#CoffeeAndKlon is my (irregular!) Sunday morning magazine series, where I talk about whatever’s on my mind right now. There’s always coffee, and there’s normally chat about the Klon and its many competitors.
Regular readers may have noticed that I’ve barely posted on here this year. Let’s discuss why.
Table of Contents
- Today’s Coffee Is A Mystery
- Why The Quiet Times On The Blog?
- Real Life Has Thrown A Couple Of Curve Balls Too
- Current State Of Play
- Final Thoughts
Today’s Coffee Is A Mystery
I must confess … I’ve lost track of which coffee we’re currently drinking.
For convenience, we’ve started keeping our coffee beans in a metal tin. No more half-open coffee bags falling over and spilling beans everywhere when we open the cupboard!
But it’s been a few weeks since we last topped up the coffee bean tin, and for the life of me I can’t remember what we put in there. It was probably Wonky Coffee (our recent new favourite) … but I can’t be sure.
Whatever it is, after drinking a lot of café coffee recently, it’s a very welcome change.
Speaking of café coffee … I want to give a shout-out to the High Coffee Bar in Chester. Kristi and I were there last week, and in my opinion, it’s the best coffee I’ve had in any coffee shop anywhere in the UK. If you’re a fan of velvety smooth coffee, I highly recommend it.
While I can’t shed any more light on what coffee I’m currently drinking, I can solve the mystery of why I haven’t been blogging recently.
Why The Quiet Times On The Blog?
There’s no big news or drama behind the silence. I’ve simply been busy on a couple of things (not all of them music-related), and there hasn’t been anything to share with you.
Mostly, I’ve been working on this year’s major blog focus (the Marshall Origin 20H review). Oh, and we’ve been dealing with some significant water damage to the house too.
Marshall Origin Demo Prep
Up until mid-March, I had my head down working on the signal path for the Marshall Origin long-term review that I’ve committed to finally writing this year.
A big part of the review (for me) isn’t just how the Marshall Origin sounds on its own. I want to explore how the Marshall Origin compares to some of the other options that now exist:
- What should I use for amp-only plexi tones? The Marshall Origin, or something like the Marshall JMP Synergy module?
- Should I use something else (like the Marshall DSL20HR) if I’m getting all my dirt from pedals?
- Is something else (like the Blackstar Debut 100 HR) a better choice instead?
- And which option is the better choice, depending on what type of dirt pedal I’m into?
I’ve been building a new Axe-FX 3 preset for this. And there’s a couple of ways to approach this:
- Do I build dedicated presets for each amp, to try and get the best possible tones from each of them?
- Or do I build one set of presets (a 1×12 preset and a 4×12 preset), so that the amps themselves are the main difference in the audio demos?
I’ve tried both ways, and eventually settled on option 2.
One thing I learned last year is to slow down and take a lot longer when I build a signal chain. It deserves (and will get) its own blog post later in the year; essentially I’ve started listening to a signal chain over multiple sessions, so that I’m doing more critical listening with fresh ears.
I think it’s close, but I do still need to test it in-depth with my Marshall DSL20HR. (Which I’m actually doing while writing this blog post.)
Oh, and I need to lock down which Axe-FX 3 firmware I’m going to use for this.
A Steady Stream Of Improvements For The Axe-FX 3
Over the last 12 months or so, Cliff Chase and the team at Fractal Audio have been shipping regular improvements to the amp modelling in the Axe-FX 3. They’ve been incremental, but (imho) they’ve really added up.
The big thing for me is that I’ve been able to reduce (or completely remove) some of the EQ tweaks that I regularly use on the Axe-FX 3.
- I don’t need to crank the High Treble control regularly any more, and
- I rarely need to use a graphic equaliser to get rid of the low-end mud that used to be there.
Or, to put it another way, I’m no longer reaching for EQ to fix perceived problems. When I am using EQ in one of my presets, it’s largely for taste.
(This is another topic that deserves its own blog post!)
At the time of writing, Firmware 32.05 has just dropped. This release adds a new Deluxe Tweed Normal model, and tidies up a few bugs recently introduced. No real amp modelling tweaks this time around. This could be the firmware version that I’ve been waiting for.
I’m quietly confident that this will work great with my Marshall amp heads. If it does, I’m going to stick with this firmware for a few months at least, to give me the stability I need for recording all the audio demos.
Lack Of Interesting (To Me) Second-Hand Gear
This blog is (mostly) an odyssey through the UK’s second-hand pedal market. That’s been getting tougher over the last few years – and so far, 2026 is proving to be the most difficult year yet.
A big part of the problem is that I’m not interested in most of the gear that’s come up for sale.
When I do find something that I think I might actually use, the asking price is normally too high imho. It’s not unusual to see sellers asking for 90%+ of the current RRP. At that price point, I’d rather buy brand new and get the 1 year warranty.
(I should really expand on this in a future #CoffeeAndKlon!)
And, let’s be honest – right now, any additional new (to me) gear is going to be a distraction from working on the Marshall Origin review blog posts. That’s another reason I’m being extra-picky. If I do get anything, it’s got to be either something I’ll use for those review posts, or important enough (to me) that it offsets the guilt I’ll feel from delaying the Marshall Origin blog posts even more.
Real Life Has Thrown A Couple Of Curve Balls Too
Mid-March, We Discovered Water Damage In The House
On March 10th, we discovered water coming up through the kitchen floor.
To cut a long story short, we traced the water to several problems:
- a burst pipe under the kitchen’s concrete floor;
- water ingress through an outside wall;
- and that the sink in the bathroom beside the kitchen wasn’t directly plumbed into a drain.
Our kitchen floor was wood laminate over an MDF sub-floor, all laid on top of the kitchen’s original concrete floor. We only noticed the water when the MDF had become completely saturated, and couldn’t hold any more.
So we lost the kitchen floor. Damn shame; we’d only had it a few years, and it brought me a lot of joy. With hindsight, though, it was totally unsuited for a kitchen. That MDF hid the water ingress for a long time, and it would have only taken (say) dropping a bucket of water on my way out to clean the car to ruin the floor anyway.
Fortunately, there’s no damage to the rest of the kitchen. “All” we need to do is to sort out the sources of the water, get a new floor laid (we’re going with tile this time – something that should not hide future water ingress), and it’ll be even better than before.
We’ve been having to organise all this ourselves. We have been in touch with our home insurance company, but they offer absolutely zero help in finding appropriate trades-people and assessing proposed work and quotes. At some point, maybe we’ll be able to reclaim some of our costs back from them – but that appears to be the only assistance that they’re willing to offer.
I … am not a handy person (to put it mildly). I’ve found it quite stressful trying to figure out what help we need. Each tradesperson has offered us very different remedies, with very different price tags attached.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to start some of the necessary repairs and restoration work yet.
We’ve Had Some Long-Planned Renovation Work Run Over
Long before we knew about the water damage, back in January we booked a complete renovation for the bathroom (which is directly next to the kitchen). That work started in mid-April.
We completely lost use of the entire downstairs of our house during this renovation. We’ve had to move everything (that we could) upstairs … and into the spare bedroom where my guitars and amps live.
That wasn’t a surprise. Building work and renovations are unavoidably messy work.
We were expecting it to take no more than two weeks; ie, it would be finished before the first May bank holiday. Unfortunately, the work massively overran.
I haven’t been able to play guitar for the last 5 weeks at all – partly because of the overrun, and then I had to get out of the house for a while because the constant dust was making me quite unwell.
Current State Of Play
The good news is that I’ve been able to start playing guitar again.
At the time of writing, the bathroom renovation’s almost finished. There’s some commissioning work to be done, plus some remediation work. I’m expecting the work to be finished by the end of May.
We’re about to start booking tradespeople to come and do the remaining repairs for the original water damage, plus the follow-up restoration work to get our kitchen back to rights. I don’t yet know how far ahead we have to book these people, but I’m hoping that we’ll get it all done before the end of July.
The remaining work shouldn’t be disruptive. We’ve been able to unbox everything and start using the whole house again. Which means that my little guitar room is no longer inaccessible 🥳
Final Thoughts
I’ve found all this disruption to be quite difficult.
It’s not just the amount of time and energy that it takes. I’m having to project manage all this repair and renovation work. I don’t know anything about buildings and their innards; my professional project management experience is in a very different field. And it’s quite draining having to project manage folks who don’t want to be managed, but equally who aren’t delivering unless I play that part.
No, the main problem is that guitar and music are my coping mechanism for difficult times – and that hasn’t been available to me for the last 5 weeks.
What do you do when your main coping mechanism isn’t an option? Let me know in the comments below.