Sorry to hear that, but between the intonation, the dead spot from the C# to the D# on the second, and the ding, you’ve got a good case for bringing it back. Best of luck - are you planning to take a different Schechter, or are you just after your money back? Keep us all posted…
Oh - interesting coincidence: I finally got to my copy of this month’s Vintage Guitar and there was a small ad in the back for something called the Jekeko Wah - just what you are looking for. It’s not a rocker wah - it’s whole *raison d’etre * (how’d I do, Ministre? 
) is to replicate the sound of a partially-depressed wah but in easy normal-stompbox form…
weblink here: http://www.customguitargear.com/
Thanks, WordMan – that is a punchy little box (there’s audio clips up on the site linked above). Pricey, too, for a stompbox, but I gotta get me one. I love the way the tone just jumps out at you, sassy as all get-out.
Guitar Center took back the Schecter, no problems at all. <phew> Damn, I’m gonna miss that axe.
In the store, I played three more Schecters, a C-1+, a Hellraiser, and another C-1 Classic (that blue one I’d mentioned early). The C-1+ had 10s (maybe even 11s, it was pretty stiff) on it, I asked for and got a change to 9s, so it would match other Schecters.
The C-1+ was nice, but the action was cranked a little high compared to the others. The 9s helped, but not quite enough. Maybe I’ll bring a screw driver next time. Other than that, it felt really good. There was something (besides the action height) intangibly different from the other Schecters that didn’t feel as nice, but it was still pretty good.
The Hellraiser was really nice… but I still can’t get past the abalone binding. The nail in the coffin (ha!) was that it has active electronics, something I hadn’t noticed before. I don’t want active tomfoolery, I want a magnet with wire wrapped around it and a pot. I’ll add my own tomfoolery down stream from the guitar, thank you.
And the C-1 classic, blue was still awesome. And it was still blue, goddammit. Feh.
I guess I’ll sleep on it and go back later in the week.
Squeegee - glad taking the guitar back provided no hassles.
This will either inspire you or tick you off… Hope it’s the former.
Thanks, good minister. I got a smile out of that.
Well, there’s another, larger Guitar Center up in San Jose, and I need to be up there next Monday. Maybe they have the guitar I’ve been longing for, blue or otherwise.
Are you dead set on another Schecter, or are you going to be looking at other manufacturers? I’m still sold on the Ibanez – we’ve had a few Strat’s in here, but the Ibanez really stood out.
Danalan, no I’m not dead set on Schecter, but I did like the one I had quite a lot. It was just that the Guitar Center I was at only had a few of the low-end Ibanezes (Ibenezi?). I played a couple, and they felt pretty…low-end. I think I’ll try the SJ Guitar Center, and see if they have more, higher end Ibanezers.
I was also wondering how folks felt about Jackson guitars? I played one at GC, but gave it a pass because I wasn’t interested in a Floyd Rose bridge. It didn’t feel bad, though; a little light but a pretty fast neck. Since the Tele fulfills my bluesy/sassy needs, I’m still looking for something shreddy overall, but not too black/gothic looking, and medium-hot humbuckers.
Hey, WordMan: I just have to ask: you don’t do stomp boxes, except for your very conservatively used fuzz box to compress the tone and boost the signal to the vaunted tubes. I respect that, its cool. However…
This “wah” box seems made for you – its completely in line with the “analog only, knob twiddling only” philosophy you seem to prefer. It’s basically an analog tone control – no DSP, no A/D conversion errors, nothing but an analog boost or cut. That said, and I’m not sure, but I’m guessing you’d have not much interest in this kind of thing. Am I wrong? It seems like a conservatively pure and tone-control-like approach that really has some punch, but is ultimately a light(er) gloss over the existing tone, no lipstick (or maybe not much).
Just curious.
Maybe you should look at getting a custom guitar made. Here’s some that not only look amazing, but sound great!
You are 100% correct. If I were to add an effect to my signal chain, this type would be right in my cross hairs. Ah, but you are unaware of one essential fact: I am a fumble-fingered-and-footed idiot when it comes to introducing complexity into my rig. If I ever have to change settings between songs (e.g., change the delay from XXX milliseconds to YYY milliseconds - darn U2 songs!), or do more than one thing during the middle of a song (e.g., stomp on a boost for lead, then stomp it back to rhythm volume) I am clueless and screwed. So as a result, I tend to quickly weigh the “complexity index” of any added effect and 99.9% of the time, keep walking. The ones that have made the cut include the fuzz (as you mention) a boost for leads, a noise gate (because I often use P-90 soapbar pickups which are NOISY), and recently, a compressor (to bring out the jangle for some, well, jangly-type songs, like There She Goes by the La’s)…
Now - why is this the case? Two reasons come immediately to mind:
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I am my band’s “floor general” - I cue my fellow mid-life-crisis geezers on changes and generally am patroling the situation while we play to make sure nothing is headed off the rails. That way, my girl singer can, well, sing - and entertain; same with my bassist who has by far the most stage experience and is our biggest “front man” type. So my time is better spent doing that vs. determining whether my chorus is on or my envelope filter is off, you know? My other guitarist has a TON of effects and invariably ends up using the settings of one song for the part he plays in the next song - since he is the lead player, it doesn’t disrupt things nearly as much as if my rhythm playing messed up with my rhythm section.
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I am lazy and find I can usually “fake it” - case in point: slide guitar. Slide is a beautiful, wonderful thing - a good slide player, like Derek Trucks or Jack White, are amazing. Well, I have to play maybe one or two songs a night that involve slide, and I can do a barely decent job of it - and I usually take that approach. But sometimes, if my “floor general” duties are demanding, or I am particularly sweaty that night (sorry - ew, but it’s true and glass slides are slippery bastards!) I may just fake it - tune the guitar to Cheater’s G (i.e., a way I fake Open G tuning - I am all about faking it!) and use my big, fat index finger and play in a slide-like way. And you know what? It does the job - if you get used to never really letting your finger up off the strings, you can make a lot of the signature glissando sounds that folks are expecting to hear and they dance away, blissfully unaware that I am desecrating ZZ Top’s Tush by not really using a slide.
The same is true with many effects - most of the time, I can get a tone and some fakery to get by. With Shattered by the Rolling Stones, jeez - Keef has some sort of big-time envelope filter + flanger effects going on if you listen to it; but if I lock into the song’s groove and sell it with my rhythm section, no one notices and everybody parties…so why go to all that trouble? Using tone-friendly effects means I would have to spend time between songs changing settings - and preset multi-effects processors have yet to sound good to my ears…
Does that explain where I am coming from okay? My point in providing all that detail is:
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I love to read my own writing - but you figured that out from earlier posts! This thread didn’t get up to 150 posts on its own!!
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My situation may be very different than yours - don’t take the fact that I am not Mr. Effects to mean that *you * shouldn’t be - it’s all good, provided you know what you are trying to achieve and how that effect can help you do it. As long as you remember that your primary tone is the ice cream sundae; an effect is the cherry or nuts on top - get the sundae right first and don’t try to cover up a fundamentally bad sundae with too many nuts!!
OK: guitar shopping, the final frontier!
Short and sweet: I went to San Jose Guitar Center, which surprisingly had about the same selection of guitars as Gilroy GC (meaning a pretty good, but not all that different). What they did have though was a brand-new, in-the-box version of that Schecter I liked so much but had to return. I played that one and three others (2 Schecters, a Jackson), and just bought that same Schecter Classic (dreaded inlays and all, but in the color I like).
The Schecter Classic had 10s on it, so it was a little difficult to gauge (badum-bum! Thanks, I’m here all week), but it felt pretty good. And what the hell, GC has a 30 day, no questions asked return policy. So I bought it, again.
I just got it home, and strung it with 9s, and it feels fiiine. Whoot!! I got a shredder and a fine bluesy/punky Tele. Life is good!
Lastly, I also got that Jekenko Wah last week. It took about 10 days or so to get here; I got a personal e-mail to the effect that “we’re building it now, it’ll be a few days”. Very small company, I guess.
Overall, I like it a lot, its great for dialing up a punchy tone, from shrieky sass lead, to “chords in a coffee can”, variations that are about what you’d expect from a wah. My only wish would be for it to have a “wet/dry” control, so I could ease back a little on the wah-ishness, which often needs a little mellowing. I need to hook it up to my little mixer and experiment with something like this, putting it into an effects send or something.
Cool - thanks for both updates!
Glad to hear you got the shredder you want - play this one hard to really check it out, too.
As for the Wah, can you roll off your guitar’s volume to reduce the wah effect? Probably not, but just thinking out loud.
and keep us posted if you swap out the bridge pickup in the Tele!
Nah, the wah doesn’t mellow if you turn down the guitar, I don’t think that’s going to work. I’ll toy with mixing it, but my mixer (Mackie DX-6) is pretty small, so there’s not much flexibility. The thing is I want the guitar signal to be ‘wah-ed’ before goes into the POD (the reverse doesn’t sound very good). The POD already hooks into the mixer so I can split the output to go to an amp and a computer ADC interface. The mixer is stereo (well, two of the channels are), so I’m thinking I could go guitar->mixer(L)->wah (effects loop)->POD->mixer®->amp/ADC. Which sounds like a recipe for blowing something up if I don’t isolate the channels correctly.