Category: Series

All of the recurring features – #CoffeeAndKlon, First Impressions, #LongTermReview, New Arrivals – all in one place.

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#CoffeeAndKlon 32: A Digital Klone In The Axe-FX 3?

#CoffeeAndKlon is my occasional Sunday magazine-style series, where I talk about whatever’s on my mind about guitars, gear, music and yes, sometimes my love of both coffee and the Klon pedal.

Fractal Audio recently released a digital Klon klone pedal for the Axe FX 3. Knowing Fractal’s reputation, it will have been meticulously modelled against a real Klon Centaur pedal – either one they own, or one they were able to borrow from the community.

Can a digital klone be a stand-in for the real thing? Let’s find out together.

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Making Music #1: Choosing A DAW

Making Music is where I share the process as I write, arrange, record and release my music. You’ll get to read it all: what went well, what really didn’t, the decisions I had to make along the way, and why I made them. I hope you find it useful!

I’m finally sitting down to record my music. The starting point? Deciding whether I’m going to use Reaper, Universal Audio’s LUNA – or a mixture of both.

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New Arrivals: July 2022

I didn’t pick up any new (to me) gear last month, and just the one item this month.

The Axe FX 3 has definitely been a big factor in this. I’ve promised on Twitter that I’ll do a separate blog about this soon. The short version is that it’s been much better than I hoped for, and I’ve been putting so much time into exploring what it can do that I haven’t really had time to be curious about other gear.

So what did I find, and how was it interesting enough to wrench me away from the Axe FX 3 for a little bit?

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#CoffeeAndKlon 31: In Praise Of A Clean Boost Klon Into Overdrive

#CoffeeAndKlon is my occasional Sunday magazine-style series, where I talk about whatever’s on my mind about guitars, gear, music and yes, sometimes my love of both coffee and the Klon pedal.

How can I put this? It feels like it’s become a bit of a pastime for some folks on the Internet to mock the idea of using a Klon as a clean boost. So this time around, let me give you a concrete example of why I love using my Klon as a clean boost pedal – with audio clips.

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Studio Diary #34: Gigrig G2 Goes For A Service

I recently rewired my home studio rack to replace unreliable home-made cables with professionally-made ones that would be noise-free.

Unexpectedly, the rewiring also revealed that I’d been losing some of the treble from my guitar without realising it. While testing all of the different signal paths that I have, I discovered problems with two of the signal chains that I use the most:

  • the signal path through my Gigrig G2 (this blog post)
  • the signal path through my Fryette PS-100 Power Station

In this blog post, I’m going to explain the problem I found, and what I’m doing about it. I’ll also include audio samples, so that you can hear the problem for yourself.

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New Arrivals: May 2022

After a couple of months with no new (to me) gear, May has been a very busy month.

There’s a few items I’ve been after, both professionally and for home use. All of these things needed to be imported: some because they’re not sold in the UK, and some because they are sold here but are constantly out of stock.

With the UK government threatening to illegally break its own treaty and start a (doomed) trade war with Europe, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get them if I didn’t act now. On top of that, rampant inflation means that buying later means paying a lot more.

Now that they’re here, what do I think of them? And how was the import process? Read on for my First Impressions.

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2021 Review: Resolutions From Last Year.

Last year (like an idiot) I posted a bunch of music-related New Year resolutions. Did I do any better than the year before? Let’s find out.

A Quick Recap

Here are my musical resolutions for 2021:

  • Revisit my old music, and start creating new recordings of it.
  • Put together a song-writing process, and practice it.
  • Find my confidence as a guitarist.

Yeah, about that …

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