Christmas gear thread.

If your family celebrates this holiday, what pieces of gear were under your tree?

A pedal board, a hardwire sc2 and sm 2, a tuner pedal and a power supply :P I'll have to upload a picture to my equipboard later if I ever remember to :P. What did you get?

badassery, right there! you're almost gig ready

actually nothing, I'm not married anymore and me and my parents decided not to exchange gifts and just showered my son with awesome presents.... not that my wife had gotten me much in the way of presents I actually would want before the split! a year before we married she got me my Polytune, but that was about it. I feel like she was more likely to buy me a gift at all before the marriage and that after she just collected gifts. I could be forgetting the odd pair of gloves or something.

what about everyone else? anyone get a new synth or guitar amp?

Yea, taking your advice on the distortion pedals though, going to have 2 distortions and a overdrive but the over drive I use for a slight crunch for doing open chords but it also doubles up as a awesome boost pedal which I'm happy about. Just want to replace the small clone and get a few modulation pedals which I'll do when I get the new amp in February then all I need will be a mic and I'm gig ready haha.

Thats fair enough, we spoiled our daughter and got our new born, Matthew a few bits too :) My fiancee has always been pretty good with getting me presents that I actually like, better than my family typically haha. Sucks about the exwife but hey least ya got a polytune which is pretty badass!

Screw you Jim, I logged on to EB, with the intent of making this exact thread. Of course there was the vc15, but I'm looking to flog on my old amp, sh*tty behringer overdrive, and chord branded chorus tomorrow, then add buy the digitech x series flanger or phaser, and probably the movall rocket train, as I decided and OD, and a compressor, would be fairly useful. The amp has a killer drive channel, but when I'm practising with my band, I don't have my amp with me, so It'd be good to have one for rehearsal, and my p90s feedback like hell, so a compressor, or noise gate, or EQ or something to hold back my frequencies, would be ridiculously useful.

I had a little play earlier, setting up my guitar into my g1xon with three delays on a patch, into my pitchfork set to detune, into my x4 with a dotted-eighth delay, and a lot of feedback, then one output being sent into my borrowed WEM tape echo, and into the VC15, with max reverb, and the other being sent back into my back line 6 spider's clean channel, with a chorus in front, a flange on the amp, and a quarter note delay also on the amp. I then looped it with the g1xon's built in jobby, just a nice c chord I found in total guitar, and played violin over the top. Angelic, my friend, angelic.

or you could just play a song without all the fuss and bother, but that's not very christmasy. So you got money and the Laney for xmas and you're going gear shopping after the holiday with the leftover cash?

PS, a compressor will make the feedback worse.... there are dedicated feedback surpressors that work pretty good, if its a consistent note that feeds back you can notch it out with an EQ pedal too, or a noise gate might help a bit.... are you getting a musical howl or a microphonic squeal from your guitar?

Yea, taking your advice on the distortion pedals though, going to have 2 distortions and a overdrive but the over drive I use for a slight crunch for doing open chords but it also doubles up as a awesome boost pedal which I'm happy about. Just want to replace the small clone and get a few modulation pedals which I'll do when I get the new amp in February then all I need will be a mic and I'm gig ready haha.

haha, my advice was 1 each OD and distortion if you just CANNOT make do with 1 or the other, but whatever, its your sound, go to town... Christmas pedals are the bomb, you should wire all your stuff up and go batshit crazy today.... I remember getting my 1st tubescreamer for Christmas in maybe 1994? 1993? God I was excited until I plugged her in, set her for a dirty boost, opened my fender Princeton up til she drove on her own and engaged the pedal. I let loose a screamin' blues lick on my old Carvin semihollow only for my dad to tell me that the point of the gift was to get me to turn the fuck down in the house and just get my rock tones from the pedal, LOL

obviously that was not the point of the tubescreamer to me... I am pretty sure my dad was missing the point and still is.... classical guitarists, meh, they just don't get it

then there was the year where I got a vox wah wah and my 1st big muff, gosh was that an exciting Christmas for a 15 year-old boy! "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" or in this case you'll destroy your hearing....

then I reached adulthood and the party was over...

except for when my band was starting to get hot regionally, that year my parents bought me a tv yellow Gibson LP special. I was hanging out in a music store right before the holiday with my dad and I fell in love with her, I was ready to wlk out empty handed but he fronted me the money to buy her that day and I was supposed to pay him back in installments. Yet come Christmas day I just got a card from him and my mom that said not to worry about paying them and not to throw this one at shows. I was really sad when I got stuck selling that guitar for my ex wife's benefit. How often do you get a Gibson from your father for Christmas as a grownup? Once apparently. I will never forgive her for that one, that guitar had huge amounts of sentimental value even if she was no longer a favorite for actual playing... I have owned lots of great guitars since, but even with my current collection I feel like there's a hole where that guitar oughta be and nothing will ever fill it :-( I loved that special so much that the finish wore off in huge chunks on the upper bout and the neck and she was covered in my blood. I cried a little when I sold her, fucking store insisted on having the case which was a gift from my bassist and had our band logo painted on it too.

Other all time great xmas gifts included a vintage FZ1 fuzz from my best friend a few years ago. Just a cool thing to be handed with a bow on it! Another year when I was working as a paid sideman I had recently picked up an unloaded 2x12 to scale down my rig from two Marshall 4x10 cabs in stereo and my parents gave me the one gift that has gotten better every year, a Celestion G12 blue alnico speaker! It currently resides in my fawn ac30. I like to rub the bell cover affectionately every couple days.

I know but I really want two different distortions on my board, at the moment I have a ds-1 on there but am going to replace in with the deluxe big muff eventually, I love the big muff in general but with that mids circuit it suddenly becomes a billion times better (to me of cause) Can't believe she made you get rid of that Gibson, I know how you feel though, I smashed up my first guitar and have regretted it ever since, I just loved that guitar, it weren't great but it got the job done, was a epiphone les paul special ii, made from mahogany and maple I think. was a mahogany plywood type thing though with a mahogany veneer top and back haha, gotta cut costs somewhere though I guess?

Why she made you get rid of it??

How are celestion blue speakers?? I want to try them, well a few celestions actually. I want to give green backs a go, seventy 80's and g12 blue speakers. I have used other peoples amps and cabs with Vintage 30's and I just love them, they sound better and better as they get older (like all celestions)

By the way, the two hardwire pedals, sc2 and cm2 sound very much like a big muff when used together, sounds pretty insane actuaslly, the sc2 gives me awesome feedback too, I love getting feedback, especially controllable feedback!

no, I chose to sell it because she needed dental work desperately that was going to eat up my entire checking and savings account, I had already done the last batch of dental by selling my bandmaster rig and it was sell something else, late pay the rent and utilities, or let her cavities abscess worse.... decisions decisions.... she actually told me not to sell her, ut in a tone that said "god I really need the dentist now, dude, its only a guitar!"

to quote Jaimie Lannister "The things I do for love."

2 dual gain stage distortions ins series gives you 4 stages with 2 levels of diode clipping and the ability to clip the input of the 2nd pedal by overloading the IC.... a big muff has 4 stages of gain and 3 stages of clipping diodes, do the math

I never knew the big muff has 4 stages of gain and 3 stages of clipping haha. Thats so cool, explains why it sounds like a big muff :)

Merry Christmas everyone :-D

I got a new special lady, a guitar I've been hunting down for quite a while... will post details, pics, and of course a review soon!