category.
When the rackmount craze hit, I caved to a small degree by buying the DigiTech digital delay unit. I got a great deal on it, probably because it had been discontinued. The nice thing was that the sound quality was good and it covered everything from doubling to chorus and flange, to echo up to a ridiculous 7 seconds. It could also do sound layering by capturing a played part and looping it back. You could then play over the top of that. The times were displayed so you could set a delay consistently as opposed to my analog pedal which was always somewhat of a guess. The down side is that it could only do one of the effects at a time and it required some fiddling by hand to set, instead of just stepping on a pedal.
I was never all that much of an effects user, so the DigiTech did the job nicely, and I sold my Ibanez “9″ series pedals to someone. That guy probably had no idea what a deal he got (it was a kid).
The DigiTech died after about 8 or 9 years and I replaced it with a Boss GT-3.
Although I owned this amp, I used it very little. It was a nice solid little amp with a good clean sound that had a little “crunch” to it. It was all solid state. Most of the time I owned it, it was on loan to the other guitar player in my band, so I heard it plenty. I also used it for a short while as the second amp in a stereo setup. It always performed well. Eventually the other guitar player bought the amp from me.
The Stage brand of amps was sold by Westbury/St. Louis Music, which also had an association with Univox from what I understand. The model I had was an all solid state 2×10. The clean sound was very nice, reverb was somewhat weak, but also good sounding. It had a knob labelled “clipping” that was unique. Unique in that it has to be the single worst sounding control I have ever heard. Ever. Anything above zero resulted in the most grating, annoying sound I have heard an amplified make. And somebody purposely put that control there! Does that mean they liked that sound?? And they made the knob go up to 10 so you could get more of that sound! I don’t know what they were thinking.
Posted April 10th, 2011. 3 comments
I had always been interested in Hagstoms because they were advertised as having a super-stable neck with a lifetime warranty. I’ve always been big on dependability in products. I bought a 70′s era Viking, which is Hagstrom’s ES-335-alike. I thought it looked incredibly cool, but the guitar never was a really fun guitar to play. It just didn’t sing to me the way I’d hoped. I swapped the cool tuners for a Gibson set, and tried different pickups, but it never became more than a backup. I used it live for one song to get super flange-o-matic feedback (hollow body guitars feedback super easily), but eventually I put the original parts back on and sold it.
My first real, name-brand guitar. I bought the small-bodied student Guild from my friend – I think for $65. It was probably a late 60′s guitar, with an all mahogany (top too), and I believe an ebony fretboard. The small size was super comfortable to play and it sounded great. I used fairly heavy strings to help beef up the sound a bit and it seemed to like those pretty well.
Sadly, the Guild self-destructed on a drive out west. It had been in the car for three days and when I opened the case just about every part on that guitar let loose. The glue had softened, the top curled up, neck pulled away from the body and just about any part that had been glued on was pulling apart. I was pretty much in tears – I really loved that little guitar. If I had it to do over I would now bring it to a repair person, because I’m sure all the parts were in good shape. At the time I had no idea that it might be possible to fix, so I left it in a dumpster. No decent guitar should suffer that fate.
In general I’m a big fan of Guild guitars – especially the older Rhode Island made models. Some of my all time favorite acoustics are Guilds.
Somewhere along the line I bought three Ibanez effects pedals for my setup – an AD9 Analog Delay, an FL9 Flanger, and a CS9 Compressor. My choice of Ibanez had more to do with price and what was available in my area than with any sound comparison. As far as I knew a delay was a delay, regardless of brand. As it turns out, the Ibanez 9 series was a great place to start.
Ibanez AD9 Analog Delay
The AD9 is probably the second most popular of the 9 series behind the TS9 Tube Screamer. I tried a Tube Screamer at the time, but it was far too subtle for what I wanted. If I was going to spend my money on an effect I wanted it to do some serious “effecting”, not some subtle wimpy kind of thing. The AD9 had an outstanding warm echo typical of analog delays of the time. It’s controls allowed a delay from nothing up to a little over 300ms as I recall, and the level could be set from none to never ending echo. One of my favorite features was that if you hit a note or chord with a long echo, and then changed the delay time, the pitch changed up or down. You could get some excellent spaceship taking off and landing sounds this way. That’s an effect! Very cool. This is probably the pedal I most regret selling.
Ibanez FL9 Flanger
I got the FL9 because it was wackier and not as subtle as the Ibanez chorus box, but it still could cover a sound fairly close to the chorus. It’s controls also allowed you to get into a totally crazy place with all kinds of strange regeneration sounds happening.
Ibanez CS9 Compressor
I’m not sure what prompted me to get the Compressor. Probably because it was the cheapest of the pedals as I recall. I’m pretty sure that I had no idea what a compressor did, or how to use it. Eventually, I used it as a clean boost. With my Peavey/Univox setup I don’t think the pedal had that much of an affect. Maybe it was just me. I’ve since used compressors that clearly make a difference in the sound, although compressors are generally a subtle type of effect – especially if used properly.
I bought the Univox used for $135 in the summer of 1976. The guitar resembled a Les Paul in shape only, employing a bolt on neck rather than set neck. The neck profile was narrow and flat compared to a real Les Paul. The body was all maple, with a blonde flame maple top. The interesting thing was that when I removed the pickups I could see a hollow area between the arched top and the maple body. It was almost as if the body was constructed flat like a Les Paul special and then the arched top was glued on top of that. The main part of the body was made of several (5 or 6?) pieces of maple.
After some initial tuning problems I swapped the tuning machines for grovers (which required reaming the headstock holes out a bit), and everything was great after that. To this day the Univox was one of the most stable guitars I’ve owned. It stayed in tune extremely well.
At one point years later I decided I needed a change and swapped out the pickups for Dimarzios – a PAF in the neck position, and a Super Distortion in the bridge. I almost immediately swapped them back out. The Univox pickups were significantly hotter and better sounding I thought. Later I put the Super Distortion back in, but I wasn’t using the guitar much at that point. I held on to the PAF and recently used it in a project guitar where it sounds amazingly sweet.
My Peavey/Univox “rig” stood in against countless Strat/Twin combinations, and although I love the Strat/Twin sound, I was never disappointed in my sound either. I could generate much more gain and overdrive the amp due to the hotter pickups and pre-amp setup, whereas a Twin needs to be at ear-bleed levels before it overdrives.
In the summer of 1976 I had hoped to save up enough money to buy my dream combination – a Gibson 335 and a Fender Twin. Well…with the usual expenses and lack of significant earnings of Post-High School/Pre-College life, I just wasn’t able to scrape enough together for either one of those, never mind the combination. I spent weeks at Rondo Music (back when they were a real music shop) and other area shops trying out amps and guitars. I eventually decided to go with a Peavey amp, and look elsewhere for a used guitar.
From the start I viewed my Peavey as a “poor man’s” Twin, although it only resembles the Twin in size and speaker configuration. As I recall it cost me less than $250.00 brandy new, as compared to about $500-600 for the Twin, and $325 or so for an equivalent Yamaha. As far as I know mine was a fairly early version of the Classic VT series, with silver knobs and a built in phase shifter. It was a two channel amp that allowed the channels to be combined into, effectively, a third “channel”. The power section used two 6L6 tubes, and the preamp was entirely solid state. There was a problem blowing fuses when I first got the amp and I had to return it for servicing. It took about two weeks because the problem was apparently a defective circuit that was new to this amp. I owned the amp for about 10 years, and never had another problem with it.
Sound-wise the amp could hold it’s own. It had plenty of volume, although not as much as Peavey’s larger Deuce and Ace amps. The clean channel didn’t have the sparkle of the good Fenders, and the distortion was no Marshall, but it did both and that was fine with me. I used the amp extensively for blues jams, frat parties, and later, gigs with an originals band.
The biggest draw back to me was the the sound didn’t “project” as well as better amps. That may not be the correct term, because the amp was plenty loud, but the sound seemed “stuck” inside the amp as opposed to really jumping out the way it does with some amps. Improved speakers might have helped that, but I never tried swapping them out.
The Bee Baa was my first effects purchase. Bought used in 1975 or 76, the Bee Baa is one of the few pedals I regret selling. It transformed my 12-watt solid state 1×12 into a multi-channel, fire-breathing monster…well, sort of. It had a host of knobs and three footswitches. It covered the boost/distortion effects from a great clean boost to more fuzz than I could ever care to use. Inbetween it handled a great range of overdrive and distortion sounds and really did a nice job for me. I stopped using the pedal after buying a multi-channel amp, and eventually sold it to a friend. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a Bee Baa, but as far as I can tell it probably was real close to some of the “boutique” pedals that are out there now.