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RPM Challenge

posted January 29th, 2013 in Guitar,Music

It’s that time of year again… when a couple thousand musically-inclined souls gather for the RPM Challenge and try to put together 10+ songs and/or 35+ minutes of new music. I did it in 2009, 2010, and 2011 (barely), but last year I threw in the towel halfway through the month on the grounds of being unable to actually finish anything and having very little motivation.

We’ll see how it goes this year… I have two different ideas for what I’m going to do, one possibly with a group instead of solo. If I can wrangle them into it and convince them that yes, it is possible to put together an album (even if it’s rough around the edges) in a month.

Peavey AT-200

posted January 3rd, 2013 in Guitar,Music

I dropped by Guitar Center tonight and finally got a chance to try out the Peavey AT-200, which I’d first seen in demo videos from last year’s Winter NAMM show. (Aside: woot, it’s almost time for another Winter NAMM!) I guess they’ve been on the market for a while, and GC has even had some in stock near me for a month or so, but I hadn’t sat down to try one yet.

The guitar was (probably intentionally) even more out of tune than the average display guitar at GC, but as advertised it popped right into tune after a single strum and pushing the volume button. I guess I should’ve tried comparing the sound of the guitar autotuned to the sound of it, you know, actually tuned, but it worked well enough. The sample tunings they demonstrate in the video — drop D or baritone — worked pretty well, too. And the most exciting bit to me was that it sounded good in the couple of open tunings I tried, open D and open Dm. Of course, those took a little bit of thought to figure out what to fret to get the autotune to end up where I wanted — ultimately you fret the number of half steps UP that you want the open string to be DOWN. (I guess that means if you want to tune any open string up, you have to tune everything down an appropriate amount and then capo up, which sort of defeats the purpose of the autotuning but is workable.)

And then I got to the fun (==ridiculous) things. I’ve always wondered about just how far you can push these tuning modelers, since they seem to usually demonstrate them at a baritone tuning at the furthest. But of course djent with 8-string guitars with a low string around F# is in right now, or if I didn’t own a bass I might want to be able to play bass parts on my autotuned guitar. Unfortunately, running a regular guitar through a pitch shifter or octave pedal usually sounds nothing like a real bass, to say nothing of the fact that they can’t track multiple pitches simultaneously — they’re useful as an effect but you would probably never be able to actually use one as a bass replacement. I think the AT-200 would be CLOSE to being usable as a bass, although I’m not sure. I autotuned it down at least as far as a bass in drop D, and I might’ve gone even further than that, and it sounded more natural than a pitch pedal but probably less natural than a bass guitar. (Obviously, running it through a guitar amp put some limit on the usefulness as a bass…)

From a practical perspective, I would still rather get a James Tyler Variax, because of the wide variety of tweakable modeled instruments it comes with on top of being able to model retunings. It would also fit in quite naturally with my HD500, which last I heard supports storing the guitar configuration along with amp configuration in presets. From what I’ve read, technically the AT-200 supports firmware upgrades to allow it to model instruments as well, but my understanding is that they will be paid upgrade packages instead of just being a standard part of the guitar. Of course, the cheapest JTV is more than twice the cost of the AT-200, which you would probably not reach even with all of the upgrade packages; on the other hand, Line 6 has pushed out several free updates for the JTV to improve its value proposition. But playing with the AT-200 did convince me that something with this simple retuning magic is something I “need” in my creative arsenal.

Sweetwater and Musical Wishlisting

posted December 2nd, 2012 in Guitar,Music

I had checked all of the Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales at Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Musician’s Friend in hopes of finding a Line6 James Tyler Variax (any model, really) on sale for sub-$1k. (There were a couple possibilities, except that no coupon at Guitar Center or Musician’s Friend seems to apply to the JTVs…or, any piece of gear I want, for that matter.) All I ended up with was ordering a copy of Superior Drummer 2.0 from Sweetwaer. This was the first time I’d actually ordered something from them; I’ve been on their mailing/calling list for a while, courtesy entering several of their gear giveaways. (Fingers crossed for their Christmas giveaway to win a full Toontrack pack or the Protools rig!)

Anyway, along with shipping my order out, they sent me their Winter 2013 “Gear Encyclopedia” — they had occasionally sent them before, although since I hadn’t ordered anything or entered any contests recently they had been sending them to an old address. So now I have a 500+ page catalog of music toys showing up right before Christmas. It reminds me of when I was a kid and one of the exciting things at Christmas was when we would get the giant Sears Christmas catalog and go through circling or marking the toys and games that we wanted, like a proxy list for Santa.

Maybe I should go through and mark everything exciting in this catalog and then hand it to my wife…

Guitar Project – Part 1

posted September 2nd, 2012 in Guitar

Back in February, somebody at work was giving away a few project guitars that they had gotten at some point and had since given up on ever actually working on. I managed to win the race to claim one of them, although I don’t know how much of a race was involved because the description of “hot pink” may have put some people off. It turned out to be an Ibanez Studio, which the Wikimedia Commons suggests was built between 1978 and 1982. It came with a pair of humbuckers, but it seems that one of the previous owners decided against the neck pickup and filled in the cavity with something. I guess I’ll have to decide whether I want to get it routed back out or just leave it as a one-pickup guitar. But first, there’s the matter of getting it to a state that I can work on it.

First, it was originally covered in stickers. I took off the strings, and the tailpiece and, at the suggestion of a guy from Home Depot, used Mötsenböcker’s Lift Off to remove the stickers. It kind of worked, although I’m not sure how much difference the sticker removal stuff did versus just soaking them in water — I still had to scrape/chisel the stickers off.

Once that was done, I had two more things to remove. First, the bridge was very much stuck in place, courtesy a pair of screws holding it in place that basically no longer had a slot for a screwdriver. What was there got chewed up pretty quickly by trying to turn them; it seemed to be pretty soft metal. I actually don’t remember at this point how I got them out, but it may have involved hammering a flathead screwdriver into them just enough to get the screwdriver to grab. You know, take advantage of the fact the metal was soft and getting eaten up by the screwdriver anyway.

Second, I had to remove all of the electronics. This was basically where the project stalled because I am inexplicably terrified of using a soldering iron. After a few months, I asked around either for suggestions or at the very least a pep talk that I could successfully desolder the electronics without burning myself/burning the apartment down. That was when some helpful people on the luthiery subreddit pointed out that for the most part I was going to want to replace the electronics anyway (even if I didn’t replace the pickup, which I probably will), so I could at least postpone the hassle of soldering by just clipping the old wires. Sounds like a winner to me! The pickup end of the wire coming from the pickup is stuck somewhere in the case, so I had to be careful to snip it tight against the original solder, leaving as much of the original wire as possible. The rest of it was less important but I still tried to cut everything tight.

There’s still one random wire that I have no idea where it’s connected on the other end; I’m guessing it’s a spare wire from the electronics that are no longer there. But now I have a hot pink guitar body sans stickers and electronics that I can spend the next x amount of time sanding down. (Because of course I’m going to sand it all down by hand, while trying not to get pink paint dust all over everything in my apartment in the process.)