Tag: video

Categories
Effects

Introducing the Screech!

Yay! The first 100 Screech pedals just got into stock at Vintage King. Again, the very first production model went to Blake Mills. He immediately started doing thing I didn’t even know it could do. Damn.

Here’s the info from the product page at gorepedals.com. Pardon then obnoxious use of the third-person.

OVERTONE OVERDOSE
The Joe Gore Screech is descended from vintage octave fuzzes like the Ampeg Scrambler and Dan Armstrong Green Ringer, but it’s not a clone. It provides much clearer octave overtones, and you don’t need an extra booster for great results.

Most octave fuzzes work best when you play near the 12th fret using the neck pickup. But Screech provides potent octaves regardless of neck position or pickup setting. It also does fine non-octave fuzz. A common mod for octave fuzzes is to add a switch that switches of the diodes, removing the octave effect. The problem is, the resulting sound is dull as dirt. Here, though, though non-octave fuzz is sufficiently fiery and dynamic to stand on its own.

Unlike most things Joe Gore makes, Screech is not especially dynamic. It needs consistently heavy gain for its powerful octave effects. But as on many vintage octave fuzzes, you get freaky harmonics and other interesting noises when you lower your guitar’s volume control.

Screech runs on standard 9-volt batteries or power supplies. It was created in San Francisco by Joe Gore and is built in Michigan by skilled craftspeople paid a fair wage. It comes with a lifetime warranty.

TO USE: The single knob is a master volume. (There’s no gain control because this circuit demands high gain to generate such strong octaves.) When you hit the DIST footswitch without the octave (OCT) engaged, the LED glows red. With the octave on, the light is yellow. (You can’t use the octave section without DIST activated.)

When Screech is bypassed, you can specify whether the octave will be engaged when you activate the pedal. If the LED glows green, the octave will be engaged when you hit DIST. If the LED isn’t glowing, you’ll get non-octave fuzz when you step on DIST.

BACKGROUND INFO FOR PEDAL GEEKS: Here’s an article and video I put together a few years ago, demonstrating all the classic octave fuzz circuits. Toward the end I show an early prototype of the circuit that would become Screech. It’s evolved since then, so don’t consider this a proper demo. It’s just some amusing pedal geekery. 🙂

Categories
Pickups

Fishman Fluence Strat Pickups

I’ve been following the story of Fishman Fluence pickups and their radical pickup design for a few years. From the beginning, I’ve thought Fluence pickups sounded great in the hands of some other guitarist, but this is the first chance I’ve had to experiment with my own set.

Most of the tech details are in the video. But in brief: These are active pickups with magnets, but no wire coils. Instead, the “coils” are printed on thin pieces of circuit board glued together like plywood. This design removes all noise and hum — chances are these are the quietest single-coil-sounding you’ll find. (Fishman also makes humbuckers and Tele pickups.) They can run on 9-volt batteries or (this is the other interesting part) a separately sold battery pack that replaces the trem cavity back plate. (There are other battery configurations for other guitars.) Another marquee feature: Each Fluence set includes a push/pull pot to switch between vintage voicing and a hotter “modern” sound.

This technology originated at an aerospace company. Someone there realized that their printed coils might work on musical instruments, and they contacted a leading pickup manufacture, who passed on the idea. Next it went to Larry Fishman, who was all over it from the get-go. He refined the idea and came up with lots of clever engineering to make it work in guitars. [DISCLAIMER: I have been paid in the past as a freelance contributor to Fishman products, but no one paid me to post this.]

To my ear these sound perfectly authentic, though the fact that they’re active is problematic for me personally. (That’s because I use so many retro stompboxes that don’t play well with the active pickups, which are buffered. The same goes for most of the pedals I sell.)

Killer, indeed!

While installing this in my much-abused MIM Strat, I also added a heavyweight bridge, trem block, and claw from Killer Guitar Components. I’m not kidding when I say “heavyweight” — it’s a formidable piece of metal, beautifully tooled. It feels like a major improvement on the standard design, and I think it sounds great as well (though it’s hard to be definitive about that without side-by-side comparisons). My favorite feature is the way the string inserts are chamfered — strings pop in correctly every time, which. as any Strat player can tell you, it not always the case. Killer, indeed!

Categories
Effects

Oink You Very Much: Meet the Porkolator!

It was a longer and harder process than I’d ever imagined, but the first of my four new pedals is finally released and in stock now at Vintage King.

Here’s my product demo:

And here’s a just-posted “First Look” video from John Bohlinger at Premier Guitar:

Man, it’s always such a trip when you tinker with an effect and play it in isolation for years, and then hear it being played by someone else. But I couldn’t be luckier: The first person who ever played one beside me was the stupefyingly talented Blake Mills. (He dug it, and he got the very first production model). And now, another performance by another of my favorite players. Pinch me!

There’s lots more info about Porkolator on the Joe Gore Pedals product page. As I explain, this is a highly mutated version of a circuit that was pretty bizarre to begin with: the Interfax Harmonic Percolator. There is so much bad info about the original pedal floating around. Everyone seems use a couple of phrases over and over: “tube-like” and “even-order harmonics.” Wrong and wrong! Everyone’s just copying something (incorrect) they read somewhere else.

A few years ago, I did a story on the Harmonic Percolator and its boutique DIY spinoffs. Even if you don’t especially dig the pedal, it’s an interesting study in how an effect gets tweaked and modernized. Here’s the accompanying video.

At the end I demonstrate an early version or Porkolator, though it’s changed so much that you can’t really compare. I gave this original to famous drummer and not-as-famous guitar player Matt Chamberlin during a film score session. Like many of my hand-built prototypes, it promptly broke. Fortunately, the new ones are built by the talented professional at Cusack Music. I just designed the damn things.

Categories
DIY guitar

Telecaster Deluxe Variations: Six Pickups and Some Weird Wiring

Fender’s Telecaster Deluxe has had an interesting and checkered history. Once regarded as yet another mediocre product from the company’s era of CBS ownership, these turn-of-the-seventies instruments now fetch huge prices on the collector’s market. I’ve never owned own. But when singer/songwriter Greer Sinclair loaned me one of Fender’s 2010 reissues, it was time for research — and experimentation.

The made-in-Mexico 1972 Deluxe reissue is a cool guitar. It replicates many details of the original: the oversized headstock, the Strat-like belly cut and fixed Strat-style bridge, and the big-ass pickguard. But its pickups are definitely a departure. In lieu of the original’s large-format “Wide Range” pickups, it employs a P-94R (a humbucker-sized P-90 spinoff) at the neck, and a conventional Gibson-style humbucker at the bridge.

The Wide Range pickup was a unique beast. Fender had commissioned Seth Lover, the man who invented the Gibson humbucker, to create a Fender humbucker in hopes of cashing in on the growing popularity of hard rock. With DC resistance in the 10k range, the new Wide Range pickup was a bit hotter than a vintage Gibson humbucker. Wide Range pickups appeared in several of the era’s models, including the Tele Thinline, Tele Custom, and semi-hollowbody Starcaster.

Gibson humbuckers have a bar magnet within, but the pole pieces are not magnetic. But on Wide Range pickups, the pole pieces are magnetic, as on Fender’s single-coil pickups. Situating individual magnets closer to the strings yield a brighter sound with greater note defition and string-to-string separation — characteristics we associate with vintage Fender pickups. So the Wide Range pickup lent a uniquely “Fender” twist to the Gibson design.

Wide Range pickups are slightly larger than conventional humbuckers. Most of Fender’s circa-1970 Tele reissues substitute generic humbuckers of the standard size. Standard humbuckers can sound superb in a Tele, but they’re horses of different colors. Fender has also created some reissues with the larger-sized pickups, but these are also garden-variety humbuckers — the larger format is purely cosmetic. The pole pieces of the factory humbucker on Greer’s guitar don’t align with Fender’s wider string spacing. (But one thing I’ve leaned from my various Fender/Gibson hybrid experiments is that sonically, this can matter very little.)

The P-94R’s cream-colored top looks wicked against the guitar’s finish. It’s a warm, full-sounding pickup from the mellower side of the P-90 spectrum. Actually, it doesn’t sound all the different from a traditional Telecaster neck pickup. (Like that pickup, it works quite well for jazz.) Note, though, that its dimensions differs substantially from those of a Gibson P-90, as you can the in the photo where it sits alongside a historically accurate Lollar P-90. When you change the size of a pickup’s components, you inevitably alter the sound. The tones can be for better or worse — but they will be different.

Continue reading “Telecaster Deluxe Variations: Six Pickups and Some Weird Wiring”
Categories
Pickups

Charlie Christian (and That Pickup)

Despite being obsessed with Charlie Christian for decades, I’ve never played a Gibson ES-150, the guitar he made famous. I’ve never even messed with a “Charlie Christian pickup,” even though it’s been a fairly common retrofit ever since the late Danny Gatton installed one in his Tele’s neck position. But I’ve always wondered: Could the C.C. pickup work in styles other than jazz? How would it sound in the bridge position? (The ES-150 had only a neck pickup.) And most of all, how would it sound with nasty fuzz?

Lollar Pickups helped me answer those questions with a loaner of three humbucker-sized Charlie Christian pickups. These differ cosmetically from the originals, lacking the cumbersome mounting hardware and the ornamental top plate. But they’re convincing sound-alikes, with similar magnets, wires, windings, blades, and modest output. (Their DC resistance is just under 3k ohms). Here’s what I discovered!

Clearly, it’s not a pickup for every rock guitarist (though it’s perfect for a swing-era jazz sound). Still, I found its non-jazz sounds strange and compelling, and I can definitely imagine using them in the studio. What do you think?

While making comparisons, I spend hours reacquainting myself with Charlie’s recordings, of which there are only a few dozen. His career was absurdly brief — it was less than three years from his first recordings with Benny Goodman through his death from tuberculosis (and probably other bad stuff) at age 25. But that was long enough to forever alter the guitar’s history.

Continue reading “Charlie Christian (and That Pickup)”
Categories
guitar

Meet the Resistocaster!

Here’s a new guitar I put together using Warmoth parts and Lollar Gold Foil pickups.

Around the time I started assembling the Resistocaster, I reviewed the cool new Supro Westbury — another guitar with gold-foil pickups — for Premier Guitar. It was an interesting juxtaposition, because the Lollar pickups are cloned from the models in vintage Teisco guitars from Japan, while the nouveau Supro pickups are based on the gold foils made in the ’50s and ’60s by Chicago-based Valco and used in several of the brands the company produced.

While the two sets don’t sound identical, they have much in common. Both provide full-frequency tones, with warm, cushy bass and open-sounding highs. Like vintage lipstick tube pickups, they have an attractively “hollow” character that always reminds me of an acoustic guitar. Gold foils are gorgeous for clean sounds, while overdriven tones are big and buttery, albeit it rather loose-sounding. (Though adding a bass-cut circuit to this guitar let me dial in tighter sounds.)

Another odd property: With almost all pickups, pulling back the guitar’s level cleans up tones on overdriven amps and dynamically responsive distortion pedals. (That behavior is pretty much the entire premise of my Cult pedal demo.)

But with gold foils, that just doesn’t work! As you lower the guitar volume when playing through distortion-producing gear, tones don’t clean up — they get a little quieter, then sputter out in the pot’s lower range. This isn’t intrinsically a good or bad thing, but as a player who tries to exploit the tonal shifts produced by varied guitar output, I was startled by this property.

At NAMM, I mentioned this behavior to Ken Calvet of Roadhouse Pickups, who created the Valco-style gold foils for the new Supros. He nodded in acknowledgement, and said it was due to the idiosyncrasies of the rubber magnets used in gold foils. (I probably wouldn’t understand the science even if he’d had time to explain it to me.)

But while it took me a while to get comfortable with the gold foils’ unusual dynamic behavior, I needed zero time to fall in love with their warm, character-rich tones. (This, by the way, is the same set of gold foils I recently demoed in my alternative Strat pickups video.

I love how this guitar turned out, and I expect to use it a lot this year. 🙂

Categories
Effects

And Now, a REAL Demo Artist

Thanks, Pete Thorn, for making my pedal sound so good.

Categories
guitar

The PAF Strat

As threatened, here’s a closer look at Strat with PAF humbuckers used for my recent “God Only Knows” cover. Most parts are from the long-suffering guitar used for all the Mongrel Strat Project experiments. And this one is especially mongrel-ific, with its blend of vintage Fender and Gibson.

Obviously, Gibson pickups is a Strat is far from a new idea. But usually, that arranged marriage is designed to spawn macho, high-gain solos minus the characteristic shrillness of vintage Strat bridge pickups. While many players I love have used humbucker-equipped Strats, I’ve always loathed playing them myself. But what, I wondered, if you didn’t use a hot humbucker, but an über-vintage PAF?

Like many players my age and younger, I was astonished when I first encountered a vintage-voiced humbucker. It was nothing like the dark, over-overdriven tones I associated with the word humbucker. A good PAF is sparkly, resonant, and perfectly capable of gloriously bright and clean tones. Here I used a Seymour Duncan Joe Bonamassa signature set, the same one heard in a more Gibson-like context here.

The results are … compelling. As expected, notes have far more mass than on a conventional Strat, and the bass response is vastly increased. There’s no shortage of top-end either, though the big lows can overwhelm the highs at times. So while I’m pretty much always obsessed with bass-cut controls (especially the high-pass section of the PTB circuit I’ve written about approximately 37 zillion times), it’s especially invaluable in this case. Since lows disproportionately drive distortion, even modest bass cuts clean up the tone and make highs speak more clearly.

I’ve also incorporated the dual-capacitor treble control I wrote about here. It creates a Vari-Tone/ToneStyler effect in a simplified way: Instead of using a clunky rotary switch to choose from a large set of treble-trimming capacitors, it fades between a large cap and a small cap, yielding the same resonant effect as the more complex options. I’ve incorporated this circuit in several guitars now, and it’s still working for me. It’s especially nice here, when paired with a Steinberger JackPot potentiometer, which lets you bypass the entire tone circuit for absolute maximum volume and brightness. I chose the small cap based on the minimum amount I’d ever want to remove from the signal, and the larger one based on the maximum cut I’d use.

I would have included a photo of the project in progress, but I didn’t because I’m embarrassed about how awful it looks inside. I needed to route out the pickup cavities to accommodate these larger pickups. But instead of taking it to a professional, or getting a proper router and learning how to use it, I chipped away with the tiny routing bit on an inexpensive Dremel tool. Do yourself a favor, kids, and don’t follow my lazy-ass example.

But hey, what’s a Strat pickguard for if not to conceal your shoddy workmanship? The guitar looks okay in the end, and I’m digging its sounds, even though it was far harder to get accustomed to than I’d anticipated. I had to recalibrate my right-hand dynamics to prevent treble notes from screeching. I was almost ready to chalk this up as a failed experiment, but after a few days of noodling around, I started to get the hang of it and enjoy the results. I think I’ll keep it this way for a while — or at least until the next Mongrel Strat concept wafts up from the bowels of Hell. 🙂

Categories
Amps

My Favorite New Amps: Carr Skylark & Lincoln

Carr Lincoln and Skylark amps.
Carr Lincoln and Skylark amps.
Carr Lincoln and Skylark amps.

I’ve been using my Carr Skylark amp incessantly for the last 18 months or so. I’d originally reviewed it for Premier Guitar magazine, and then I bought one for myself. I dig the fact that, while Skylark is inspired by 1960s Fender amps, builder Steve Carr made numerous departures from the Fullerton template. To my ear Skylark sounds better than my ’60s originals. That’s especially true of its re-voiced tone stack, where the ranges are smaller and subtler than on vintage Fenders, with more of a Matchless-style “no bad settings” sensibility.

For better or worse, history repeated itself earlier this year when I reviewed Carr’s Lincoln in PG. Lincoln is to Vox what Carr is to Fender — not a clone, but vintage-inspired model with its own character and unique twists. Its dual EL-84 architecture makes it a cousin of the AC-15. But I think of it more as a “fantasia on a theme by Vox.” It’s captures the Vox qualities I dig, minus the ones that can make dealing with vintage Voxes a major drag.

Carr-Skylark-Wiring-WEB
Skylark features true point-to-point wiring, with no circuit or turret board. (Lincoln, however, uses bits of circuit board for non-audio functions such as channel-switching.)

If you’ve listened to many of my videos and demo clips from the last year or so, you’ve heard these amps, so I figured I’d focus on them. For tech details, see the reviews. This video is more about how the amps inspire me musically.

From their flawless cabinetry to their ravishing tones, these amps are simply stunning. Cheap, they ain’t, but I felt like I was (RATIONALIZATION ALERT!) investing in musical art. Or maybe I’m making up for not buying a Trainwreck amp back in the ’90s when they were affordable.

I especially love how these Carr amps sound with my flatwound-strung guitars, and I used them on most of the demos for my pedals because they’re so very flattering. Ironically, I thought I’d given up buying new amps, because I was having so much fun building from kits. But trust me — both these instruments sound way better than any of my kit amps. Have a listen!

Categories
Effects

Premier Guitar’s Winter NAMM Report on Gore Pedals

Lookit! My pals and colleagues at Premier Guitar just posted a video demo of my pedals shot at NAMM last month.

It was a trip being on the business end of that gear-review microphone! Shooting this clip was surprisingly nerve-racking. You have to make the gear sound good … try not to play too terribly … speak coherently … and not come off as a dick. It’s a tall order, at least for me.

Thanks to the gang at Voodoo Lab for letting me shoot this in their booth. (Which they did because they’re just plain cool.) Thanks also to Shabat Guitars for letting me borrow this pretty guitar, and to Fryette for letting me plug it into one of their spectacular Aether combo amps. Man, am I a freeloader, or what?

If you’d like to learn more about Gore Pedals, please visit my Gore Pedals page for studio-quality recordings with multiple guitars, more pedal settings, and lots of geeky tech info.