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Can you help me figure this thing out? It’s almost always a bad idea to label something a manifesto. It’s pretentious, and it makes you sound like a crank, especially if you were born between 1890 and 1990. But it is dramatic. And would anyone pay attention if I gave this post a […]
UPDATE: My Premier Guitar Heptode Virtuoso review is live. Read and listen here. I’ve got phase shifters on the brain, especially after encountering a couple of truly stunning ones. I just wrote a review for Premier Guitar of Heptode’s Virtuoso phaser, a superb clone of the old Maestro PS-1A. (I’ll link to the […] I just bought 500 germanium transistors.(Yes, as a matter of fact, I am insane. Why do you ask?) UPDATE: My Dunlop Fuzz Face Mini review is live at Premier Guitar. Audio clips included! How and when did it get so frickin’ easy to procure great-sounding germanium transistors? I’ve been building stompboxes for four […] Any talk box fans out there? Whew. Didn’t think so. I mean, doesn’t everybody hate those godforsaken things? Wasn’t it all downhill after “Tell Me Something Good?” But did you know that the “talking guitar” has a rather exalted history four decades pre-Frampton Comes Alive? Check out this performance by Alvino Rey, the steel guitar […] D’oh! I omitted a circuit from the Fuzz Detective video. It’s the germanium version of the Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz FY-2. So here’s a brief Fuzz Detective Appendix. The silicon version of the FY-2 is a cult item, a nasty little thing best known for its appearance on Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy album. The germanium […] 
As threatened, the Fuzz Detective video: WHAT: Twelve germanium fuzz circuits compared and analyzed. These represent the sounds of almost every fuzz pedal introduced between 1962 and 1968. WHY: A tool to help players identify the circuits most relevant to their musical needs. This isn’t about particular brands of pedals, but the circuits they […] Man, I’m glad I announced my intentions about this project! Thanks to your links and suggestions, the “Fuzz Detective” project has grown vastly more ambitious. I need a few more days to make my test recordings are assemble the results, but I believe this will be the most complete and “scientific” audio comparison of 1960s […] UPDATE: Based on cool info supplied by YOU, dear readers, I’m expanding the scope of this piece. I’m furiously wiring up clones of some very rare models, and I can promise many cool and interesting surprises. Thanks, guys! :beer: Okay, now that we’ve all gotten that silly “reading” stuff out of our systems with […] |
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