jimmarchi1's Reviews
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41028
the original haunting mids
this thing is the forerunner of the PQ9 and sounds basically the same... these are VERY valuable. I am not sure why. I suspect these pedals inspired JHS' haunting mids...
41028
not as bad as everyone says
boost this into a plexi or 800 and you get a world of cheesy 80s tones... personally I prefer the SD9 sonic distortion in this style, it cleans up better.
41028
gave it to my best friend
this is a high gain tubescreamer or SD1 with treble and bass controls... in fact, the whole xotic line was TS/SD based until they started doing the SL drive and EP booster... its a really good sounding pedal, but it wasn't for me. I believe EHX's crayon is ripped off of this pedal. Personally I think the MXR custom badass OD is a similar take on this sort of thing that is way easier to dial into my personal gear preferences.
41028
I don't get what all the fuZZ is about
I know Roger supposedly invented octave fuzz but the version I had in the spaceship case didn't do a whole lot for me... I actually prefer the Hendrix branded Dunlop ones. I just couldn't get next to this... of course, its my understanding that there's nothing on the market including this Mayer pedal that bares any resemblance to the ones he made for Jimi in the 60s... whatever. Mayer charges a lot for his name and his spaceship housings and what you get is no better than something cheaper in a practical, MXR-sized box.
41028
yeah baby
if you don't need reverb, just pure fender tone? the plain Princeton sounds better to my ear than the PR. The silverface ones tend to be cleaner even if you put the same type of speaker in both and you swap the stock 5U4 for the 5AR4 that you would find in blackfaces (even though the blackface tube charts specify a 5U4, they all came with 5AR4s, usually RCA branded Mullards)… but all in all I have never played a bad sounding Princeton. ABY box one of these with a wide panel deluxe or something similar and you can pretend to be a Heartbreaker. This and the PR used to be my sound in the 90s.
41028
exceptional tone, flimsy transformers
I dock ceriatone's 18 watt a star for the transformers. I blew the OTs in my friends and in mine and I wasn't abusing them in anyway, just playing them all the way up as god intended. These amps are really some of the finest 18 att based amps going. The TMB channel is fun but I always just played a strat or LP jr into the normal input with the tone and volume wide open. If you want clean headroom try the 20 watt head. These amps have voxiness and plexiness in one box and can win the folgers taste test against any ac15 made since the JMI era. I really think the ceriatone is the best sounding 18 watt I've played, but you might as well buy a classic tone output transformer right out of the gate and put that in because the stock one is going to melt down, it sounds fine, but its a piece of shit.
41028
total beast
these amps are great, old or new.... basically a diode rectified 18 watt without tremelo. There's a lead and a bass channel each with a single guitar-style tone control that's best left close to wide open. They're punchier then an 18 and they actually have a clean sound that can compete with an old deluxe reverb volume-wise. More true midrange then a plexi when recorded through a quad box fulla celestions. Very marhsally, less vox flavor then the 18. It would be hard to choose between these 2 similar circuits but this is overall more of a rhythm amp that can hang with a drummer whereas the 18 watt is all about full bore lead riffage.
41028
one of the coolest grecos
this is like an es-339 before Gibson dreamed up the 339. I really liked this guitar and regret selling it but I was getting divorced. You usually see them with trapeze tails, but mine had the rare stop bar. I'll get another one someday.
41028
best quality squier since the 90s
this guitar plays like a real fender.... the fit and finish and shockingly good for a far east beginner's axe. I never bonded with it but I think I just don't like jazzmasters.
41028
a brief flirtation...
I got this guitar on trade from Atomic Music. It had the best neck of any fender I've ever owned but it also had a thin and weedy bridge and an excessively boomy soap bar. The modern bridge didn't help it sound the way I want a tele to sound. It needed too much work when I had a pile of other good teles. I was thinking of putting the neck on another tele or maybe changing the electronics but in the end it went back and was exchanged for an AC30HW2. If you see loose aerodyne tele enck and you're planning a build then go ahead and buy it. Fender Japan hit on something with the neck feel.
41028
great bass, HUGE hum
I loved this bass, but the hum was intolerable through my ampegs at the time... great tone though, it just was a total bear to record and that's the only reason I owned it. She didn't stick around long before I sold it to someone less concerned with accumulated 60 cycle hum. But the Sting bass is an excellent player and if you can angle yourself to avoid hum it has an outstanding tone not unlike a j-bass, but more 'rounded' and very balanced.
27261
I tried one of these at a shop when they first came out, and it was the best fretted neck I'd ever held. I still think about that neck 20 years later. This week, I'm gonna go to a local shop that has a used one for sale and see if it's as good as I remember. Fender never made many basses with the 1-5/8" nut width AND those tiny 50s/60s frets. Which may be why I've had a hard time finding something with quite the same feel.
41028
@pkennethk yeah, when it came out a friend of mine got one immediately and I wss head over heels for it... fast forward a decade and I got one at a good price but the single turned me off. Rather than change pickups I sold it for a profit. If played bass on a regular basis I would have modded it and kept it forever. With the prices always hovering around $1500 I decided I could go with a less valuable instrument with more practical stock electronics. I sometimes regret not getting someone to wonder me a him cancelling version of that pickup.
27261
If I end up liking the neck as much as I remember, I'll probably just hand a detailed spec sheet of all the measurements to Musikraft or similar and let them make me one with a nice rubbed oil or nitro finish, and the more appealing (to me) '57-onward P-Bass headstock. Maybe I'll even have a slap rosewood fretboard on there, who knows?
27261
OK: just got back from Guitar Center. I played pretty much every Fender bass in there, and then I played the Sting bass -- the neck is just as perfect as I remember. No contest. I need to go find those exact specs...
41028
@pkennethk yeah, thanks... now I want my sting bass back. It was perfect from a playing standpoint. I wonder if I can buy a spare sting neck from stratosphere and stick it on my candy apple red J
27261
Sting neck is: - 7.25" radius - 1.625" nut width - .84" thick at 1st fret, .97" thick at 12 fret - super short and skinny vintage frets (somewhere in between actual frets and fret markers for a fretless neck)
The Stratosphere and similar rarely have parts from instruments that have been out of production for a decade. And if anyone offers one, you're bidding against me and probably 100 other sickos in the same spot.
I'm going to try and find out if any of the P-Basses Fender Japan was producing around the same time have the same neck specs. That might be by best bet to score one for under a grand.
41028
@pkennethk well, there are some sting models on reverb for 1200... bet you could make an offer for a grand and score one. The single could actually sounds good, it's just a giant cell phone antenna.
27261
True, Sting basses sell for roughly the same price as all the good Japanese Precision basses, from the 80s Japanese Squiers to the 2 decades of PB62 production... but yeah, don't know if I wanna deal with that single coil, and I don't know if a stacked or split-coil replacement pickup will make me happy either-- it's a huge question mark. If I can get the same neck on a post-'57 P-Bass body, for the same price, I'd probably lean that direction.
41028
@pkennethk I'm not sure about stacked, but split coils tend to sound pretty good for guitar... my fear would be the form factor though... will you miss the overlap of could like a split single in a humbucker form factor where the polepieces don't overlap but the coils do... as I said in the forum thread, you may want to look at Lakeland. Mij and cij fender isn't sold in the USA (or wasn't, maybe it is now) so your options to try before you buy are going to be hella limited.
41028
one of five...
this was one of five pinecasters Eddie at pebblebrook made from the same slab of 200 year old barn wood... mine the body was slightly mis-cut. I dock it one point for being slightly imperfect, but it kept the price down... I dock it another for being ungodly heavy! Great sounding guitar, the proprietary noiseless 50s tele pickups were impressive in practice… I never bonded with the neck shape or the overall feel no matter how she was set up. it wasn't bad, but it was not what I want from my personal teles. Soemthing very 70s fender about it. I let this one go after a few years when I had to thin the herd before my son was born.
41028
a very interesting amp
These early, rebranded Magantones are generally seen with an 8" speaker and a champ like SE amp featuring a 6SJ7 pentode, 6V6 and 5Y3 rectifier, just a Magantone varsity jammed in there.... mine had the same cab dimensions but with a 110" jammed in powered by a push-pall amp. Sort of like a melodier amp, but all octal and with one of the inputs driven by a 6SJ7 gain stage.... similar to a Gibson GA20 leatherette on paper. This amp broke up early. It wasn't quite as loud as a 5E3 even through ane xtrenal cab with efficient speakers. It had a very, very distinctive sound, particularly when playing into the microphone input that was powered by the pentode. It actually was loaned to me for about a year by a very close friend and I used this amp extensively for 'color' parts with a tele or LP jr when recording the UYB record. This was one of the 'tiny music' amps as we called them on the sessions. We were inspired by the most-hated but most-toneful of STP records to use a lot of little, oddball amps like this to balance out the plexis, showmans and V4s... they wound up taking over a lot f the tracks. This was without a doubt my favorite little guy besides the marshall 18 and 20, but they have more of a little-big-amp sound. The more common single ended Leillani palm tree amps are sweet too (and dead similar in sound to an early Gibson GA5), but this is the one. This little guy has its own thing going on. I'm always looking for these because my buddy won't sell it to me.
41028
unerrated
why this amp was marketed as a bass amp is beyond me, but tis the hidden gem of the dano line... just stage worthy at about 25 watts this amp really gets its mojo from the tube rectifier. it has that Zep grindy thing going on like the Supro Thunderbolt. These are hard to find in good condition and they're getting pricier. Don't bother with the chipboard speaker cab, just buy a head and try it through some 12" celestions.
41028
don't buy it
One of rose morris' many crimes against rock n roll. Sold to me when I didn't know any better. Liquidated quickly, eventually replaced with a '62.
41028
a classic
this is a classic of 9 volt analog delays, right in there with the AD9, everyone knows this pedal... maybe not as badass as a memory man... I got this in a trade and sold it for a good amount of money. Honestly, as nice as the dm2 is, it doesn't do anything that's distinguishable from like a carbon copy once you're playing with a band. But if people want to pay big bucks for originals? hey? Ill take that money.
41028
these solid state 80s laneys are rpetty good bass amps
first bass amp I ever owned, got it for free from my highschool divorced from the headshell… not sure what I did with this amplifier
41028
service nightmare, great tone and versatility
its well known now that this guy is the Josh Homme amp... I was into them before that. A neighbor had one of these he bought new and all the friends of his kids, myself included, enjoyed playing through it because with the active, semi parametric midrange it could cover a lot of ground with any guitar. This amp delivers a muscly 70s rock tone lean or turned up to mean, Its usually stock with CTS ceramic 10" speakers that have some of alnico CTS vibe of an early super reverb but more authority. It weighs a ton, more than any other 4x10 you'll encounter. These amps have a complicated circuit on multiple PCBs and can be very confusing to service even with a schematic. They also use some oddball tubes in the preamp. When I owned one there were no 6L6es that could hold up to the high voltages. The originals were designed for 7027A tubes. These days the JJ 6L6 will handle it no problem, but I used to eat tubes power tubes. All these factors made this a once-in-a-while amp for me back then. Eventually I left it at my buddy's as a gift (he loves the stones). Frankly I didn't want to lift it or deal with the retube it needed. I liked it, but not that much. My friend didn't keep it either. He traded it off. If you have a great tech, a source for NOS tubes and a guy to help you lift this (mine had casters, but they were no help getting in and out of a van) then this is a great American amp that can do a lot. Otherwise? skip. yes it will do all those queens tones with a tubescreamer and some cool fuzzes out front.
41028
the ebst american 4x12
These cabs are great. They're the original front-loading 4x12. The stock speakers are okay, but load them with old celestions and they really kick butt. They're a perfect square from the front and very deep going back. I think they were designed to bass as well as guitar duties. They make excellent bass cabs too. I love a good 4x12 bass guitar sound. Anyway, these cabs can be had for cheap in beat up condition as a local pickup, particularly around Philadelphia because the ampeg plant was not far away and we're glutted with 60s and 70s 'peg gear. These are a great buy. You will want to add casters.
41028
so rare
these tall cabs are the same height as the modern TV cab, but they're straight. They're invariably loaded with old H30 speakers. if they have a 'Bass' logo they're usually cloth 55 hz cones, but if they say 100 they will have paper 75hz cones. Both sound great. These cabs are almost always beat up and if the rubbery pinstripe fret cloth is destroyed or replaced with something else the sound will be different because this stuff is not tonally transparent. I got my 1981b by luck froma guy who just wanted someone to take it away. The closest mass produced thing to one of these is the mesa oversized rectifier cabinet. If you put some legit speakers in one of those it gets close to the bigness of these cabs. The extra air space is the main thing.The TV cab by marshall is not bad, but tis a bit brighter even with H30s, probably due to the slant. A 1980A slant cab abck in the day was really no different from the bog standard slant 4x12 other than the cosmetics and H30 speakers.