creepingnet's Reviews

A good Cheap, but basic, Axe

I bought my ME-437 at a pawn shop for $55 on a whim back around 2007 or so. In stock form, it's quite comparable to other First Act Models at the time.

The ME-437 is basically First Act's Wal-Mart available attempt at an Offset Style guitar, combining lines of the Jag-Stang with lines of something like a Mosrite. I think the idea was a inexpensive to produce budget offset that they could sell at Wal-Mart for around $75-150.

First impressions were pretty much on par for First Act. These Wal-Mart grade First Acts were rather under-rated instruments. They have solid wood bodies (poplar I believe), a pretty good maple neck, decent fretboard (not sure what material, looks like ebony but I'm, pretty sure it's either dark rosewood or some other rosewood substitute), 22 modern frets, a 12" fretboard radius off the bat, a decent 8.4K Ceramic humbucker at the bridge, decent enough electronics, and a decent tilt-back headstock. The version in the picture has the six-inline (which I prefer), but mine has a 3x3 on it (I think earlier versions of the ME437 had that setup).

The pros are for the prince it's a rather nice guitar and plays fairly well out of the box so-as-long as you are capable of doing your own setup. Fretwork isn't perfect, but for a $55 guitar I can't complain at all, because it's on par with most Squier Affinities of the period. With some leveling and re-crowning of the frets I'm sure I could get the action pretty low. For a "student guitar" though it does have a surprisingly wide and thick neck. You'd think they'd be copying the skinnier Fender Mustang-esque profile more popular on this style of guitar, but I guess they needed to save $$ on tooling so they just used their standard radius that they also use on the ME-537 (a LP-sh design that shares the same neck), and ME-636 (I've owned all three of these models at one point). I have gigged the other models using the same electronics and honestly, it did a great job on stage. It stayed in tune, it played rather well, and was fun to play, though I gave it my best pro-grade setup before bringing it up there. The fit and finish for something sold at Wal-Mart is also surprisingly above par. Not a single crooked route, screwy mistake, or lack of conformity in shape anywhere.

The cons of these are really only the machine heads and the bridge. The machine heads are your standard fare for a guitar in this price range at the time, and the bridge is one of those cheap Stratocaster copy hardtail bridges where the strings feed in from the back and have the difficult task of feeding them THROUGH the saddle and over the top. I find these SUPER Annoying to restring because it means I have to push the string up using a jewlers screwdriver or small hex wrench or something like that to force it up at the right angle to get through the middle of the saddle if I don't want to have to turn the saddle sideways and then feed the string through, and flip it down. Also, these saddles don't feel that solid.

Mine has some upgrades since then though. The wife decoupaged the generic black finish with a 70's motif. I put in a GFS Lipstick Tube Humbucker which gives it a crazy Hair-Metal-Meets-Danelectro quality, with a three mode coil split allowing me Tele and position 4 Strat sounds from the one pickup. I also routed it out by hand watching Mad Max movies with some Daiso store chisels for a Pro-Tone six screw Strat whammy which stays in tune great even with the 3x3 Headstock.

This is close to what I envision for the future of guitar amplifiers...

The Boss Katana MkII head was a major draw for me after my Bugera 333XL started giving me problems again and I talked to some musician friends about what everyone is using live these days. "A lot of modeling amps" seemed to be a big part of the concensus.

So I started looking at modeling amps - modern ones. I looked at everything I could find from Line6 Spiders, Marshall Codes, Behringer V-Amp products, Fender Mustangs, and then the BOSS Katana. This particular amplifier line started to check all the marks the more I read about it.

In years past, I had to have at least TWO rigs...

One rig was usually a digital effects modeler plugged into a computer used for multi-track recording. In this case, it'd be the Line6 HD500 plugged into a late 2015 iMac 21.5".

The other rig would be the one I would use in a live situation. In this case, it was a Bugera 333XL into a Peavey 412M 4x12 with Celestion GK85 speakers in it, and a SKB PS-45 powered pedalboard with a mix of analog and digital pedals, including a couple home built ones.

And both rigs shared the same stable of guitars which ranged from 5K ohm single coils to a 17K humbucker. And I wanted to get the same amount of distortion out of both without bending the character of the guitar's sound too much.

What appealed to me right off the bat was consolidation - I could remove several pedals, and basically use ONE amplifier for everything. The next thing was I knew I wanted a head. I love the sound of that Peavey 4x12 cabinet that I found at a rinky dink Seattle pawn shop for $114 in the fall of 2008. So I wanted to keep that for the "big volume" part of the equation. Lucky me the heads were 100 Watts across the generations, across the board. I could record with it at home (more on that later), I could practice on it and rock out in the house without blowing the roof off the place or precariously keeping the volume at 3 or under, and I could definatley go out and play a live show with it cranked up.

What lead me to the mkII head was a couple of things. First off, a good Gen 3 Artist or Gen 3 head would cost me about $500 - about the same as the Bugera. Sure, I'd get Bluetooth and the new "Bloom" feature, but that never was a big part of my sound or overall technological style anyway. A Mk1 is fine, and I compared the Mk1 and MkII to each other and found I'd probably be fine with either.

So I looked at our local Guitar Center and as luck would have it they had the MkII head there used for about $264-ish. So I went over, tried out a quartet of similar guitars to mine through it (J.Mascius Jazzmaster, the worst setup Squier Tele in the world, a $1000 Snakebite James Hetfield model, and a Squier Mustang). Within 2 minutes I had my sound dialed in, and I tried out the 5" speaker on it which sounds surprisingly great considering it's jammed inside of a amp head. So basically, these are a 0.5w/30w combo that also doubles as a 0.5w/50w/100w head. Nice.

The built in effects have me currently testing and tweaking and deciding which pedals go, and which pedals stay.

Among the real jewels of the built-in effects are of course the Chorus, Delay, and Reverb effects, as well as the EVH style Phase 90 effect. So that took a Small Clone, Behringer PH9, and a BOSS DD7 Digital Delay off my board already, as well as a Behringer Noise Gate.

The Pitch Shifter, however, in typical BOSS Fashion, was not something I'd be using the same way, so the EHX Pitch Fork stays put. I use my Pitch Fork like I did my old WH4 Whammy pedal, 5ths usually (ie single string power chords that I can layer over each other using power chords, or add 5ths to regular chords for some big, pretty sounding stuff). However, it has it's own purpose in the setup that matches will with the Pitch Fork as I remember trying a BOSS PS-2 pitch shifter in the 90's and loving the whole feedback knob effect I got from it back then. That said, it is a downside I can't really remove that pedal from the board and have one MIDI Floorboard, but you can't have everything.

I don't really have a need for Fuzzes or Overdrives since I use my own home-made Fuzz pedals which are on my equip board. But it's nice to know I have more options.

One big feature is the "Boost" feature. My 333XL had an Effects Loop with adjustable gain so I used to use that as a booster for solos. This has that as well. It requires a separate foot switch except I think some MIDI Pedals allow for control of 1/4" phone jack which is in my future plans.

Being able to control via MIDI was important because I looked at the footswitch options. While the GA FC and GA FC EX are both nice looking footswitches in their own right, they seem a bit limited compared to the functionality that this amplifier is capable of. Lucky me I have the MIDI Controller port so I can pick from one of many various MIDI Controllers for it which is a source of research to improve the QOL of my guitar-life.

Through the 5" speaker, yes, you will get some "blat" with bass-heavy tones, but that's to be expected, this is a high-wattage, high gain amplifier with a 5" built-in speaker intended as a quiet late-night jamming option. It's not meant to be a tonal marvel, meant to be a tool for practice and jamming out for fun.

Recording through the computer is a bit of an interesting scenario. See, I'm an I.T. guy by trade, I work with Windows, Linux, and MacOS and am familiar with all three...here's my view of the landscape...

The BOSS Katana has pretty decent support across all three but has some caveats I think people need to be aware of...

First off, the headphones are MONO only. So you don't get that cool stereo separation you'll get over USB. However, recording, you WILL Get stereo and it sounds spatial and awesome when dialed in right.

For Mac and Windows you can edit patches on the amplifier using Boss Tone Studio which is downloadable via their website. It requires downloading a driver. That said, it does have one downside in that you are limited to one of eight signal chains, and those signal chains might not be to your liking....or fit what you want necessarily....

Which brings me to Linux. Linux has FxFloorBoard, an unofficial program that allows you to do more in-depth editing of patches including changing up the signal chain in any order you choose. This make it somewhat incompatible with BTS and means you might need to choose one or the other as patches might get corrupted by the official software.

Some of the smaller models might not allow for as many stored patches as the head does, which allows for eight + a "panel" button that allows it to be used like a regular guitar amplifier via the adjustments on the top. Which is 5 more "channels" than my old Bugera has. However, having limited patches is an advantage because one problem I learned through having eight setlists of 16 banks of four patches each on the HD500, or the Behringer V-Amp pro with it's crazy total of 100 patches (or more), was I would sometimes get a form of "option paralysis", or wonder why I'm only using 2 banks of patches 90% of the time with so much space. Because my use-case is my own sound, and my own sound only. I'm not looking to copy famous people anymore. I found my own tone long ago.

So the pros of this unit is that it can indeed be a consolidation of your musical gear needs into one head that can do it all acting as a digital recording device for your PC, a home practice amp, and then take it to a gig with a 4x12 and melt faces with it. Also the chorus, delay, reverb, and having a lot of other stuff prewired into the amp helps a lot with reducing pedal board sizes, which with the reducing sizes of local stages these days is a real plus to not need to navigate 10 stompboxes that take up the space of a toilet stall.

The cons are that the headphone jack isn't stereo, and in order to monitor the stereo output you need to use a program like Ardour or GarageBand with the monitor on. This is somewhat negated in that there's no latency even on my ancient iMac, but it is kind of a pain to need to open up a DAW just to hear the amp in it's full stereo glory. The footswitch is separate and costs about $140 - which is kinda' expensive considering it only has five buttons and you still need to purchase separate footswitches and expression pedals for other functions like boost, wah, or volume. However, for about the same price or less you could buy a cheap FCB1010 Behringer MIDI board and run the whole amp if your programming skills are up to it (one of the options I'm seriously considering). Linux support is spotty at best, with me spending a lot of time in Pulse and Alsa dicking around with the settings to get a sound, while Mac is probably the best platform for adjusting the outputs on it (we all know how wacky modern Windows audio can be).

But overall, it checks on average 9-10 marks from someone like me who demands a lot from his equipment at a price lower than some Squiers, and at $264 used that's a friggin steal. It's small, it's light, it's loud, I can practice or record with it, and then go down the street and terrorize the open Jam Night with a thumping monster guitar tone. 100% what I was looking for. And the fact it has MIDI Negates a lot of the negatives about the footswitch.

Preferred Settings + Usage:

Great Tone, not so Great Setup......

I picked this one up for $45.00 in early 2016 as an "office guitar" - it has since been used for parts and to create a functional yet decorative addition to a friend's livingroom. But here's my thoughts on the Memphis A-2TR.

Memphis is a Korean, Samick built guitar, and a badge for an Illinois music store. They made guitars from the late 1970's till the late 1980's. The A-2 is one of the lowest end models they had made. This version is an update on the original A-2 - which was a shortscale guitar int he Harmony H-802/Mahar vein - with practically 60's Teisco hardware and a Bill Lawrence style humbucker jammed in the middle - this guitar improves on it by using a Stratocaster block-less tremolo unit and one of the excellent DiMarzio humbucker clones that Memphis started putting in their guitars in the early 1980's.

The TR Designation means "Tremolo". This guitar takes the original A-2 shape, removes the pickguard and outdated Teisco hardware, and outdated 60's style neck, and replaces it with a rather mid-80's Washuburn like 21 fret Mahogany neck with a rosewood fretboard and black binding (hidden under red, black, or metallic blue paint), mated to a Plywood mini-Super-Strat style body routed for a through body "C" plate Strat style trem, with a DiMarzio super-distortion style humbucker in the bridge rating in at around 12K, 1 Volume, 1 Tone, top mounted input jack, and a set of budget tuners at the headstock. It's a rather simple, but effective guitar.

Sonically this guitar is very close to an old Fender shortscale with a humbucker at the bridge - like a Mustang or Duo-Sonic. Clean evokes very Nirvana-esque tones, and distorted is very thick and grungy. The Vibrato stays in tune excellently, thanks to a fairly decent set of inexpensive machine heads and a rather well done nut and so on.

Where this guitar falls short is the action adjustment. First off, it falls prey to the Memphis curse of a fretboard that was not properly leveled at the factory, making for much fret-leveling off the bat to get any sort of decent action out of it.

Another problem is the neck slot was cut too deep, causing the heel to sink too deep into the body, and causing the guitar to have high action even with the bridge saddles "decked" to the bridgeplate. This is not good, this means you NEED a shim to get a good setup out of it once you get the fret situation sorted out.

And speaking of action adjustment, the screws on the bridge are odd - rather than the usual Allen key screws used on most Strat-style bridges, Memphis, for some odd reason, opted for a stratocaster tremolo that uses FLAT HEAD screws that require a Jeweler's or eyeglass screwdriver to adjust the action for each string. The screws are, of course, made of brass and tend to seize up in their holes so adjusting the action is almost undoable after 30 years of gunk got into the threads, as the soft brass wil lbreak splitting the flat-head screws. If you want to fix this problem, you will need to remove those flat head screws via Pliars or any other means necessary, and replace them with metric thread Allen screws like a regular Strat trem.

Another small issue is if you want easy vibrato action on .009's, using 2 springs, you are going to need some strong springs, or you are just going to have to chock it up to issues and use 3, because there is no way to deck the tremolo to the body with .009's without 3 springs - which on a 24" scale guitar where the string tensions are lower, is a bit ridiculous, I think they did not cut the bridge spring cavity long enough for proper adjustment for my type of action.

But outside of that, the issues stop there. The Truss rod is very responsive, so it should not take much.

Does all the things a good tuner should....as long as it stays in the mode I want.....

So this story starts while I was in Zombie Jihad. I bought this thing off the other guitarist for $50.00 when he basically wanted us all to have the same tuner - and me, for over 20 years, had used my own ears to tune my guitar, and it always worked great, never a tuning issue in any of the previous bands....but this one, we relied on BOSS TU-2s for everything.

So I wound up adding it to my board for $50 and it's been well worth it and become a handy tool for intonating my guitars. I usually just keep it in the chromatic mode because not everything I use is in EADGBE - as I use Drop-D, Drop CG, Ricky Wilson (B-52's) tunings, and tune a Bass VI and regular basses and build/setup my own and friend's guitars and do the intonation with this as well.

My only problem is I've found with my big clodhopper feet is I can have a tendency to knock it into the wrong mode when playing live if I get a bit uh.....wild on stage. It's happened a few times, currently I'm not as reliant on it because most bands I use my ears to so I can compensate a few strings for specific songs using my ears and my touch. Something a lot of guitarists don't realize is a guitar is not a perfect instrument and no guitar is 100% perfectly in tune, you have flat and sharp spots all over the fingerboard - unless you buy one of those $500 compensated fretboards - even an Earvana Nut or Buzz Feiten system won't give you 100% accuracy on a guitar as the nature of it's design lends to sharp/flat notes. Also, like all BOSS pedals, it has a Buffer in it so it comes AFTER my custom-built FazzFuzz prototype pedal on my board to prevent dynamics/input issues.

So yeah, handy tool, just remember it does not fix the limitations of guitars and always put a Fuzz BEFORE it or you might have some problems with the behavior of your fuzz devices.

Was this Beginner's Luck or did I just discover another bloody talent......

...to complexity my life. Really, I can build guitars and basses, work on outdoor power equiptment, technology, household handyman stuff.....now I'm starting to get this good at electronics....WTF, thanks for making my choices of what to do with my life even harder now.

This project started upon joining the Eddie Sweaters in early 2017, I found that since we are a 90's cover band and 90's bands are a bit, uh "Grungy", and my amp setup is setup for clean, biting, crisp, toasty brown tube-driven overdrive, I kind of needed a muddy, noisy, chaotic fuzz pedal of some kind to get some of that "Grunge" back in my life....

So I assessed the cost of buying a new Fuzz Pedal, in particular, the BOSS FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz, and thought to myself...."Why do I want to pay $150.00 for $55 of parts and a nameplate.....if it works for guitars, maybe it works for pedals too". The final thing was seeing DIY Guitar Pedals on Youtube make a fuzz pedal in 5 minutes.

So $99 in my pocket and that kind of extended alone-time needy project wants and I started work on my biggest project in a long time - building my first pedal. And of course, like always, I dream big, and take on what would be more than anyone could chew for most people.

Over the course of 3-4 months, I breadboarded up my own fuzz, using several circuits such as DIY Pedals 5 minute Fuzz, the Big Muff (various versions), Univox Super Fuzz, and the Fuzz Face, as a guide, but not at all copying them. Instead of Germanium transistors sourced from a reputable pedal supplier - I sourced all my stuff from Vetco in Bellevue WA.

The pedal got it's name "FazzFuzz" or "FNaF Fuzz" or "Freddy Fuzzbear's Pedal" off the fact that during development, the ultimate final number of Transistors became a total of 5 - which just so happens to match the number of Homocidal Animatronics in the Scott Cawthon modern indie classic computer game Five Nights at Freddys, so each Transistor is named after an Animatronic, and all but Freddy can be taken out of the circuit, giving a wide variety of sounds, and the adjustable voltage and currents applied to such give some insane versitility. the Transistors consist of 3 50,000 hFE BC517's and a pair of 300 hFE BC333's - giving a sound like no other pedal on the planet as I've never heard or seen a design that uses this many transistors, let alone these specific variants.

So let's talk now about how this pedal works and why I'm so happy with it.....

The controls are as follows from Left to Right

TOP ROW: Jumpscare (Volume), Negativity (-Voltage or Q2-Q5 to Ground off Emitter), Freddy (Freddy's Input Voltage - Q1), Power (The Total Voltage going into the Pedal), and Teeth (Gain)

MIDDLE ROW: these 4 switches either direct the Emitter of Q2-Q4 to a fixed value resistor, or the Negativity control - Golden Freddy (Q5), Foxy (Q4), Chica (Q3), and Bonnie (Q2) from Left to Right.

BOTTOM ROW: Far Right Slide Switch controls the input capacitor giving the pedal a more "distortion" like voice or a more "fuzz" like voice. The Far left slide switch changes how the Volume contrll roll-off works by retaining the treble frequencies or not, allowing the volume to also act as a tone control, which works well as this pedal is EXTREMELY hot in output.

BUTTONS: Left = Permanant On/Off, Middle = Switches between Permanant and Momentary Operation, Right = Momentary On/Off, later versions I plan to omit the center button because I figured out a way to make this work without a "mode" switch. There is a bright red Indicator LED I sourced from a dead VCR in the middle above Bonnie's head on the artwork (center) that indicates when the pedal is off or on.

The pedal can run off of 5-15VDC at 1mA or lower either off a 9V battery, or off a Power Supply. Currently I'm using a 9VDC at 300mA power supply on it, center positive - which I need to reverse for my pedalboard and to meet standard BOSS pedal requirements if I'm ever to start making these for sale.

The amount of sounds this thing can get, due to the variable positive/negative current flow and voltage levels, and all the input/output options provided makes for a very versatile device ranging from a great booster to a insane noise machine that would make someone like Trent Reznor or Captain Beefheart proud. So it's a bit more than just your regular, run-of-the-mill Fuzz Pedal.

Using just the input stage gives a very traditional fuzz that can range from slightly lower output with good crispiness with full voltage, to muddy, angry, dark grungy fuzz with a nice even gain. HIgh output pickups really drive this thing to crazy levels, especially active pickups. And because the gain is not so over-the-top it can also be stacked or layered over other pedals or a already great sounding Tube Amp to add some "mud" or some other tonal chracteristics unattainable any other way.

The Bonnie switch switches between a resistor and the variable positive switch. Bonnie creates these frantic blippy computer-like oscillations that would be good to use as some kind of junky lo-fi sequencer setting, or some kind of broken synthesizer sound. Turning the negativity up and down makes his more or less extreme or changes the behavior quite a bit.

The Chica Switch acts more as a stabilizer. The set resistor is a 1Meg Resistor that basically adds a hair more gain and takes away some presense. However, the negative control is a bit more useless on this setting up to a certain point ebcause it basically cuts the whole signal off or sends it to ground, I plan to fix this by putting another 1MEG between the switch and the pot so that I can have up to 2MEGs of control on the negative side making the pot more useful.

The Foxy and Freddy Switches Add more gain and an alement of chaos to the pedal. In set mode the pedal becomes more quiet but a bit more aggressive as well.

And combining these can do all sorts of things from raspy, distorted, messy industrial sounds, to an almost perfect square wave, to strange Atari-2600-Arpeggiator effects added to the note decays. Messier and glitichier settings filled with noisy artifacts can be controlled by using the momentary footswitch to turn the pedal on as needed, weather you want to add an Atari-2600 type decay to the end of a guitar solo, or create brief chaotic sound bytes to add texture to a piece.

That said, very satisfied with my first pedal and first original pedal design. It has it's quirks, flaws, and some revisions I need to make to make the next one better - but despite it's been a very usable, very fun, and crazy tool and toy in my effects setup since I built it. I plan to build more of these.

Found in a Dumpster and Still better than a Gibson IMHO

So I was moving my now wife in with me back when we were dating and during a purge of junk we did not need to the trash bin, I open the bin and find a guitar case, and in that guitar case, was this black 2008 Epiphone Les Paul Special II........with all six strings still on it, and some kind of rock glued to a hole on the top. It gave me a conflict of conscience for most of the morning.....

Well, I left and went to drop some stuff off at my place and came back to find said guitar now sitting in it's case, outside the bin, with the case open - a-ha! An Omen. I talked to my girlfriend (now my wife) and she said "Go get it! Are you nuts! Free Guitar!" - so I got the Epiphone and brought it in the house. That evening proceeded with a teardown and cleanup of the Les Paul.

Now here we are, 7 years later and I've been using that same guitar off/on when I feel like something omre "Gibson-ish". To understand my tastes, I'm more of a fan of bolt-on necks - that's one thing I have an issue with on most Les Pauls or pretty much anything Gibson - being a techie and being the kind of guy who sets his guitars up to a certain level of perfection, I prefer bolt-on necks - who needs that much Sustain anyway? I get just as much out of my Paul Dean, and this guitar is almost the same in that category as well.

The Epiphone Special II Les Paul, as it was in 2008, was a maple necked, basswood bodied Les Paul Special style guitar with 2 humbuckers, a 700R in the neck at around 8.4K Ohms, and a 700T in the bridge at around 14.6K Ohms resistance, very very hot pickups. Despite these crazy values and a bolt-on neck, it really does deliver a rather official sounding Les-Paul-Like tone. Everything is stock.

About my only complaint about this guitar is the machine heads. They don't hold tune very well live and tend to slip, which is probably why it was thrown out. I have plans in the future to put on a brand new set of Kluson Revolution machine heads to fix this issue, other than that, it plays extremely well, with action on par with a Les Paul Custom worth about $3400 more than what I paid for it, which is hilarious considering I got this thing drenched in beer and probably vomit from a dumpster for the best price in the world - FREE.

The only upgrades this guitar really got was a pair of chrome pickup rings, some stickers, and a new set of strings.

Best Fluke Buy I Ever Made

One of the most vital parts of my "tone quest" was over as soon as I found this cabinet for $114, beaten and road-worn, in a Everett WA Pawn Shop in 2008. The shop did not know what it was, the only spot on the entire cab that said "Peavey" on it was the nameplate in back, it had heavy duty casters all grungy and beaten suggesting decades of hair metal, grunge, punk, and other hard rocking shows.

The 412M in the picture is the newer version, I have the older VTM series version from 1988 - these 412Ms came with 4 Celesion GK-85S speakers - precursor to the GK-100. Honestly, after having a Line6 Cabinet with a GK-100 in it, I prefer the GK-85s better, they are a bit warmer, and have midrange, and that midrange is in EXACTLY the right spot for my tonal preferences. Need an idea of the kind of midrange I like - go listen to Eddie Van-Halen, George Lynch during hte Under Lock & Key era Dokken, Elliot Easton on the early Cars records, or George Kooeymans in pretty much any decade of Golden Earring - THAT is where this cab sits tonally - with a 120 watt Bugera 333XL head with EL34s and 12AX7's pushing the speakers.

It's a tough as nails cab too. Last band I was in, this thing got regularly loaded into an old panel van and beaten around on it's way to gigs. Our rhythm guitarist had a Marshall cabinet just as old, and his looked like HELL! This thing's tolex could stand up to a nuclear blast, only had to glue one patch of it. All 4 casters still work despite being rolled up and down western Washington streets for the better part of 3-4 decades. Will never let go of this cab.

And just a hint on the other variatns this cab has....

The 1988 version is what I have which came with the old Peavey VTM series amp heads - a set of amps with Dip-Switch "modification" circuit tweaker stuff.

Then in 1989-1990ish, Eddie Van-Halen joined Peavey and the 412M became his cabinet of choice for the 5150, except with Sheffield Speakers.

I think later these got equipped with the GK-100 speakers sometime after the 6505, correct me if I'm wrong.

My Go-To Strap Button System

I swear these things should be a standard feature on all new guitars. They have been a permanent and important installation on ALL of my guitars since 2000....bought, built, modified, however I got them or use them, these are standard equipment. I watched a friend make a lawn dart out of his brand new B.C. Rich Warlock imitating CC Deville - if he'd had these, I never would have had to re glue the headstock on it! Performers and musicians - were a crazy lot who do a lot of stupid things with our instruments from time to time - I consider this insurance against accidents involving strap failures.

This thing was a steal for $25.00

Okay, now picture this, you are a 30-something year old dude with too many guitars at a thrift shop looking for a power supply for a pedal you are building, you come up front with a pair of vintage headphones that would be perfect for your recording setup and the lady at the desk goes "you're a musician? maybe you know of a good price?" - and on the wall hung a pink Chinese P-bass copy, and this - a 2006 Ibanez RG2EX1, with mismatched machine heads totally unoriginal, missing truss rod cover, and missing output jack.

Now, given the condition of the guitar, I told her "Around $50, maybe $75" - I did not plan to buy this....her reply "I'll sell it to you for $25" - well heck, I get another $25.00 fixer upper. They find me, and I bring em' back to life. That said, my previous experiences recently with Ibanez were on a borrowed Ibanez Gio, so my expectations were low, even with a bound fretboard.

Well, I pay my $25 and bring this thing home and am blown away to find out it has a Basswood body like my Jag-Stang, EMG pickups on par with the Selects I have in one of my Kramers, and was a small run "Spot model" for guitar center....but that's not all....

My initial test of the guitar with a pair of alligator clips attached to the loose wire where the output jack was and a set of twelves so old and crusty I felt like I needed a tetanus shot afterward. Despite having shitty action/setup, it actually sounded pretty nice. OF course the electronics stock are very rudimentary - just a pair of 500K pots, a capacitor on the tone pot (of course), 3-way switch, and when it was not being put on life support like some kind of abused puppy so I could hear the machine speak, an output jack.

I took the crusty old .012s and mismatched tuners, half of which appeared to be gold Grover Rotomatics like my Epiphone AJ-18SCE acoustic left the factory with, I don't know what the previous owner was thinking. But like all $25.00 guitars, I have such a stash of spare parts built up over the years, it cost me nothing to fix it up. Had a plastic Jack plate that fit like a glove, a stash of 1/4" phono jacks to use for the output, some wire to wire it all up, all I had to do was lay out $35.00 for a new set of pin-mount Ping sealed tuners for it, which most likely are the same units the guitar shipped with when new. I'm still waiting for some good time to make a new Truss rod cover for it out of ABS Anti-Scratch plastic.

Once fixed up and restrung with a fresh set of Ernie Ball Paradigm .009's, it setup and intonated rather quickly and sounded great. In between here and there I also added a treble bypass capacitor to the volume control to give a hair more versatility. also, I must note, once the Truss Rod was set, and a very tiny fret level was done, the action on this guitar is STUPID low with minimal buzzing, I'm talking lower than a Les Paul Fretless wonder, lower than a $3000 botique guitar....I can see why Steve Vai uses Ibanez, if this is what EVO is like.....needless to say, I was quite shocked a $25.00 guitar could setup like this. I was expecting at least some amount of abuse to be crippling it, nope, it took even less effort than my Jag-Stang or Hondo Paul Dean II to setup and got action just as, if not a hair lower than those two - and I set it up low - my usual setup is around 3/16 of an inch give or take a few microns at the 22nd fret, this is like 2/16ths minus a micron or two......stupid low. Playing chords, single notes, and pretty much anything is effortless, TBH, the action is even a little too low for my taste a bit because it just does not feel right that something I bought so cheap should be able to play that easily. Looking up what these were new, they were a steal at the $200-300 they were new too just based on this fact alone.

Fit and Finish is really good, it had some scratches and a few tiny dents but otherwise is flawless. About all that's left for me to do is finish making a new Truss Rod cover for it. Either way, it's a keeper now, whodathunk buying a pair of vintage Realistic helicopter guy headphones for my home studio would lead me to finding a Unicorn?

They Live up to the Hype for Me

So one day I was browsing Youtube and the adaptive advertising came on talking about these new strings showing everyone from Paul Gilbert to Kirk Hammett to John Petrucci beating the ever loving shit out of their guitars with these installed. Knowing how hard I am on guitar strings....I sweat buckets, I pick attack like a beast, I use my whammy bar like some kind of weapon, and my systems are not even locking systems......let's just say being the open minded sort of guy I am, I decided to give these a try on my two main - and probably the most uncomventional guitars to install these on - my old 1995 Fender Jag-Stang and 1998 Fender Jaguar.

Well, that was February of this year, and both guitars are still wearing those same first packs, both are still rather bright, not at all dead, and I've only had to tune them a few times since buying these....it's a very funny feeling to come to rehearsal and gigs and kick the BOSS TU-2 and find out you're not tripping that your guitars are in as good a tune as a guitar can get.

I'm a very hard player, I play with Dunlop Jazz III picks and Dunlop Big Stubbys and other thick picks, I hit the strings like I'm trying to kill someone, as music is also my aggression outlet, and I play with wimpy little .009 gauge strings.

Prior to this I was trying out the Jag-Stang using the blue "super Slinky" .008-.038 strings, moving up a gauge to .009's from that for these was not much of a change, I swear, these feel like .008s! Only difference is I don't need to finesse the low E at all with these. Prior to that I was running Fender Super Bullet 350XLs, .009-.042, since 2005 when Fender discontinued the stainless .009-.040 sets. I bend, twist, tremolo pick like a nitrous powered lawn mower with guitar picks on the blade, and it stays in tune. I treat that Fender Dynamic Vibrato harder than most people treat their Floyd Rose tremolos, and it and the Paradigms just do whatever extreme madness I choose to get myself into that day.

The Jaguar I do a lot of picking behind the bridge - hard - which can break strings on a Jag. Has not done so yet. Another problem with Jaguars, which was why I used Bullets for so long with my Jaguar - the windings on regular strings like Super Slinkeys and D'Addarios and Dunlops would unravel under the constant whammying I do with that Beach Boy's approved Floating Tremolo (think if EVH was forced to use a Jaguar for a set and you'd get what I do with a Jaguar vibrato). These, the Jag is like a fine tuned, well oiled machine, and due to the lower bar travel and the stronger feel of tension due to the bridge system the Jaguar employs, it has only really needed tuned once since then.

This sounds like a very overly positive review, well, it is. I've used everything from .008-.038's to my own custom .014-.060 gauge sets (yes, in standard tuning, with a Floyd Rose - ripped it outta' my Kramer after awhile TBH), and the Jag-Stang's best on string age has been 9 months on a pack of Fender bullet .009's - well, now it's been 9 months and the Paradigms are doing even better than the Bullets did and I swore by those Bullets for years, and then Fender discontinued the stainless .009-.040 set I loved so much, and I started having problems with the bullets coming off on my Jaguar and Jazzmaster - negating the whole reason I used them on those guitars in the first place, so I started looking to new strings, I think I've found them. And if they last with a guitar-bashing whammy-holic with a penchant for vintage hardware like me, they should do at least pretty good for someone else.

That said, I've read other reviews claiming broken strings and other issues. I've noticed a lot of people don't install their strings properly and that's where I could see these issues coming up. Kink any sort of metal wire - it will break. Wrap them badly around the capstans, of course they won't stay in tune. I could write a book on all the sins I've seen/heard/fixed from people's faulty restringing jobs. But that's a bit too much for a review on strings.

A decent guitar that can be obtained cheaply

Memphis guitars was a badge brand associated with a Chicago music store in the sixties, and are best known as being one of those "Pawn Shop" brands. Over the course of the 1970's they did all the same things most of the Japanese guitars did, lawsuit copies (including apparently one of the best Les Paul Lawsuit copies of the era), but by the mid 1980's, Memphis had become a bargain basement brand.....except one thing.....their humbuckers!

The Memphis 302HB had 2 production runs actually - there's the earlier Matsamoku built Japanese production run, which was basically the same guitar as a Hondo Deluxe or Fame series fat strat model, and then there's this version, the later Korean made variant that shares the same body, hardware, and tooling with the Kramer KS400 and Harmony H-80T Strat copy.

• NECK: Maple Neck, Rosewood board, 21 Jumbo frets, plastic inlays, cheap tuners, tilt back pointy headstock, plastic Gibson style nut. The neck has a wide and slightly chunky profile.

• BODY: Plywood strat style body, open space between spring cavity and bridge humbucker from the factory, it's a slightly wider and boxier shape than a regular strat, as the edge roundover is not as extreme as an actual strat.

• PICKUPS: 2 tall Matsamoku style Strat pickups in the neck and middle positions, and a very amazing 12.7K Ceramic humbucker in the bridge on par with a DiMarzio Super Distortion, surprisingly these were lifted from the earlier Japanese version.

• WIRING: 5-way selector, 1 volume, 2 tones, and a coil split switch

• BRIDGE: What appears to be a Stratocaster copy vibrato, but with a twist, instead of a standard "intertia block" in the back, the intertia block is really a C shaped plate with a threaded collar welded to it for the whammy bar. On a lot of these it sits a bit further from the back of the pickguard than is aesthetically pleasing.

• FINISH: These came in black, cobalt blue metallic (which ages to a Ocean Turquoise sort of color if under UV light too much), and red. The red and black seems more common than the cobalt blue, it may have been available in more colors.

• TRIM: B/W/B plastic scratchplate with black plastic hardware and chrome metal hardware

• HARDSHELL Case with Locks

The upside is this is an amazing sounding guitar, especially when you consider the money. It's very much on the Van-Halen end of things through an appropriately voiced amp and is not very microphonic at all, something I don't exactly expect out of a Korean mid-80's copy guitar. It also stays in tune amazingly well despite a janky stock vibrato and those classic "el-cheapo" machine heads.

That said, these do have a few flaws from the factory, making them good guitars for learning to mod/fix guitars on.

• The necks on these are NOT level at the fretboard. Most of them have some action issues because the fretboard needs leveled and so do the frets. That said, doing a "redneck" level did get it into acceptable territory (a redneck level is using 800 grit on a 3M sanding block and a sharpie). I replaced mine with one from a Behringer strat copy with Kluson REvolution tuners on it, much better.

• The tuning keys tend to have play for 1/6th a turn but at least they hold tune

• The vibrato unit is a luck of the draw. Some of them are properly placed, some are too far forward or back. Also, that collared piece in the inertia block should be welded at the top, bottom, and sides from the factory, or it will break if you use the vibrato bar with any frequency (I use it all the time). In the end, I replaced it with a 2 point Korean unit (fittingly) with larger mass to compensate for the lighter metal used in the replacement. The guitar gained a few more points through that modification.

• Also, the pickups are either out of phase in the neck and middle positions to the bridge, or the factory was wiring the humbucker up the wrong way. These humbuckers typically work by grounding off the series link between the coils but on the Memphis pickups it works more like a EMG Select in that you have 3 wires, one for single coil mode, one for humbucker, and one for ground, and the switch switches between the two (it's a SPDT switch obviously). The Choice of 500K pots was a very smart move on this guitar, which allows that bridge humbucker to crunch and has a tone very close to old Van-Halen, not too bassy, not too thin, just nice, tight, brown sound.

Usually these can be picked up for as little as $10 and as much as $200 depending on condition, and who is selling. I tend to think the $50-150 range is perfect for these, with $150 being a perfect 10 in new condition, and $50 being for a really beat and broken one in which the pickups are still functional and the rest of the guitar can be whipped into shape.

A good player, modded or stock, with one of the best necks from the vintage batch

Ah, the Fender Music Master, the little one-pickup wonder Fender introduced in 1956 as a 22.5" Scale student guitar, that managed to hang on the longest of any of the original Fullerton run guitars.

While I own a 1971 model, I'm kind of also reviewing Music Masters in general.

It seems when Fender kept producing the Music Master through the second generation and third generations of Student models from 1965-1981, these guitars were default to a 22.5" scale or 24" scale 22 fret vintage maple neck in the thinnest "A" Nut width, making these the skinniest necks Fender made, and also making these the preferred neck of Nirvana guitarist Kurt Cobain (his Jag-Stang and Mustangs were all based on these same necks as they were also used on the Duo-Donic II, Mustang, and Bronco as well as the Music Master, it's just on at least some of those other models, it appears one had a choice of neck width).

The bodies are typically made of Ash, Alder, Poplar, or I've heard reports of Mustangs having fabled Mahogany bodies (not sure why Fender would be using Mahogany, but then I DID know they made acoustic guitars too at that time - which I think everyone forgets). Mine has a poplar body.

The one I have is tricked out and modded, the only original 1971 parts are the body and neck. IT started off an ex-Grunge band guitar of some sort probably used by some Seattle grunge scenester decades ago and then lost in a closet before handing it over to the guitar store to use for parts.

Stripping off the paint reveals quite a bit of Bondo was used on this body to level-out the finish at finishing time. It's original color was Dakota red, then over it's lifetime it was repainted black, white, sort of a darkened vintage-white, and then some kind of odd jade-on-foam-green sort of color, and it must have been badly done because you could see where it had stickers once upon a time.

Someone routed it for an extra switch, probably because a second pickup was added at some point, a common modification to the Music Master as stock it lacks a bridge pickup, which in certain genres is extremely limiting.

I assembled this guitar from the cast-off body and neck in 2014 after sitting for 3 years unfinished but strung up and playable at least with a Fender Tornado string through bridge (another butchering a previous owner did was drill it for a string through Stratocaster bridge). I finished it for a total of $9.40 in parts including the Tap Plastics orange acrylic pickguard. The stickers were stocking stuffers from the previous x-mas.

In the bridge I have a Peavey P12 humbucker from a 80's Peavey Falcon that weighs in at around 14.6K Ohms resistance, and in the neck a super-tall Strat single coil from a 1993 Washburn MG-43. Everything dumps into a single 500K Audio pot and 3-way switch, with a 3-way series/parallel/split switch for the humbucker, allowing me to get a wide array of Mustang type sounds. Intiially it had a home made pickup in the bridge to test an idea with hum cancellation that kinda-sorfta worked but I have put on the back burner for awhile to focus on other projects.

With the original home-built pickup the guitar premiered with Zombie Jihad at Hempfest 2014 and was quite loud. There's a video of it being used through a Bugera 333XL head into a Mesa Boogie 8-ohm 4X12 on the seely stage playing a Led Zepplin cover.

After leaving ZJ the guitar was modified for my current (as of this writing) 90's cover band as a Nirvana Style guitar for doing Nirvana covers. Bye bye hempmaster - hello Kurtmaster.

So far this is one of my favorite hardtails, only eclipsed by the Hondo Paul Dean II.

The Essense of the Telecaster captured in a Wallet-Friendly Version

It was the Spring of 2007 - I had just gotten a bonus for saving the local Cell company a bunch of money with their tower testing and was looking to gift myself of a certain Squier Jagmaster that caught my eye at Kennelly Keys a few weeks before only to find it sold, but then I looked at the rack and saw this little Butterscotch Blonde Squier Affinity Telecaster - something I'd never seen before - hanging on the rack, fresh out of the box only 5 minutes. I picked it up, played it, and I could feel that with the right setup, this guitar had some "magic" to it that some guitars just have with certain people.

I pitted it up against 3 other guitars - a 1952 Telecaster Reissue, and a Custom Shop Telecaster, and a Telecaster Custom. The Affinity won out. Not sure if they are all like this, but this one had that inxplicable thing all great guitars have. The sound was there, the feel was there, I just felt this puppy sick from it's sea-faring adventure in a cardboard box needed some TLC and a good setup and it' would be a screamer - so for $158.99, I bought it, my first Brand New, never been owned or used before guitar - basically, the first "Virgin" guitar I'd ever laid hands upon that was not something I'd made in my own shop.

So I took it home, set it up, wax potted the pickups (whilst watching Crossroads, fitting movie to watch when wax potting Telecaster pickups), threw on my standard set of .009's and proceeded to use this guitar as one of my main guitars ever since.

Now here we are 10 years later, the only things I've had to change on it are the tuning keys and strings. The original pin-mount bolt-bushing sealed gear tuners started to drift after the pins broke after eight years of being played in the studio and live and used hard every time. Now it wears a set of Kluson Tone Pros with split shafts - which are way better tuners than what it came with originally, no more pricklies. It's well on it's way to looking like a good Bar Crawling 52' Telecaster now.

My only gripes with this model aside from the tuners is how the strings load - which is a problem on a LOT of chinese budget guitars - it has that messed up rear-loading thing that First Act used on their Wal-Mart guitars that makes getting strings up and over the saddles hard. I have plans to convert it to a through-body setup with a vintage-style lighter mass bridge once I decide what parts provider to go with.

Overall though, I'd say in this rather short review, that this guitar is great value for the money. I find them all the time in pawn shops for cheap and if I was more of a Tele guy I'd probably buy a few more as they are a great workhorse that does not cost a lot - they're like the Ford Ranger of electric guitars. - simple, solid, reliable, inexpensive, and easy to fix when they do have issues.

A Luthiery Self Assessment

It was 2009, Hipster-dom was riding high, and Jazzmasters were starting to go for a premium. and I wanted one because I always loved the Jazzmaster since playing a Foto Flame 1994 MIJ model with Seymour Duncan pickups. When the only Jazzmaster you can find costs at least $800 - why spend it all at once when you can spend it gradually over time.

But Jazzmasters had some things with them that I did not like, in particular, only 21 frets, out of the box the bridge usually needs some work, the fretboard radius is a bit too round for the scale length, the tuners are flimsy on some of hte reissues, and the bridge pickups on every Jazzmaster I ever played were anemic and/or imbalanced to the neck (ie, the hotter pickup always was in the neck for some reason).

So this was my attempt to tweak the Jazzmaster into what I think a modern Jazzmaster should be. A Jazzmaster that can rock out with the best of them but not lose any of the unique traits that made the Jazzmaster such a special sounding, playing, and feeling guitar.

I started off with a Swamp Ash body, so as to have a pretty finish, light weight, and some dampening for the high frequencies - basically to absorb some of the "Ice Picky-ness" of the Jazzmaster but not lose the highs so much it sounds less like a Jazzmaster and more generic.

The next thing addressed were the electronics, in particular, the pickups. In the bridge is a Alnico 2 10% overwound Pickup Wizards Jazzmaster pickup, measuring in at 8.8K Ohms resistance, with a Alnico V AVRI 62' Jazzmaster pickup in the neck to add a little more spank and sparkle to the neck position whilst keeping that signature Jazzmaster sound to it. The pickups are NOT RWRP as Fender and Pickup Wizards seemed to have done it differently.

These two are wired into a standard Jazzmaster wiring harness wired with cloth wire - 50's style - with no alteration from the standard Jazzmaster schematic at all. The Jazzmaster is rather versitile to begin with so no need to fix what's not broken to begin with. When you play one, you have to think with a bit of inverse logic of other guitars though - on the lead circuit, you want to turn the volume DOWN to warm things up and increase the gain, not the tone, and turn it up if you want to clean things up and gain more twang. The sweet spot is around 7 - gives it a very P-90-like output, flat out sounds like a Pissed off Telecaster on steroids with more bass and naturally scooped mids.

I forewent a vibrato unit with the Trem Lock both for budget reasons and that I've never had to use that feature on any offset I've ever used with this vibrato, and I use my own special setup that increases the vibrato range, bringing it into first album Van-Halen territory - that's right, I use this guitar to dive bomb - people said it could not be done, so I looked at the mechanics, figured it out, and did it!

I used the much maligned stock bridge, one of the import variants. I did the same mod to it I did to my Jaguar, 2 thicker springs on the outer E saddles to box the middle ones in, and angled the Low E saddle upward to lock the low E string in place and prevent it from jumping. Works just as great, and it increases sustain from both the scale length and the "3rd bridge" behind the bridge - which is like having a whole second instrument there - either that or a built in reverb tank made of sympathetic vibrations - one of my favorite features of the Jaguar/Jazzmaster vibrato setup. The main problem with these bridges has almost always been part tolerances rather than breakover angle.

The Neck was the other major upgrade to the design - I wanted something skinny, with a flat radius, 22 frets, and something that looked late 70's/early 80's - so what I wound up with is a Tommy's Custom Bodies and Necks 22 Fret Maple neck with maple fretboard and a CBS Fender headstock. I put a CBS Fender Decal on it just to see how many people would think this was a custom shop build, LOL. I'm planning to remove it in the future and put my own waterslide on there (just a sponge away from that). The flat 12" Radius and bi-directional truss rod has allowed this guitar to be probably one of the fastest playing Jazzmasters ever made - J.Mascius would HATE this thing I'm sure, strung up with .009's and only something like a 10th of an inch between the 22nd fret and the strings with little to no buzzing if you play light and fast like a metal player. The added 22nd Fret means I can do some mondo bends up to F#-A on the high E at the 22nd fret, effectively pushing the guitar's overall pitch range up a little bit too.

That said I have had some improvements to make to it. The original selector switch I used was a tad junky, had to re-bend the leafs inside the switch to keep contact. Switched to a Gibson switch and the problem went away. Have been toying with installing a "Super Switch" on it at some point to add even more tonal options like series/parallel/phase reversal. Another change soon coming is Kluson Revolution tuners because I found the Kluson Tone Pros I originally used are a bit too flimsy for frequent gigging as I played this guitar out a lot and found those tuners made the tuning stability a bit of a crap shoot - but I've been testing the Revolutions and they sound better as they add a little more mass to the headstock, and also are a LOT more stable, less drifting, and no play in the keys.

Either way, I've toyed with building small batches of hand-built guitars and I consider this a prototype to my own tribute to the original Jazzmaster. Sort of the Caroll Shelby Jazzmaster if you will - looks like a production guitar because at it's core, it is, but has all the right tweaks in the right places to make it play fast, stay in tune, and be versitile enough to not be limited to just being a Grungy Fuzzer and a Surfy Plinker. It's just as at home growling out UFO and Scorpions songs as it is getting fuzzed up for some Bush, Sonic Youth, and Dinosaur Jr, or dripping in reverb and taking the classic Ventures route, or the wacky B-52's route.

My Favorite Chorus of All Time.....and far more capable than most people see it as.....

When most people see my equipboard, they must think I'm some weird bastard offspring of Nirvana, The Cars, and Loverboy - most espeically Nirvana with the offsets and THIS thing on my board, but make no mistake, while I do pay probably too much homage to my musical heroes on the gear side, and while certain sounds draw me to different products at times - THIS is something different.........

About nine years ago, in another band, I went through a bit of a quest for my perfect chorus - and Chorus is one of the most original elements of my sound. The way I prefer to use it, and how I mix it in with more modern sounds. Basically put, I like a good Chorus pedal that's "out front" enough to be noticed if you pay attention, but not so "out front" that it overbears the sound too much - I want it to be an element of my sound that adds some complexity and depth/3-D elements to my sound. I'm extremely particular about this, and so far, the best chorus units I've used in my home studio were that on the BOSS ME-6 Multi Effects pedal, and that on the Behringer V-Amp Pro, but unfortunatley, I had yet - until very recently, not been able to find something I was 100% happy with.

Thus far, prior, I've owned a Starcaster Chorus (really bad), a EHX Stereo PolyChorus (yep, another Cobain pedal, liked the sound but it was not exactly what I wanted), and had toyed with just buying a BOSS ME-6 and A/Bing it with my regular pedals just for the chorus, plate reverb, and delay alone....

Then one day I'm at Guitar Center and they have THIS badboy in the shop for $75 used. I was a bit reluctant at first because between a Jag-Stang, Jaguar, and several HSS Strats, my rig was starting to look like a attempt at a budget Nirvana cover band setup. So I try it out, and well......it had THAT sound I was looking for - no, not that knob-wall the way up chorus warble everyone likes to imitate "Come AS you Are" with - and sure enough it has that......but it had that 3D, spatial, expanding, barely noticeable unless it's not there sound that makes my guitar sound huge and "in yo face" - Basically, I took the EHX SmallClone, and did exactly the OPPOSITE of what Kurt Cobain did and got my intended result. Now how's that a twist....

The EHX SmallClone is a one-knob wonder, and most of the time I just leave the rate knob at 0 and use the depth switch to switch between a slow, wavering chorus that sounds like a tank full of water during a light richter scale earthquake, and then a very light, smudgy, whoosh witth the Depth switch off that gives some extra treble, clarity, depth, and some background movement that makes my guitar sound very 3-D. If I do get the whim to do something more warbly, it's there, and i have used it as a vibrato before with the Depth switch off and the knob up as well. It has become my favorite mono chorus of all time.

A Bloody Steal at $35

Ah, Behringer, best known for their plastic effects devices that sound great but have the structural integrity of an overly moist birthday cake.

But not this one....

This one has a metal enclosure, it's built like a tank, and it's been a mainstay on my pedalboard since 2009. I bought it when my sister gave me $50.00 for X-mas and told me to buy something I want on Amazon with it - so I did - this was it.

What I was looking for in a phaser was that Van-Halen MXR Phase 90 sound, not too overbearing, just adds some background movement to the sound. Well, THIS gets that tone for 1/4 or less than what an EVH Dunlop MXR Phase 90 would cost, and it has a bit more to it.

The upsides of this unit is that it has a durable plastic casing, the switch adds further versitility to it, and the range of Phaser goes from that Van-Halen modulation thing like he does on his solos, all the way up to a nice, warbly, thick 1970's style phaser perfect for running a Rhoads Piano through for those late 70's sitcom sound moments. Also, I've had it for eight years and it has yet to fail - which is kind of shocking considering some elements of the design, how long and hard I've used it for, and how much I paid for it new.

The downsides to this Phaser is it does eat batteries quite a bit, also, everything INSIDE the box is an SMD device, including the potentiometer, which does not make for the best internal durability. Also, the footswitch got noisy for awhile. But other than that, this thing is a bloody STEAL for $35.00.

THIS is what I look for in a Flanger

One of the most difficult parts of assembling my rig was finding the right Flanger. I had a very particular kind of Flanger sound in mind, sort of that low-end "woof woof" thing that Paul Dean had on the early Loverboy records. I wanted to adopt that sound for my own use as I had several nifty applications for it (but with my own tone). By the end of 2016, I'd tried darn near everything, a Modded DOD Flanger I tweaked the LFO sweep on, I'd found that sound on the Behringer V-Amp Pro's built in Flanger but it was VERY tricky to dial-in, and it seemed everything that had it was either expensive or did not work - even an old broken MXR DelayLine Flanger that got close but was totally unusable because of a very rare, out-of-production I/C on the board that I could not buy anymore to fix it.

So when my DOD FX-75B died, I decided to go on a nice little "Flanger quest" and it just so happened about that time a fellow I met through my youtube channel was asking me what I used to get that Flanger sound on the Loverboy covers I'd posted (using a Behringer V-Amp Pro) and said he had talked to Paul Dean in person and found out he had used a "Loft 450G DelayLine Flanger" (not far from that MXR unit I trashed a long time back because it was pretty much trashed). So I looked those up and they are like $500.00 - so well...crap, what am I to do?

I decided to go look at cheap Flangers on E-bay and look up demos of them, by the time I was done, I had a line on 3 different flangers, some strange old Arion-like unit that was located in Japan but had that sound by default, some obscure cheapo plastic Flanger that had the same sound, and then this, the Digitech TurboFlange.. the lower left-hand setting has it.

But what's nice about this Flanger is it has THAT sound, plus my old flanger sounds, plus a few new ones where the shift only goes up or only goes down, making it a non-one-trick-pony - while yes, the majority of the devices on my pedalboard were picked because I knew XX played on in XX band back in 19XX and got XX sound from them - another KEY element is that I actually have a reason to USE the knobs and switches on the pedal, get my money's worth out of it.

Unlike it's 2 competitors in the lineup, this one had a metal body (I HATE plastic pedals, I kill Behringers like cockroaches for example), it had the ability to go stereo if I wish, it has more than one operating mode, one of which is that low-swoop jet-flange thing Loverboy used, and it works with a standard power supply (unlike my old DOD pedals which needed an Atari 2600 style 9 volt adapter to be powered - ie 1/8" Mono Phono Plug vs. the current Barrel Jacks BOSS pedals use).

Currently I use this in a 90's cover band that does some 2000's covers too, and I found that mode 7 "Loverboy" setting works GREAT for covering Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name Of" on the intro, sounds bloody HUGE.

What more can I say, it has the sound I want plus a bunch of new ones, it's durable, it's quiet, I've had little trouble with it in the eight months I've been using it, and it's become my favorite flanger.

Has been my goto DAW since 2007

I started off recording on PC before it was even popular using TwoTrak freeware on a 486 (and god that was a PITA to get working), then using QuartzAudiomaster Freeware for awhile, and then when Quartz went belly-up in 2007 and their website disappeared, I needed to look for a new DAW, and I found REAPER and it has stayed mine ever since.

I've seen REAPER as an excellent DAW both for beginners and pros alike. I'm kind of a "savant" of sorts with this stuff, I never studied mixing, I never learned how to master or how to even USE a DAW, but I figured out REAPER on my own enough to recreate the functionality of Quartz AudioMaster Free years ago and have used it ever since to the point that I've actually learned a lot through using it making demos, recordings for YouTube and elsewhere, and whatnot.

I did have some problems using it at first because my computer was older (an eight year old Pentium III with half a gig of RAM running WIndows 2000), but I found out that switching to a better soundcard caused the metronome and tracks to sync properly.

And even then, I had a period using a Pentium-D using Windows 7 x64 and 4GB of RAM with it where it would go out of synch but was easy to fix everything so no biggie there.

But since about 2012 I've been golden. For awhile I even used an even older PC with it (Pentiium 4 2.8GHz w/3GB of RAM and an SSD) and it performed well there too. Currently I'm using a custom home-built box for it now where hardware is not a concern.

And $60 to use it commercially is a real steal TBH. When a guy who was learning from a major producer tells you he's amazed how your demo tracks you bring to the band sound like actual album production tracks, you know you're using the right DAW.

My attempt to bring Harmony's Bizzaro 40 year run into the modern age....

I always loved the Harmony H-804, and the H-802 especially with it's wacky chrome pickups of mysterious origin.

So what I did here was took a Harmony H-804 body, with a more stable neck (well, mostly, might replace it eventually wiht a different neck as the Memphis neck has it's issues), and a pair of H-802 pickups by putting one in the stock neck position, and the second in the bridge - sscrewed into the wood - where this guitar body once hosted a humbucker.

Those H-802 pickups have a magic all their own, with a very thick low-end, sort of like a P-90, but a little rattier and raspier, and a very twangy, metallic din to the high end, sort of like hitting a metal bowl with a metal pen. Distorted it sounds glorious and thick, but clean it sounds very warm and balanced. What's shocking though, is that it's not very noisy or microphonic, which is the antethisis of what a lot of reviews of the H802 would lead you to believe. When wired right, it has that thrashy garage rock quality to it - but with some class to it.

I built out the pickguard by tracing the one from my 02813 and cutting it out for just one pickup. All the other aesthetics are the same. I used TAP Plastics ABS Anti-Scratch acrylic on it like I did my mad-rite prototype.

The whole shindig is wired up using a replacement 3-way pickup switch and the original Harmony H-802 wiring harness from the 1970's/1980's - which was in amazing shape. The bridge is an ABR-1 style Tune-O-Matic, and it has a 02815 stamped clamshell tailpiece on it (I will be replacing that with the bigger mass tailpiece of the H-802 later as they make reissues of them on E-bay for stupid cheap).

The resulting guitar was quite satisfactory, it came out giving a sound somewhere between a Les Paul Special and a Telecaster - it's twangy, but it's thick. It's not piano-like like a Jazzmaster, but not ice-pick like a lower-output Jaguar. It sounds absolutley crazy with high gain.

Currently I'm looking into turning my Harmony 02813 into a THREE pickup variant of this using another trio of old H-802 pickups.

This is a prototype for a Mosrite style guitar built in MY style......

The inspiration for this guitar was Kurt Cobain's Univox Hi Fliers and Mosrite Gospel, and the Mosrite Ventures and Mosrite Mark V that Ricky Wilson was using in the B-52's early days (R.I.P. dude). I had a Kay KE-17 neck laying around, and no body for it, and I felt it would make a great neck for a Mosrite inspired guitar.

SPECS NECK: 2004 Kay KE-17 neck, Kluson Revolution Tuners, 25.5" Scale, 22 Vintage frets, skinny profile BODY: Pine multi-piece table bank sandwhich body inspired by the Mosrite Mark V and Ventures PICKUPS: First Act Humbuckers, an 8.4K in the neck, and a 16.8K Jammed right up against the bridge CONTROLS: 1 Volume, 1 Tone, 3-way pickup selector, and a tone switch for each pickup allowing for split/humbucker/parallel operation, giving a wide array of tones from thin and twangy to thick and grungy BRIDGE: Washburn Wonderbar/Shift 2001 vibrato unit compensated to act as a poor-man's trans-trem PICKGUARD: TAP Plastics ABS Haircell Plastic pickguard based on a Mosrite Mark V style guard FINISH: Bare Pine .), I've been making quite a few small tweaks/refinements as needed that would damage putting a permanent finish on it HARDWARE: Black CASE: None, yet, plan to build one STRINGS: currently using Dunlop .009-.042's as those were what I used to set it up, might move to Ernie Ball Paradigms to test next

I built this guitar on a whim. I wanted a body for that neck, so I went to Lowes for some unrelated things, and looked around the lumber section, and found a large chunk of pine sticks glued together that could be cut in half and made into a guitar body by sandwhiching the layers. I bought a pull-saw, and a coping saw - the whole mess cost me $15.00 total. Not bad. I've made other bodies out of pine before - but those were with power tools - this was in an apartment with HAND TOOLS - well, until the final shaping part and the final routing that was thicker than half the body thickness.

I came up with the shape by going through my giutar collection and matching lines of my other guitars up with photos of Ricky Wilson and Kurt Cobain's guitars I pulled up via google image search. I started off like Semie Moseley did for the original Ventures shape - tracing a Stratocaster backwards. Then refinements came by some free-hand alterations, adding in some Jaguar and Harmony H-802. The resulting shape was very much Mosrite-ish, but with some small differences.

The body contained some various experiments in construction. After the top half was cut out with the pull saw, it was glued and screwed to the back half using some coarse wood screws. Before doing that, I cut the neck slot using the coping saw.

When I was done, I did some of the initial pickup routing using a Chisel, but later went to using a router to refine everything. There were some mistakes on this body though, pickup routes were too wide because I had not decided weather I was going to use Univox style, Mosrite style, or some other pickups I had, I even toyed with using EMGs at one point ( an H and a 60 - both vintage 80's models). I finally decided to go with a pair of orphan First Act pickups I had laying around that never sounded that great in other guitars, but somehow wound up sounding PERFECT in this one. Possibly the biggest jack-up though was the neck slot, which has been under various tweaking from the start - but desipte, sustain and resonance on this guitar is crazy good. I've been filling it in, and reshaping with Basswood, and had to move the front shelf forward and cut the end of the rosewood board on the Kay neck flat to make sure it intonates properly - now this sucker is dead on and by god does it resonante now.

There are some key things in this guitar that makes it sound the way it does. The Pine body absorbs some of the lows and some of the highs, giving a balanced midrange effect - pair that with a big, monster pole equipped 16.8K Ceramic humbucker at the bridge, and it's like a super-high-gain mosrite kind of tone I'm getting out of it, even when full humbucker, it's still got that twang to it, just noiseless, and with a rididulously good amount of distortion - with a large amount of bite and a low end that never gets flappy or muddy, but is very thick.

The neck position is perfectly balanced, it compensates for it's very close position to the neck heel with less winds, smaller poles, and a lower ohms reading (8.4K, more in the traditional PAF vein). Split it does the whole Ricky Wilson/Ventures/Surf thing really well - in full humbucker it's like Insta-Bleach.

Overall though, it has kind of it's own unique voice, sort of like a shredder's surf dream, or a surfer's metal weapon. Which was the whole goal. so mission accomplished.

The last, and another interesting part of this things construction, was the use of a Washburn Wonderbar vibrato - a really weird old also-ran that competed with the Floyd Rose and Kahler vibratos in the 80's (originally called the Shift 2001 vibrato), and best noted for no need of routing to be useful.

But one neglected thing about this vibrato unit is it's ability to transpose chords around on at as many as 4 strings at a time, as a result of a set of "jaws" behind the tension rollers that change the rate of pitch drop each string recieves. So far I've gotten it close enough it's usable almost like a trans trem - which saves time for tuning down at concerts/gigs/etc. I'm working out a way to make all SIX work that well that way as the primary problem is the amount of pitch drop on the high E just can't get close enough - need something that matches up with a .009 gauge high E better in tension. Once I have that figured out - I might break my GAS for a Steinberger Trans Trem equipped axe of my own design.