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.
#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.
If tomorrow was going to be your last day on Earth, and you could spend it playing just one guitar rig (that you already own), what would you be playing?
Continue reading “#CoffeeAndKlon 30: My “Last Day On Earth” Rig”This year, I’m aiming to record four pieces of original music that I wrote in the early 1990s. They’ll be performed on acoustic guitar, and I’ll be doing the engineering, production and mixing myself.
Four songs on an acoustic guitar doesn’t sound like much, does it? After all, your average guitar YouTuber probably has to bang out at least one piece a week, every week. And this awesome chap is on track to record and upload 100 songs.
So why am I only aiming for just the four songs? And how is it going? The clue’s in the title.
Continue reading “Studio Diary #26: Rehearse, Rehearse, REHEARSE!”The big news this month (here in the UK) is that non-essential retail has been allowed to re-open. We’re coming out of lockdown, and guitar shops can open their doors to visitors once again. It’s too soon to travel the length and breadth of the country to hunt for hidden gems gathering dust on a wall somewhere, but we’re getting closer to that day.
In the meantime … this month, I’ve managed to pick up a couple of curious pieces to try. They’re a bit left-field, and (he says, having not tried them at the time of writing) probably not for everyone.
Continue reading “New Arrivals: April 2021”I recently picked up another of the Boss Legend Series pedals: the FDR-1.
Is this dinosaur of a pedal a dud or a delight? As with its sister pedal the FBM-1, it all depends on what guitar you play … and what you want to use it for.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Boss FDR-1 Fender ’65 Deluxe Reverb Overdrive Pedal”MIDI drums and drum samples. Love ’em or hate ’em, they’re a fact of life for just about everyone who records music at home. And, just as most of us can’t accommodate the noise of a real drum kit in the house, most of us have nowhere to keep a digital drum kit either. We’re left with using much smaller percussion pads, or we compromise and use something we can sort-of play like Roland’s SPD-SX.
But how do you get them into Universal Audio’s LUNA DAW in the first place? When I googled, I couldn’t find any instructions anywhere on how to do this.
So I wrote my own.
Continue reading “Studio Diary #25: The Roland SPD-SX and Universal Audio Luna”#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.
I can’t wait to get back into guitar stores when it is safe to do so once again. Why? Let me try to explain …
Continue reading “#CoffeeAndKlon 29: Why The Eyes Don’t Have It”It’s been a very quiet month for new arrivals. This time, it’s mostly down to me.
(The second hand market here is still a mess, but that’s a topic that probably deserves its own blog post …)
I’ve been enjoying both the Mad Professor Sweet Honey Custom and Sweet Honey Deluxe Overdrives so much, I’ve just not been very curious about the pedals that have been cropping up on the second-hand market this month.
But, you know me: I’m always on the lookout for tweed-tone pedals, and this month, I picked up a couple that are pretty rare in their own ways.
Continue reading “New Arrivals: March 2021”This year (2021), I’m on a mission. I’m learning how to record acoustic guitar at home, so that I can record some of my older, original music.
Earlier this month, I picked up the Roswell mini K47 large diaphragm condenser. Now, I’ve added a set of Neumann KM184’s to my mic locker too. How am I getting on with them? Read on for my First Impressions.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Neumann KM184 Small Diaphragm Condenser Microphone Matched Pair”It feels weird to write ‘2021’. While it always takes a bit of time to get used to writing down the new year each time around, this year it just feels plain weird. 2020 was one of the hardest years many of us have had to face, and it seemed to go on forever. [So far, 2021 is shaping up to simply be Season 2 of 2020 – Ed]
This month, I’ve been focusing on things that will help me hit my 2021 New Year Resolutions. Oh, and I found another tweed-tone pedal too.
Continue reading “New Arrivals: January 2021”
As regular readers will know, tweed-tone pedals are kind of my thing. Good, bad, or indifferent, I’m always on the lookout for an opportunity to try as many of these pedals as I possibly can. The Catalinbread Formula 5F6 is one of the few that’s in regular production.
The day this was delivered, I was pretty down on it over on my Twitter account. Has anything changed now that I’ve had a bit more time with it? That all depends on what kind of guitar you play …
Continue reading “First Impressions: Catalinbread Formula 5F6 Drive Pedal”