Good Luck Struck! I won this guitar from Guitar Player Magazine a year or so after buying the Carvin DC150. That was so cool. It was billed as being worth $1200, and arrived with a beautiful fusia/pinkish-red metallic finish with a white binding (painted I think). The carved arch-top body and through-neck were mahogany as far as I could tell, and it had an ebony fretboard with sharkfin inlays. It had a Kahler Pro trem installed, and who knows what kind of pickups.
The disappointment was that when it arrived it was in awful shape. It was unplayable due to buzzing etc, and one of the pickups was dead. I talked to the folks at Robin, but they didn’t seem concerned and were not at all helpful. I suppose they were thinking “Whadda ya want for free, kid?” So…I took it to Doctor Bob, who did a wonderful job maintaining my Carvin, and he set it right. He also added some switching options. The guitar came with a S-S-H configuration and he added push-pull switches to the volume and tone controls so I could split the humbucker and run it out of phase. As with the Carvin, I never really found a use for this. It just sounded good at the time to have more options.
The Robin was a very comfortable guitar to play, although I never got used to the pointy reverse headstock. It also had a graphite nut and Bob suggested I didn’t need the locking nut, so eventually I removed it. He was right. A properly setup trem and guitar with a graphite nut and good tuners doesn’t really need the locking nut. Even heavy trem use didn’t throw that guitar out of tune.
The Robin did a nice job pulling off strat sounds in the neck position and the neck-middle position. I was never happy with the bridge pickup. I swapped it out for a Carvin, but still no good. This guitar was also a bitch to set up properly. I lost contact with Doctor Bob after he moved at one point and took the Robin to several different people at various times, but never with very satisfactory results.
I always expected the Robin would eventually become my main guitar because it was so nice to play, but that never happened. Sound-wise it never compared to the Carvin, so I carried it as a backup for years and eventually sold it. In my research prior to selling it I talked to the folks at Robin again (who were very helpful this time) and discovered that the guitar was not actually made by Robin in Texas as I had assumed. It was one of a series of guitars that were built for Robin in Japan. Still, it was a gorgeous guitar that was fun to play.
I decided to semi-retire my Univox, and in 1985 or 86, after much reading and searching and trying out, went with a Carvin DC150. It had all the features I was looking for (plus), and was pretty reasonable. Maple set neck, ebony fretboard, Kahler Pro locking trem, dual humbuckers, and that cool Les Paul Jr. double-cutaway shape that I’ve always liked.
This guitar was a real surprise when I received it. I had high expectations (it was the most I’d ever spent on a guitar after all), but out of the box it was setup incredibly well. Not like most of the partially or poorly setup guitars in area shops. It was in tune with great intonation and incredibly low action with no buzz at all – perfect, really. The Carvin is a machine. It is precise, very heavy for it’s small size, very punchy and bright for a guitar with humbuckers (probably due to the hard maple body?), and it cuts through the mix extremely well. It prefers high gain amps. This guy and a reasonably good high gain amp nail the Santana sound. To this day the guitar does not go out of tune unless I de-tune it. As long as it gets played reasonably regularly and the strings are in halfway decent shape it stays in tune. This guitar has been incredibly stable.
The Carvin was semi-retired a few years ago. I decided the Strat was more suited to the music we were doing and the smokey bars we were playing. The nice thing about a strat is that if something breaks, you unbolt it and put a new one on. Not so with a set neck guitar.
The downsides…As I said, the guitar is an absolute machine, but it’s sound can be characterized as somewhat “soul-less”. It’s very articulate and not at all muddy, and because of that it sometimes lacks character and a voice of it’s own. Carvin guitars of this era were advertised as being able to cover a wide range of sounds, and it certainly can. How many are really good sounds is another story. The humbucking sounds are all excellent in my opinion. I never swapped the pickups because they’ve always done what I’ve wanted them to do: The bridge is hot and can drive an amp well; the neck is much rounder and fuller and the two pickups balance well. The guitar has switches for splitting the pickups and running them out of phase as well. I use those once in a while, but not for long. I have never used anything other than the standard three pickup positions when playing live. The split positions sound weak and nasally in comparison to the standard full humbucker. This is comparable to just about every guitar I’ve played with split humbuckers. It’s not that they sound bad, just that they don’t sound as good. And they don’t really pull off the Strat sound as some would have you believe.
There were a couple of construction issues that turned up over time. First the truss rod was set very close to one end which meant that after a number of years and many setups and adjustments, the truss rod reached its end. It cannot be adjusted any further. Fortunately, the neck has been rock-solid and it hasn’t been a problem, but really the truss rod should have more room to adjust.
The second is more of a finishing issue. My guitar is plain white, and after a few years the neck joint and body joint started to become more visible, just slightly under the paint. If you look at older set neck guitars with solid finishes you’ll see it’s very common. The uncommon thing is that at the bottom of the body near the strap button a dark “crack” appeared. I had Doctor Bob (guitar tech who had done all the setups) check it out and it was only a finish crack with whatever was underneath starting to show through. In the years since the crack has not gotten any bigger, and it never had any affect that I could tell, but it’s a cosmetic flaw that really shouldn’t be there.
The Carvin is a very ’80′s sounding guitar and takes well to effects. It’s relatively high output compared to most other guitars and that is a large part of it’s signature. Very easy to get squeals and harmonics, and even with the Kahler trem it has outstanding sustain.
I read that Carvin started producing the DC150 again…that model seems to have disappeared from their catalogue now. That was a much different guitar, and is most likely not at all like the older model I have. Carvin guitars have changed significantly since then. I have had good experiences with them though and wouldn’t hesitate to at least try one of their models out.
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.
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.