Author: Stuart

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First Impressions: Xvive Sweet Leo Overdrive

Earlier this month, I picked up the Xvive Golden Brownie Distortion pedal (a JCM 800-in-a-box pedal), and I really liked it (once I got my head round it!).

With everything that’s going on right now, I wanted to buy something from my local guitar shop to try and support them, and it was my good luck that they had Xvive’s other dirt pedal in stock.

I’ve had a couple of hours with it so far. Here’s how I’ve gotten on with it.

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First Impressions: Anasounds Element Spring Reverb Pedal

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This is a bit of a difficult First Impressions for me to write. After years of everything being in the same place in the room, I’ve recently moved everything around. I’m still getting to used to how everything sounds in its new location – and in my new listening position.

Anyways. The Anasounds Element has just arrived, and I’ve had a couple of hours with it through my rig. Here’s my very first impressions of this pedal.

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New Arrivals For February 2020

Winter NAMM 2020 has been and gone, and now we wait for announcements to become shipping product … and then to reach the UK, which can sometimes take months longer.

I’ve pre-ordered a couple of things that were announced at (or around) NAMM. They’re going to take up most of my gear budget this year. The PRS S2 Singlecut McCarty 594 might arrive by the summer. We already know that Neural DSP’s Quad Cortex won’t arrive until the autumn at the earliest. At least I don’t have to wait as long for the Lark (Rhett Shull’s new signature pedal from Mythos Pedals); that should ship in March.

I’m still keeping an eye out for interesting bits of gear, but it’s got to be pretty special – and at a special price. By and large, I’m only looking to pickup pedals to help me fill in the gaps in my collection, or provide complementary tones for recording with.

Finally, I may have finished my planned revamp of the home studio, but now I’m sitting down to use it, I’m finding that a few things need sorting out, and that there’s a few gaps that are nagging at me a bit. I’m going to be tackling those, but not all in a single month 🙂

Here’s what arrived this month.

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First Impressions: Fender’s The Trapper Fuzz Pedal

I’m really not a fuzz kind of person. They pickup and amplify all of the noise on the dirty electricity we have here. I don’t enjoy playing through spitty, broken tones. And about the only time I use the bridge pickup on my Strat is to make sure it’s still there.

So what am I doing with one? And what do I think of Fender’s latest fuzz pedal?

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Studio Diary #18: Recreating The Sound Of My Speaker Cabs Using Celestion Impulse Responses

Now that I’ve added the Two Notes Torpedo CAB M to my setup, the next challenge is to set it up to sound like my actual speaker cabs do.

One day, I want to make my own impulse responses of my speaker cabs. I want to be able to share them with you, so that you can recreate the signal chain I use for yourself. That’s something I can’t do with any impulse responses that I buy.

I’m going to be using Celestion’s official impulse responses on the CAB M, until I can replace them with my own impulse responses.

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