Tone. At Home.
My home studio revamp is in full swing. I’m hoping to complete it this month, so that I can spend the winter months getting to grips with it all and starting to record music for myself once again.
The second hand market on eBay has picked up a little since the horror show that was October. It feels like the number of items is up a little, but I haven’t really felt tempted by any of the items put up for sale.
Continue reading “New Arrivals For November”This conversation was originally posted on my Twitter feed.
Good morning! It’s a (rare!) sunny day here. I hope it’s nice wherever you are too. For this week’s #CoffeeAndKlon, I want to talk about how I’ve been using my Klon these past few days.
Continue reading “CoffeeAndKlon #21: Fender Elite Strat And A Klon”This month has been a month of two very different stories: guitars and pedals.
On the guitar front, I’ve been very fortunate to find a couple of guitars that blew my socks right off. Proper love-at-the-first-note through an amp fairytale stuff. Fairytales don’t always have a happy ending, mind, so do check back in the months ahead to learn whether these do (or don’t)!
Pedals have been much more of a mixed bag. Good deals have been hard to come by this month, with a lot of people chasing a smaller pool of 2nd hand gear. Maybe it’s the summer months, or maybe it’s the renewed uncertainty here in Britain atm? Either way, I hope things pick up.
I’m doing something a bit different this month. Rather than try and squeeze my first impressions into 3 or 4 paragraphs (to keep these ‘New Arrivals’ posts short), I’ve started breaking them out into separate posts that I’m linking to from here. It gives me a bit more space to talk about each piece of gear. Do you like it? Or do you prefer the ‘all-in-one’ format I’ve been using up to now? Let me know in the comments below.
Continue reading “New Arrivals For July 2019”This conversation was originally posted to my Twitter feed.
I’m just going to put this out there. Is the Fender Pugilist distortion pedal secretly a Marshall-in-a-Box pedal? I think there’s a case to be made.
Continue reading “Fender Pugilist: A Marshall-In-A-Box Pedal?”This conversation was originally published to my Twitter feed.
Arrived this morning … will the Sovereign from Wampler prove to be the king of drive pedals? Spoiler alert: no. It’s a finicky pedal to dial in. Got some great sweet spots though. Let me walk you through them …
Continue reading “#SecondBite: Wampler Sovereign Distortion”This conversation was originally posted to my Twitter feed. You can find Part 1 here.
Well, the green Strat is back, and the result has been quite the surprise.
Quick recap: Fender Player series Strat, which I’ve really taken a shine to. Dropped it off @astringsuk yesterday to replace the stock pickups with a (mismatched) set of 63 Veneers from Bare Knuckle. Wanted a more vintage Strat tone.
Continue reading “Changing Pickups Part 2: A Nice Surprise”This conversation was originally posted to my Twitter feed.
Just dropped the green Strat off for a pickup swap. I was going to wait until I could do a before-and-after demo, but honestly I’m not a very good (or musical!) player. You’re not missing out.
Continue reading “Changing Pickups: Part 1 – Why?”This conversation was originally published to my Twitter feed.
I picked up one of the new Fender Vintera ‘60s Modified Teles today. I don’t care that it’s made in Mexico. It’s a good guitar.
Continue reading “First Impressions: Fender Vintera 60’s Modified Telecaster”At a recent post-gig band rehearsal, we decided that I needed to start adding effects to my acoustic rig. The plan this month was to build out a full acoustic board – one that’ll run into the amp for shows, and also directly into a PA for open-mic spots.
Sadly, my timing’s off, and the pedals I’m targeting for the acoustic board have been out-of-stock every time I’ve gone shopping for them. In the meantime, there’s been a few unexpectedly good bargains crop up on eBay, so I grabbed those instead.
Here’s a list of all the new gear that arrived in May, along with my first impressions of each item. I’ll do a detailed writeup about each piece of gear when I’ve had a bit of time with it.
Continue reading “New Arrivals For May 2019”Last night, Tess and I did our first gig together. Just me on guitar and her on vocals, and a very warm and generous crowd at the club we played at.
Continue reading “Gigging The Fender Acoustasonic Telecaster For The First Time”