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From the GAS thread:

I didn’t realize one was owed, sir.

Okay, I’ve had about 5 days with the new axes, and can say I’m still very much settling in. I’ve tried concentrating on them each for an extended practice session before switching off to the other guitar. I’ve probably spent 2/3 of this time with the Telecaster.

Tele impressions: it really is awesome to finally have an axe that has such a wonderful bluesy tone to it. I’m still getting used to the fact that I have such an instrument, and that I can approach old, classic electric blues and actually pull off playing stuff that just never sounded or played well with my old crappy guitars.

I’ve played around with WordMan’s knob twiddling a bit. I do back off the tone to around 5-6. I often roll the volume back to 7-8, but beyond that its just too weak a tone.

I dug out my ancient TS-9 Tube Screamer, and plugged that into the Pod to try to similate what he’d describe, and tried getting tone that way. Its just not going to work – I think WordMan’s settings above are adding signal compression, so that the guitar’s range will be around the same level even with the guitar level turned down. If I try something similar with a POD and the TS-9, it doesn’t really seem to compress much, the tone is too crunchy, and the POD gets a little distressed by that much signal from the fuzz box. I guess I’ll need to go back to GC and try this with a real tube amp, and see if that’s what I want to use.

(One nice thing about the POD is that I don’t need to mic anything to record the instrument, I just plug the POD right into an M-Audio ADC (Firewire 410), and use my computer to record tones and fiddle with guitar duets and such. I’d miss this with an amp, or I’d at least need to mic it well.)

Schecter impressions: I still love this axe, in spite of the dreadful inlays. I’ve mostly been using it to try out shreddy things I don’t do well, like trying to figure out sweeps after seeing various YouTube tutorials. Also its just fun to add a crunchy tone and take this guitar around the block doing deedle-diddle-deedle-diddle-sqwak! hard rock bits. Takes me back to my youth. I did find one manufacturing flaw – one of the brass grommits on the back is not set in properly; it looks like someone forgot to drill that whole out for the fitting correctly, and the grommit is sticking out from the back of the guitar about 1/16". I need to take off the strings and see if this is really wrong and if I want to live with it or return this guitar for another. Other than that, the Schector looks and plays really awesome.

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Of course you owe an update! Part of the fun is hearing what you find when you take 'em out for a shakedown cruise! :wink:

The Tele sounds great and no, you can’t do the knob twiddling with a POD or other solid state amp situation - simply won’t work. Using the Tone to take off highs makes sense, but overloading the amp and using your guitar’s volume to regulate that is a non-starter because solid state and digital amps react in a non-organic way to signal overload - the don’t “collapse” in a musically-pleasing way (tube guru’s refer to the effect an overloaded signal has on a tube circuit as collapsing it)…

The Schecter sounds like fun - re-seating a grommet should be no big deal to do yourself or to have them do for free in a coupla minutes while you wait, but first make sure that you have indeed uncovered all that needs adjusting.

Set your calendar to go back to GC before your return policy expires and make a list of stuff you come across until then…

Keep on playing!

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WordMan, yeah I figured it was moot on a POD, but it never hurts to tinker.

Question: since you’re using your fuzz box to overload the tube amp, don’t you get a lot of noise from the signal compression when you back off on the guitar volume? I’d think the background noise would get an unwanted boost, at least a bit. I know you have a noise canceler, but I’d think the pedal itself would hum a little.

I’ll go try a small 5-15w amp, one that doesn’t DSP (I’m thinking of G-DEC and Champ XD with solid state preamp stuff, but if you can bypass all that to just drive the tube portions, they may be fine. There seems to be a pretty limited selection of micro-amps that are just tubes and power), and experiment in GC with it and a pedal like my “tube screamer”, though maybe a different pedal would get the effect better?

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Depending on the pickups of the guitar, I can get some noise when I stomp on the fuzzbox to overload the signal, but not much more than I get normally - P-90 soapbar pickups can be noisy sumbitches but they are to begin with, so the fuzzbox isn’t adding much - and you don’t have to worry about them anyway. If things get noisy as you experiment but you love the tones you discover, you can decide if a Noise Gate/Suppressor would be worth it - it is for me.

I think you are headed in the right direction in terms of amps. In terms of pedals, that is a huge question. I am NOT a pedal expert - let’s put it this way: I got my ProCo Rat when I was about 18 or 19 in the 70’s and haven’t bought another fuzzbox since. My understanding that overdrives (like Tube Screamers) and Distortion boxes (like a Rat) are different - but I am not sure how. I also know that even across Distortion boxes they can be pretty different - some actually use a pre-amp tube as part of their circuitry for instance (I have tried an Ibanez Tube King that had this and really liked it). Add to all that the fact that I stumbled across my signal-loaded tone recipe pretty much by accident (long story) and I am really not much help. Sorry.

My buddy who has a Blues Jr amp tried my Tone recipe with a Bad Monkey, which is apparently very Tube Screamer-like and thought the tone was good, but not amazing like I was reporting. But his amp has a Jensen speaker, and I strongly suspect a Celestion or other Marshall-type speaker would be much better. I have a Celestion Blue in my little Tweed and it is so, so sweet and crunchy.

Bottom line if you want to go Tone exploring - get a good, simple-as-you-can-tolerate tube amp, and try it out with a few different fuzzboxes. Do NOT focus only on my “crank the level to 10” tone - just get a feel for whether you like how that stomp box works with that amp and guitar - and if it also happens to sound like it has possibilities when cranked, fine - but it should not be the only thing that matters.

Please note that if you want to shred with your Schecter, you need to make sure that the amp and/or fuzz box needs to have good enough tone controls that you can “scoop the mids” (i.e., dial down the Mid tones while keeping the Bass/Lows and Treble/Highs dialed up higher) - which is a standard metal tone profile. Because you want that type of tone, you need to ensure that whatever amp and box rigs you are considering can serve for both blues rock (which have a big mid spike in the tone) and scooped-mids metal. So if the tone controls on amp and/or box are not that responsive or only sound good in one setting, walk away…

Hope that helps.

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OK, WordMan – now you really have to post a short WAV of that Tone you’re so crazy about that you get with those seven magic knob settings. C’mon, a couple of chords, maybe a “before & after” example of the naive approach vs the magic knob settings. C’mon, post it! :slight_smile:

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I can look into this since my drummer-the-record-producer might be able to help. He is just moving into a new place and may be setting up some recording equipment in his basement. Depending on his progress, I can try to get something down.

If I had to pick a tone that sounds closest that I have heard recorded, it would be this one (link to youtube for a recording - the visual just the album cover). It’s Mama Kin off Aerosmith’s first album. I am pretty sure the initial, just-guitar rhythm is Brad Whitford playing a goldtop Les Paul from the 50’s with P-90 soapbar pickups. The lead work a few bars in should be Joe Perry on a Les Paul sunburst. In both cases, they get a thick, rich, natural sounding, almost “woody” or “hollow” tone - like you can kinda hear a bit of wah pedal-type tone but just as a natural part of the sound. The low-end punch of the rhythm playing is great - ballsy and deep, but no humbucker mush - a real single-coil clarity to it, but without the biting single coil highs since the knobs are twiddled; I love that. Playing my Tele’s single coil with the Tone rolled off and all that gain pumping through the amp sounds like that…

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You’re right, WordMan, that is a really awesome rawk tone. The mids are really out there, maybe from that immobile wah-pedal, and the dirty-yet-clean grunge is a great balancing act. I’d choose “woody” as a good description.

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Just a minor nit: I don’t hear that a wah pedal is being used - not like Mick Ronson (David Bowie/Ziggy) or Michael Schenker (UFO - if you don’t own their live CD Strangers in the Night, buy it immediately) did, where they would turn on a wah pedal and partially depress it and then leave it untouched to modify their tone. In this case - for Mama Kin and what I hear in my tone - is that “vocal” wah-like quality in the basic tone - it’s something you tend to get with lower-output pickups played through (wait for it - you know it’s coming) an overloaded, simple tube amp.

Angus Young gets a great vocal-sounding, woody tone through his SG and a cranked Marshall JTM45 (which actually has very little fuzz going - I doubt he is using a pedal to augment the natural gain of the amp - but then again, it is a JTM45…). Especially on their Bon Scott stuff like Powerage and Highway to Hell…

That subtle, vocal tone is one of those intangible things that I have yet to hear out of solid state, digital, heavily effect-laden rigs.

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Hey, WordMan! I actually went and bought that album on iTunes – I hadn’t heard it in 10 years or probably much longer. Those Schenker licks still stand out really well; a lot of UFO is pretty hackneyed, but it was then as well, so that’s OK. It was always about the guitar, which was awesome.

I’d always heard about doing this, but never tried it. I recall getting a Cry Baby as a gift, and being very frustrated with it because of the pedal travel being ridiculously short, so I sold it to someone. How would someone model tone this sans wah pedal? Couldn’t I just grab an EQ with enough bands and cut or boost something together? Schenker’s tone is pretty cool on that album, it’d be fun to try a tone like that. OTOH, its not like a wah is that expensive, but I’m not sure exactly what a wah does in EQ terms and I’m curious.

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re: Wah – I found this article about wahs, which contained a lot of circuitry information I didn’t much care about, and a frequency response curve, which I did. After some muddling with the 5-band EQ on my mixer, I’ve concluded that I can’t make that response curve on a small EQ, and would probably need something more capable. And getting a 10 or higher EQ seems like more money than the tone returned, so I’ll likely just go buy a wah and take it for a spin.

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What - you’re saying that Only You Can Rock Me is not in the pantheon of great songs?! Blasphemy! :wink:

No, you’re right Schenker is the man, Phil Mogg has a wonderful-sounding voice with about a 5-note range (could he be the Natalie Merchant or Tracy Chapman of the New Wave of Brit Metal?) but they aren’t one of the enduring great bands - but I dig it anyway, kinda like Montrose or (pardon the guilty pleasure) Starz.

As for the wah - well, I must invoke my “I know nothing about pedals” clause. To my knowledge they are basically a tone control mounted to a pedal, so as you vary the pedal the tone changes. I believe the effect is somehow exaggerated vs. normal tone controls - i.e., the active (powered) circuitry boosts or cuts frequencies to a greater degree vs. our guitar’s passive controls but there you go. So I see where you are going with the EQ, but clearly there is more to it than that.

I know envelope filters can mimic a wah-like sound - but the effect is more like an “auto-wah” where it somehow automatically depresses an imaginary wah right after you pick a note - so the effect isn’t a constant tone change like you would get with a stationary wah.

I can see if I can ask around, but suspect that you might be able to invoke it with a POD, but as you might imagine, I know nothing about those…

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Okay, I’ll jump in until someone who really knows what they’re talking about comes along and corrects me. My knowledge of pedals is about 30 years out of date, but I remember wahs…

A wah pedal is essentially a low-pass filter with a small zone of increased resonance at the filter point. The potentiometer is side mounted and controlled by a gear-toothed bar attached to a pedal. As the filter point crosses the harmonic series of a given note, it makes that characteristic ‘Wah’. It was particularly effective when it was downstream from a fuzz, overdrive or distortion pedal, and some pedals combined fuzz and wah.

Zappa was another artist who liked to leave the wah in a certain position and play around the filter point so that higher notes would have a stuffy tone quality, lower notes would have a different timbre, and notes right around the filter point would ‘jump out’ in timbre and resonance.

The ARP 2500 synth had a magnificent filter, that could be switched from low-pass to high-pass, band-pass and notch-pass, had a variable resonance, and could be controlled manually or with a slow wave-form, which produced a sound very much like a flanger, but by a completely different process. (What I really want these days is a Joe-Pass filter, but apparently I just need to practice more…)

An envelope filter, or envelope follower, used the initial attack on the note to trigger a pre-set wave form controlling a low-pass filter. On some of them, the sensitivity could be set so that you could pick the first note and then do a legato phrase of hammers and pulls and get the ‘wah’ over the whole phrase instead of individual notes. On fast passages, the analogue envelope followers would usually just give up.

I know you can get wah effects on the Pod XT Live, but I don’t know what you do on any of the others. I haven’t used the Pod live since the rehearsal when I started ‘Across the Universe’ with something called Insane Lester instead of Electric 12-string.

Hope this helps.

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What he said :smiley:

Well done, Beyonder! (that is the translation of your name, right?)

The key point is that “small zone of increased resonance” - I suspect that is what you can’t get out of an EQ unless you can really punch up a tight cluster of frequencies…

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I’ve started my tech phase evaluation of the instruments. I grabbed a tuner (BOSS TU-80), and intonated both of them as best I could (something that’s not very hard to do, see here ). Following that, I played a series of open chords using a very clean sound, and anything else that I could think of to test for dissonance.

The Tele sounded beautiful, with hardly a hint of dissonance (and, yes, I do know that some dissonance is inevitable, its all in that beautiful math) between open A-G-C-D chords. The clear tone and bright open sound was lovely.

The Schecter, on the other hand, came off fairly poorly. I toned down the pickup output and tried several settings, dialing as far back as I could to a clean tone. With the guitar perfectly in tune according to the tuner, the open chords sounded a little out, with an open D fairly dissonant, and the open A pretty bad, with some harsh beating.

Strangely, if I play barred versions of the open chords a little further up the neck, the dissonance subsides, and the guitar sound really good played clean. So I guess there’s something out in the lower frets positions or something…? The strings on this guitar around about 9 days old, so maybe that’s part of it, but the same can be said of the Tele and it sounds awesome, so I’m skeptical that its the strings. I’m going to see if I can live with this; there’s always that 30-day return I can do.

I’ve also found a couple more issues with the Schecter – there’s a fairly harsh buzz when playing barre chords above fret 10, but it doesn’t seem to be audible through an amp. I think this is the plastic packaging on the bridge pickup that I haven’t yet removed. I’ll need to take the strings off the guitar to remove that properly; I removed the neck pickup plastic, but it was a real pain with the strings on, and there’s a little bit of adhesive gunk left behind that I’ll need to figure out how to remove.

The 2nd (B) string has a slightly ‘dead’ spot around frets 14-16. Not really dead, but the sustain peters out more quickly than on other parts of the instrument.

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**squeegee ** - read the new guitar thread I started on the wood in solidbodies - more importantly, follow the link. I wonder if what you are experiencing with the wolfie B string is related to the problem Terry the guitar guru addresses starting with post #9?

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The dead spot could be a couple of things - first, try replacing that particular string. It could be a dud, in that as that batch of wire was being extruded, a couple of milimetres came through slightly thicker or thinner than the rest of the string. If the next 2 strings on that spot also show the same problem, that’s one variable eliminated. With any luck, that could be the source of your problem, and it’s cured for a $2 or less.

Other possibilities - those two frets could be a little high relative to the fretboard. If that’s the case, they can be replaced or ground down. That’s the kind of work that’s well past my limit, but a good pro can do that. If you need, send me a PM and I can ask some of the lads on the Jazz Guitar list if anyone in your neighbourhood does good work.

You like .09s, eh? Double check that there’s nothing about your grip that squeezes one string harder than any other in first position. Grabbing at straws, I know, but maybe the frets are higher on the Schechter than on the Tele. (Me, I like my .12s, but that’s purely personal taste. I had a student who liked .08s, and my vibrato on his axe sounded more like a trill…)

Maybe it’s that fancy inlay of yours… (teasing)

My tuning secrets - about 30+ years ago, I worked in a music shop, and one of my jobs was to tune all the guitars in the store so that anyone, even the brain-damaged keyboard player who sold organs, could pick up an axe and strum something on it to encourage people to buy it. Well tuned instrument with good tone = sale. We had strobe tuners in those days, but it was easier to stick a tuning fork in my mouth and tune them up from a reference tone. So, my secret method, modernized -

  1. Tune everything from the tuner.
  2. Play (4)=0, (3)=2, (2)=3 [(#) is the string, the next number is the fret]. How’s the open fifth/octave sound? Adjust as needed.
  3. Play (4)=2, (2)=0, (1)=0. How does that sound? The second string needs to function equally well open as the fifth of (4)=2 and as the octave of (4)=0, fingered (2)=3. There needs to be some compromise between these two functions.
  4. Once those two are sounding acceptable, check the sound of (4)=0, (3)=2, (2)=3, (1)=5 and compare it to (6)=0, (5)=2, (4)=2, (3)=4, (2)=0, (1)=0.
  5. Now, move on to (5)=3, (3)=0, (2)=1, (1)=3; (6)=3, (4)=0, (3)=0, (2)=3, (1)=3; and finally, (6)=0, (5)=0, (4)=2, (3)=2, (2)=5, (1)=5. All five of these open fifths should sound equally well tempered.

The thing is that in equal temperment, the fifth is a little out of true, and it’s more important that each chord sound in tune with itself than that each open string make the needle of the tuner peg right smack in the middle. If something’s out enough to make one of those sound sour, you’ll hear it.

Those’re my thoughts for the moment, sorry, I do go on…

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Merci beaucoup, mon ami. You’re so close - it comes out as ‘The Minister from Beyond’, or, if there were a ‘Ministry of the Beyond’ in the Canadian government, I could be known as ‘The Minister for the Beyond.’ Of course, the existence of such a ministry would be a state secret…

It’s also a character in the song “2033” by ‘La Bottine souriante’, one of my favourite Québecois bands. Unfortunately, having a French pseudonym gives people the impression that I’m a francophone, which is an honour I cannot claim. Francophile, most certainly, but it’s my second language.

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My Good Minister, thanks for the commentary re “Wah”. Your 30-year-old knowledge is probably state of the art; I can’t imagine a Wah has changed much since the days of Clapton and Cream. OK, I can imagine there’s now DSPs in the Wah, but I can’t say that I’m very interested in that sort of thing for a tone control, and would prefer something “old school”. But maybe I’ll be surprised.

Yeah, I’ve used envelope followers. I find them a bit too gimmicky and “quacky” to use more than once.

My POD 2.0 has a “swell” sound (which I find of limited utility; a cheap volume pedal would do better), but no wah effect, and I don’t think I’d want an auto-Wah in any case.

Ah! A very good point; I’ve got 3 sets of strings in my drawer, I guess I’ll change both guitars and measure it all again. And go buy some B’s from GC if I still see the problem.

A high fret(s) is my current theory, but the “dead zone” is about five frets long. Which certainly doesn’t rule out a high fret, it could well be the cause. It might also be a weirdness in the neck bow – looking down the neck, I can’t precieve any bow, which seems odd. But I suppose I’d need a straight edge to see if this was really the case. Its an awfully long scale neck, so the curve may be subtle.

Actually, I prefer 10s, but the Schecters in the store had 9s (for obvious presentation reasons) so I had left it that way until I got used to the instrument a little. I have 10s on the Tele and it feels good. I hadn’t decided if I wanted to keep 9s on the Schecter or not, I was so in love with the fast neck that I wasn’t in a hurry to change them. But now I think I’m back in evaluation mode, so I’ll do some trying out of different string weights.

That’s a very good thought. I have tried to be really light and consistent in my playing when I was testing the setup on the Schecter, but 9s are pretty fungible.

Ouch! :slight_smile:

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I remember long ago learning how to do equal tempered tuning, but I never quite made it work. Your method is more involved than anything I did, so I’ll give it a shot and see if I can make it work. Thanks!!!

I do wonder if some of what I’m hearing on the Schecter is the timbre of the rosewood & humbuckers vs the maple and single-coils of the two instruments. The Tele may have some “beating” in the open chords that are very subtle, but the warmer tone of the Schecter makes them jump out. I suspect its a combination of things.

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OK, the Schecter is definitely going back: there’s a scar on the body that I didn’t put there, and I’m horrified that I missed it. Its on the “bottom left” side of the guitar, the part of the body that sits under your armpit. Its on the side of the guitar, not on the face or back, and its not normally visible unless you look for it by turning the guitar neck-down. Its definitely a guitar store injury, and its pretty deep; it looks like someone whacked the guitar against a corner of something, and it goings right through the finish into the wood. The finish didn’t “shatter”; the gouge is a straight line perhaps 3/4" long. Damn, I hope GC doesn’t want to contest that scar, or I’ll really be pissed off (mostly at myself for being a dumbass). Dammit.

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Ouch. Best of luck.