#HOW ARE YOU SO NOISY. THERES A HOLE IN THE WALL. JUST FUCKING LEAVE I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THIS

[stinkbeck]

washing the dishes and this cockroach strolls by, gets to this rusty corner by the water heater, and just loses his shit. he spun in circles twice before just scampering away as fast as he could. like damn! there is nothing in that corner!!!! that little dude got the creeps! he met a cockroach ghost or something

#great now he’s following me around. man i got soapy hands i’m doin the dishes cmon #bugs #how can one cockroach make so much noise #?!?!!!??!??! this guy just does not act like a cockroach #HOW ARE YOU SO NOISY. THERES A HOLE IN THE WALL. JUST FUCKING LEAVE I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THIS

[cleverwordsandsadstories]

Rig Rundown/Studio Tour

Hey dudes, been a real long time since I did a walk through of my music rooms with you, figured it would be a good time to give you one of those. 

So where to start, well these are my three main boys,up on the wall from right to left, my tele, an xavier thinline, it sounds like santana, its huge sounding. it stays in tune super well, and it has a bridge pickup that isnt too bright or too barky, love it. My sisters jazz bass which I have been “barrowing” for like, 6 years. its perfect, I have another bass, a yamaha 5 string fretless, that I barely use and will likely sell, because this jazz bass just does everything so well and I dont have to eq it, or reamp it, its direct, with compression, nothing else. and lastly, my signature strat, special switching system, and a 5 position mid boost preamp and a hipshot b bender, I love this guitar, its perfection. 

below them, my blue strat, I have the trem set floating and the strings are old and really dark sounding. I might switch it to flat wounds because the pickups in it are really bright, and with darker strings this guitar sounds so cool and surfy through a clean amp with a ton of spring reverb. love it. and then there is my washburn, its a floyd rose guitar. I wanted to be joe satriani growing up, but the older Ive gotten, and the more Ive played, ive realized that isnt me. an old fender trem, and a set of locking tuners is good enough for most people, floyd roses just dont sound right to me. they lack a certain character. and full humbucker guitars arent my thing either, as soon as I switched back to a strat from my tele...man, it was eye opening, single coils with a mid boost > humbuckers with a coil tap any day. I am thinking about switching the humbuckers out for p90s with that mid boost circuit in it, or maybe even just a booster. 

I do recognize that my main guitars all have humbuckers in the bridge position, a lot of bridge single coils lack a thickness to them, the only single coil bridge pups I have ever liked were tele pickups. but its easier to just drop a humbucker in there or leave one in there than try to shove a tele pup in there. 

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my acoustics, my first act, my douglas, and my ovation. My first act was my second guitar ever, I got it in 2004? the pickup in it is from a harmony solid body from the early 80s, it is scarred six ways from sunday, it was my main live guitar for about ten years. I love this guitar, it sounds better than almost every electric guitar I have ever heard. if it wasnt for the fact it was so hard to ground and was so noisy, I would use this guitar for EVERYTHING. The Douglas was a graduation present from a customer at the music store I used to work at, it sounds like wes montgomery, its so fat man. and when you run it through my marshall and overdrive it, its so round and warm, its perfection. lastly is my ovation, its a 76 balladeer. it didnt come with a pickup which is disappointing, but I use a gold foil sound hole pickup with it that works really well. these three guitars are usually mic’d with that sweet audio technica at2020, and then I also run it through my amps on a cleanish setting, mix those in box, it sounds amazing. 

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heres my pedalboard, and also my main amp....and yes, that is a shelving unit, and my pedals are zip tied to it. The fender mustang floor is a life saver, I listened to it A/B’d with amps in the store I used to work at, and they were so true and lifelike, as good as a line 6? no, but this was like 500 dollars cheaper when I factored in my discount. great marshall tone, great bassman, great champ, all of the pedal sounds are great. and I can record at 4am and not get evicted. from left to right. 

behringer compressor. very smooth Dynacomp clone, it it so smooth, almost like an orange squeezer, but this thing sounds like country. 

behringer pitch shifter/harmonizer I use it to do two things, 3rd harmonies, so if im feeling lazy and dont want to double track a guitar, I can just do this and there it is. and i use it for full step bends, when you combine it with the b bender, you can really emulate a steel guitar

Electroharmonix LPB-1. my booster of choice, I prefer this so much in front of a dirty amp to something like a tube screamer. get an amp sorta dirty, roll your volume down to get a clean sound, and click the boost to get distortion. 

behringer hellbabe wah. optical, spring powered wah. very narrow Q, adjustable range, I use wah a lot, but I dont like it to have a really wide sweep like how crybabys do, this boy works so well.

also I know thats a lot of behringer, but guess what. sold pedals for 6 years, I have had dozens of different brands on my board, from vox’s joe satriani pedals, sans amp pedals, JHS dirt boxes, three or four seperate chorus’s, a few different flavors of delay, but I stuck with the ones I have, because they sound great....and because their resale value was low enough that I couldnt justify selling them to buy other pedals. plus they just sound good, yea theyre plastic but fuck you, they sound so good. 

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while I do mainly use a fender mustang to record, I have slowly been switching back to using a real amp. MY AMP. its a Marshall Valvestate 100 Watt head, into a Bugera version 1 2x12 cabinet, so I dont have those harsh turbosound speakers in it. I have changed the tube out in the head for a ruby tube like 3 years ago, its holding strong so power to those dudes. I have the amp set really loud (more on that soon) but the gain set really low, if a marshall running almost flat out with the gain pretty low worked for ACDC it will work for me. so about me running a 100 watt head flat out in an apartment, well you might have noticed that little boy up there

that bugera power soak is a life saver. my amp sounds so warm and chewy, and I never was able to get that tone from this amp before I got it. the valve state has a tube preamp, and a solid state power amp, so the idea is, if you run it low, it should sound about the same as it does full out. it doesnt, I think the power amp section definitely plays a smaller role but it does still play a role. I have the amp set to like 7/10, because above that I definitely get some suck to the sound, where the volume drops a little bit when you hit it really hard, and below that it is a little grainy sounding, theres just this high end sort of fizz, and the amp is a bit too dynamic at low volumes, if you hit it really hard it just gets too loud compared to when you play quiet. the compression I get from running it that loud through the soak just leads to such a solid sound. All of my youtube videos for the last few weeks are this marshall, but there is one last part to my sound. 

a first act delay pedal. this dude is a bucket brigade delay, that has a fault that drops the volume just a little bit when its on, and when you set the delay length reallly long, it gets really atmostpheric, and when this and the spring reverb in the amp start playing with eachother, its lush, its big. I put this in the effects loop and just this, nothing else. this, in conjunction with the soak, keeps my volume managable but also thick sounding. 

so there it is my dudes. Hope you got something from reading all this, cause I love talking about guitar gear so much more than you can imagine. if working at music stores didnt pay so fucking bad, this is all I would ever do. 

#blog #blogs #guitar #guitars #rig rundown