I had a blast building and testing two Marshall 18-watt kits for a Premier Guitar story — and I emerged with new respect for this cool 1965 design.
These mini-Marshalls were neglected in their day, but are now treasured. The oft-heard claim that they provide plexi tones at reasonable volumes is only partially true — these are open-backed combos powered by a Vox-like pair of EL-84s tubes. But while they have roughy the same horsepower as the era’s Fender Deluxe and Vox AC15, their tone is undeniably ’60s Marshall. In the studio, they sound far larger than their actual size. And out of the studio, they’re still pretty darn loud.
I’ve never seen three 18-watts in the same place before.
Even though the Mojotone and Tube Depot kits I built share the same schematic (and identical cabinets, both made by Mojotone), the build experiences and final results differed greatly.
And just when I thought I’d scaled the Everest of 18-watt ecstasy, I get a real Marshall 18-watt reissue for an upcoming Premier Guitar review. Stay tuned.
Are any of you guys 18-watt fans? Any observations to share?
This photo was originally a line of 137 amps, but I had to crop it to fit this small space.
Premier Guitar has just posted a new installment in my Recording Guitarist column. The topic: doubling riffs for fatter sounds. Using a single guitar part (and a great drum performance swiped from Dawn Richardson), I tried every doubling trick in the book. plus some ones that wise editors expunged from the book. We’re talking amps, mics, panning, processing, analog vs. digital—real OCD stuff.
Is it interesting enough to justify listening to the same part doubled 20 different ways? Depends how big a geek you are!
For the less geeky, here’s a concise executive summary:
Q. How many doubles do you need for maximum fatness?
A: Between zero and a lot.
Q: How many is too many?
A: Fewer than the 21 tracks in my last over-the-top example.
That, plus some helpful information, just to keep things lively. :smirk:
Few guitar pedals can rival the cult cachet of the Harmonic Percolator, a singularly ugly distortion stompbox produced in minuscule numbers in the early ’70s by Interfax, a small company based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And guess what? They sound ugly too, though they’re ugly in a cool and useful way.
They don’t get much rarer — or uglier. (This is a cosmetically faithful reproduction from Theremaniacs.)
I’ve been wanting to write about these for years, but was hindered by the fact that I don’t have access to one. No one does! Well, except the pedal’s best-known user, producer/guitarist Steve Albini. (Steve has posted several popular YouTube videos in which he sings the praises of the original and evaluates it against modern clones.)
But I revisited the idea recently when Christian Magee, who runs Tube Depot, sent me a couple of old 2N404A transistors from a stash he recently acquired. This rare PNP germanium transistor appeared in the original, along with an NPN 2N3565 (also rare, but not as ridiculously rare as the 2N404A). Yes—this pedal uses both a positive-ground germanium transistor and a negative-ground silicon transistor in the same circuit. (Another Fuzz Face/Tone Bender clone, this ain’t!)
I whipped up several variants:
• a clone using the original parts
• a near-clone using more readily available alternatives
• a Harmonic Jerkulator, an all-silicon/no-diodes variation created by DIY stompbox titan Tim Escobedo
The gold medalist is wrangle, for his touching coming-of-age tale about the day he learned there’s a reason musicians say “One two three four” before they start playing. Tied for second: Mark Spangler’s harrowing near-death experience as Jeff Beck’s hand-picked opening act, and Roel Torres’s terrifying tale of being hoisted skyward by stage machinery. (Think twice before wearing a hoodie onstage, kids!) Both are worthy of reenactment on one of my fave guilty-pleasure TV shows, I Shouldn’t Be Alive.
Winners, send me your snail mail addresses, and I’ll send you something noisy.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a story, voted in the poll, or just read the stories and spewed coffee on their computers. Thanks for holding court while I was traveling, and for giving me plenty of good laughs on the road. In the meantime, I’ve pretty much gotten over jetlag, flu, and a mountain of postponed paying work, and I’ve got some cool and intriguing posts planned for the coming days!
You can read all the entires here. Or just the finalists here. Or just the winners after the jump.
I was just in Europe, but I’m heading right back — this time on vacation. We’re going to spend a few days knocking around some fave cities, then embark on a tour of Paleolithic cave painting sites in France and Spain.
Our Cro-Magnon ancestors had to contend with such hardships as poor stage lighting, inadequate sound reinforcement, and excessively reflective surfaces.
I know it’s hard to tell when I’m being sarcastic, but this time I’m not. I wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid, until my mom said, “Why? All you’ll do is sit in a closet polishing worthless scraps with a toothbrush.” (Fortunately, she was more supportive of my musical dreams. She never said, “Why do you want to be a studio musician? All you’ll do is sit in a closet polishing worthless scraps with Pro Tools.”)
Since I won’t be able to post and reply as often as usual until I return at the end of the month, I figured you guys could help me keep things interesting. Which brings me to the latest tonefiend contest: the Cro-Mag Comedy Competition!
The rules are simple, just like the musicians we’ll be poking fun at. All you must do to enter is post a funny musical anecdote to the comments section below. It doesn’t have to be about musical stupidity, though experience suggests that those are the funniest stories. Nor does it have to be about guitar, though there are few things stupider than stupid guitarist stories. (Drummer, bassist, and vocalist stories are the obvious exceptions.) The tales should be true, or at least sufficiently true-sounding to dupe the rest of us. If they involve real people, please change their names enough to avoid legal action.
I’ll winnow down the entires to a manageable number via some as-yet-undertermined means (dartboard, or maybe animal entrails), and you, dear readers, will get to select the final three winners, each of whom will receive one of my unique handmade stompboxes, created in a closet at my cutting-edge workbench out of worthless scraps premium mojo parts.
Enter as many times as you like — but please, only one anecdote per comment. Also, please post your anecdotes here on the site, rather than in Facebook comments. Stories can be as long as you like, but remember: Your judges will be musicians, so they may have difficulty grappling with complex sentences.
The contest runs till I get back, or till jet lag subsides — whichever comes last.
Here’s a sample story to get the ball rolling. Naturally, I’m ineligible for the competition because I already have enough crappy little pedals it’s the ethical thing to do.
I heard this one from one of my favorite guitar techs. He’s such a pro that he refused to reveal the identity of the musicians in question, though I managed to pry from him the fact that it’s a leading UK or Irish band you’ve probably heard of.
Anyway, the band’s bass player insisted on using a large, loud, miked amp onstage, even though the front of house guy used only the direct signal in the PA. “Please don’t use an amp,” the crew and band pleaded. “It leaks into the other mics. It screws up everyone’s onstage mix. It makes everyone’s life more difficult. You can have as much bass in your wedges as you like. Or wear-in-ear monitors. Or anything! But please, no amp!”
“Sorry,” said the bassist. “It’s my sound. What’s more, I refuse to step foot onstage tonight unless I see my amp up there with a mic on it!”
That night the amp was right where the bassist expected it, with the usual mic in the usual place. But unbeknownst to the bassist, the mic cable wasn’t connected to the sound system. The cable ran offstage, where it was plugged into … a cabbage, pilfered from catering.
I just recorded a solo version of one of my fave film themes: Jerry Goldsmith’s main title to the 1967 spy spoof In Like Flint. I’ve adored the melody since childhood, and I blame it for instilling the love of chromaticism that made possible my extraordinarily uncommercial career.
I’d previously posted another version of this tune, performed upside-down on a friend’s lefty guitar. But that was all-analog — this time it’s digital. And I’ve used the video to highlight a favorite MIDI technique: doubling recognizable guitar sounds with non-guitar synths and samples.
I’ve been obsessed with this score since dinosaurs ruled the earth.
It’s funny — being able to trigger pretty much any sound from the guitar isn’t necessarily as liberating as you might think. Sure, when you first try it out, it’s thrilling to conjure an electric piano sound from the fretboard. But who wants to hear some schmo noodle aimlessly on electric piano when they could be noodling aimlessly on guitar?
For better or worse, I find myself using this technique repeatedly. When I double a part effectively, the result still seems like part of the guitar cosmos. It feels like expanding the palette, as opposed to vomiting on it. (Not that I’d be above vomiting on a palette if it helped create a cool painting.)
Did anyone else encounter this sort of childhood musical contamination? A melody, progression, or tone that infected you early on, and colored everything after? I’m not talking image, like falling in love with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Nickelback on the CBC because they were so frickin’ cool. I mean a primal sonic imprint. Anyone?
No longer ridiculously expensive. Now they’re just very expensive.
I spent last week covering the Musikmesse musical instrument trade show in Frankfurt, Germany, for Premier Guitar. I had a blast, and Chris Kies and I posted details and pics of more than 70 new products. (Here’s the short list of our personal faves.) Kies shot lots of video, and will be posting more than 50 demo segments to the PG site in the coming weeks.
But Messe is hellishly loud, far noisier than NAMM. When I finally got home and picked up a guitar, it was an acoustic. I was trying something new, based on info I obtained from Mary Faith Rhoads-Lewis, CEO of Breezy Ridge, a company that distributes several brands for acoustic musicians, including John Pearse strings.
I’d previously geeked out here about about the strangest and most expensive guitar strings I’d ever tried: this “rope core” set from Austria’s Thomastik-Infeld. Reader/cool guy Al Milburn turned me on to them, and I wrote about them here. And I recently posted this video demonstrating how the transformed my old Martin 0-17 into a compelling steel/nylon hybrid with a unique and expressive voice.
Anyway, Ms. Rhoads-Lewis told me that the late John Pearse originally created this set for Thomastik, and that the John Pearse Folk Fingerpicking set [PJ116] is identical to what the Austrian company sells. Best part: You can get them in the States for under $20, as opposed to a walloping $35 for the Thomastiks. She also told me that their magic works in reverse: You can put this relatively low-tension set on a classical guitar for a very different sort of hybrid steel-string sound. (This, she said, is exactly what the great Brazilian player Bola Sete used to do.)
I popped a set on my old Yairi classical. The feel was — totally strange, and in precisely the opposite way as on the Martin. The tone was edgy and exciting, but the tension seemed a little too extreme. If just seemed a little too … high-strung, in every sense. Then I tried lowering the entire tuning a whole step, with the sixth dropped all the way to C.
And … oh, my. Check it out:
Summary: Holy cannoli, I love how this sounds. And there’s something psychologically satisfying about the transformation too. See, this guitar has always been a bit … tragic to me. I got it when I was 16. My classical guitar prof at UCLA said I needed a better instrument, and my every-supportive folks, bless ’em, helped me buy this Alvarez Yairi for around $700 (in 1970s dollars). It was a top-tier model for Alvarez, signed by luthier Kazuo Yairi, and boasting lovely Brazilian rosewood backs and sides. It was a huge upgrade for me, but as I got deeper into classical playing, its shortcomings emerged. Had I not shifted my studies to composition, I’d have needed to upgrade again. I envied the Igancio Fleta y Hijos models my two teachers played, but at around $3,000, they were beyond my budget, even with parental help. (Pity — their current value is approaching $50,000.) So I’ve used this instrument as a limited but decent-sounding model suitable for pop work, if not serious classical concertizing.
May I take this opportunity to pimp my new monthly recording column in Premier Guitar? The first installment covers basic electric guitar miking technique. It’s ground that’s been covered often enough before, though I hope the article’s many audio files (recorded via ReAmp, moving the mic between “takes”) shed some new light on the topic.
Meanwhile, I’m breathlessly stoked about my new “Partsmaster.” It’s a Korina “Split Jazzmaster” body from Warmoth with Fralin P-92s and some new tricks I’ve been wanting to try with wiring and onboard overdrive, plus several other ill-considered, stab-in-the-dark adventurous experiments. It’s like some wacky Firebird/Jazzmaster hybrid (“Birdmaster?”) I hope to post some video later this week, but right now, the guitar is awaiting the plek treatment at Gary Brawer’s shop. Gary is also prettying up some of my clever but sloppy wiring, and remedying the fact that, when I brought the beast in, the strings were about a half-inch from the fretboard.
BBC dumbaas: "What are you going to do when you leave school? Take up skiffle?"
Aha! Now we know why no one has developed a cancer cure! It’s because young James Page took that skiffle thing a little too seriously.
Yep — it’s Jimmy Page at 13 in 1957. (He turned 70 this week.) Imagine how different the world would be had he followed his stated goal of becoming a cancer researcher. We’d probably have eliminated cancer 30 years ago, but our music would be a lot crappier.
As much as I love Pagey’s playing, I’ve long felt his greatest influence was as a producer. He defined what rock sounds like, largely via his unprecedented innovations in exploiting and manipulating reverberant spaces. Zep sounds like modern rock. Nothing before does.
Condescending BBC presenter: “What are you going to do when you leave school? Take up skiffle?”
Many years ago I was kicking that notion around with my friend Andrew Goodwin, the brilliant British media studies scholar. He expanded our ramblings into a journal paper, and gave me an entirely undeserved co-author credit. To this day, it’s my only academic publication. Andrew went on to create a Led Zeppelin course at the University of San Francisco. He was working on a Zep book when he died in a freak apartment fire a few month ago. I assume he was aware of this clip, though I’m not certain. He definitely would have loved it! I miss him.
What’s your favorite Pagey moment? I think mine is from one of those leaked studio outtakes, an excerpt from “Heartbreaker.” You hear the amp close-miked and claustrophobic-sounding. Then you hear it miked from a distance, spooky and reverberant. Then you hear both sounds together. Voilà — modern rock guitar.
My fave Pagey solo is — hehe — “Sympathy for the Devil.” Yeah — I still think he played that one.
Earlier this year I got to do a couple of shows with Marianne Faithfull, who prompted the song in the first place when she gave Mick a copy of Bulgalkov’s brilliant novel The Master and Margarita. We were talking about the song, so I figured it was my moment to finally solve the mystery.
“So who played the solo?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. “I just knew you were going to ask me something idiotic like that.”
But not everyone is a resolution cynic. Check out the comments section below last year’s NYE post, and you’ll find a dozen entires from Josh Starmer, who pledged a year ago today to record an entire album, finishing one song per month.
Yup — he did it! You can read about his journey here.
Speaking of journeys: I emailed Josh to congratulate him, and he wrote back from frickin’ Cambodia on the day he was touring Angkor Wat.
Heck of a year, Josh!
I solicited words of wisdom. Josh’s reply:
For every one part challenging, it was 10 parts rewarding. Before I started, I’d never written a song before. I’d recorded little instrumental tunes, but nothing with words. I was pretty intimidated by lyrics early on, so I did what any awkward person would in such a circumstance, I sang about the weather. I then sent the song out to my closest friends and, over the months, their praise and complements kept me going, and their honest criticisms made me better. I’ll have an album out by mid-February.
Each month started out with one or two weeks of doubt and freak out. It didn’t matter how good an idea I had about what I wanted to record, it always seemed impossible. But, like everything, it was just a matter of starting, pressing record, and then putting the song together, piece by piece. The second two weeks of each month were always filled with immense pride as I watch the song materialize out of nothing. An idea in my head made real, and in many cases, better.
Along the way I developed a systematic method for singing in tune (which, sadly, is a different skill from playing any other instrument in tune), and I’m going to write about that as soon as I can. There’s a lot of bad advice out there on the internet, and I think what I came up with works really well.
Oh, and perhaps the most important thing – I can’t say enough about how cool it’s been to take an seemingly impossible task and just chip away at it each month in a disciplined way. I’ve found myself encouraging everyone I meet to do a similar thing – be it sewing a quilt, or writing short stories, etc…
How cool is that?
Anyone up for the “Starmer Challenge” in 2014? Or are you goals more modest? Or more grandiose? Please — confide your hopes and dreams for 2014 so that one year from today we can all join together to laugh at your failure toast your amazing accomplishments!
So what are my 2014 resolutions? Easy — same as 2013! :satansmoking:
Somewhere far, far away, all NYE resolutions come true.
