Tone. At Home.
“The Hermit’s Cave” is my little home recording studio. This is a general catch-all tag for anything about me and my gear.
A couple of days ago, I finally bought a Walrus Audio 385 Overdrive pedal. It’s my first Walrus Audio pedal, and I’ve been waiting a long time to get one.
I absolutely love it. Let me explain why …
Continue reading “First Impression: Walrus Audio 385 Overdrive Pedal”#TweedTalk is my occasional Tuesday column, where I talk about all things related to tweed amps and tweed-tone pedals.
This time around, I share my notes on how I’m capturing the sound of my Tweed Deluxe amplifier, and my thoughts on the experience.
Continue reading “#TweedTalk 4: Recording A Real Tweed Deluxe Amplifier”#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.
Continue reading “#CoffeeAndKlon 31: In Praise Of A Clean Boost Klon Into Overdrive”Earlier this year, I bought a brand new PRS Paul’s Guitar.
So what do I think of it? What does it sound like? And why exactly has it taken four whole months to write up my First Impressions?
This is a lengthy post, so grab a fresh drink before you dive in 🙂
Continue reading “First Impression: PRS Paul’s Guitar (2020 Version)”Towards the end of last month, I picked up one of these:
Read on for my First Impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Earthquaker Devices Special Cranker Overdrive Pedal”I recently picked up another tweed-tone pedal: Catalinbread’s Formula 55 overdrive pedal.
Is this going to be the 5e3-in-a-box pedal that I can recommend to anyone who wants the sound of a Tweed Deluxe without having to buy one of these expensive amps? Or is it going to be three out of three for disappointment with Catalinbread pedals?
Read on for my First Impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Catalinbread Formula 55 Overdrive”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:
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.
Continue reading “Studio Diary #34: Gigrig G2 Goes For A Service”I recently bought a Fractal Audio Axe-FX 3 mkII rack unit, for use at home.
Why did I get it, and how am I getting along with it so far? Read on for my First Impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Axe-FX 3 Mark 2 As An FX Processor”Over on Twitter, my friend Alessandro asked for opinions about Mad Professor’s Little Tweedy Drive.
Yes, I have opinions about this particular pedal. I wasn’t a fan when I first got this pedal. Will that change, when I take a second look at the Little Tweedy Drive? Read on to find out.
Continue reading “TweedTalk #3: Mad Professor’s Little Tweedy Drive”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.
Continue reading “New Arrivals: May 2022”