Scott Fraser

RIP, Godspeed.

100% meaningless.

I so don't get it. Any tape machine I have owned which produced anything sounding like the various aspects of this pedal would have been ejected from the studio instantly. In the days of analog we did not love having tape recorders which were in any way lo-fi, warbly, crinkly, distorted, dropping out, buzzy, lossy, or anything else sounding like this pedal. Those sounds would have lost studios business back then, faulty equipment, avoid like the plague. Is somebody really nostalgic for that?

Those are all the right descriptive words, in my book, and as an exclusive finger picker, this calls to me.

Great that the D'Angelico is turning out to be a real winner in baritonia. Of course, at about 5 times the price of the others, it darn well ought to. I'm approximately happy with my Hagstrom baritone, but I can imagine selling it in a heartbeat if I got my hands on that D'Angelico.

What I'll say here is "Real, uh, 3" springs!"

This self-regarding, entitled prick has demolished the solid reputation that his father built from scratch over the course of many decades. There are a lot of dedicated guitar builders who are committed to making their customers happy, instead of justifying their own infantile, narcissistic, passive-aggressive behavior. Looks just like another Henry Juszkiewicz, who also led a once revered guitar company down the tubes.

No, for recording I use the Melda plugin. For live concerts with Kronos I use the Logic plugin in Mainstage. For my own playing I use the Leslie emulator in a pair of Boss SE70 rack units. My intent is to replace the hardware with software for my live gigs. But here are some things which don't exist in software, like the EHX xxx9 series, & some things which just sound better as hardware. I've been long tempted to try out the RT-20 as possibly fitting into that latter category.

Glad to hear that McLaughlin is still on his game. I had read that recently he feared his career was over due to arthritis issues.

And, unlike every other Leslie pedal I've looked at, (and a lot of software plugins, too,) the Boss allows wet/dry mixing. Big plus for me.

It's Monday 7:00am here in LA & the rain has stopped for the first time in 24 hours. It's been nonstop & very heavy all day yesterday. But where I am there were none of the predicted high winds at all.

Interesting observations all around. I have the Hagstrom baritone and, though I have no other baritones to compare with, I've always felt it to be interesting but not essential. I see Squier Tele baritones up for sale on Craigslist somewhat regularly, & it's good to know that's a contender. A side note: Masonite isn't plastic, it's a hardboard made of wood fiber, which has been steam cooked & pressure molded into panels. Extremely hard & rather heavy, but with no grain orientation.

I'm a huge fan of Laurie Anderson. I'm lucky & honored to have recorded, mixed & produced her album and concert collaboration with Kronos Quartet, Landfall, which won a Grammy in 2018. Laurie & I spent a lot of time discussing, dealing with, & processing the deaths of our spouses, which occurred in close proximity. So in addition to being the most intelligent person I know, and an incredibly original artist, she's also a lifeline for me. Listen to what Laurie says.

Yes, Velcro is definitely your friend. One of the great benefits of NASA's space program.

I've always added my gear to my homeowners insurance, but there are some caveats there. An instrument stolen from your home is covered, but an instrument stolen from your car at a gig might not be covered. There are companies which specifically provide insurance for musicians, but I no longer have any specific names on those. Symphony musicians who travel with their instruments definitely have insurance for them.

Wow, damn. A lot of great music came out of his head & heart.

Big congrats Skip!

I leave in a few minutes to set up and mix an outdoor gig in the sun. But it's at the beach so with tons of sunscreen, a hat & lots of water I'm assuming we'll be fine.

The best of the worst.

I bought a Dean Zelinsky Private Label strat style a bunch of years ago. It was beautiful. And absolutely unplayable. I think they hired chimpanzees to do their fretwork. No quality control whatsoever, because a very high fret was causing several lower frets to play the higher note. It was made in Indonesia. I took it to my luthier. He took one look at it, then went in the back and pulled out an identical Dean Zelinsky guitar that somebody else has brought in, except that one was made in India. And it had exactly the same problem, a couple high frets that made the neck completely unplayable. He suggested I send it back because there may be other neck issues that these guitars were suffering that would show themselves after he fixed the frets. I contacted the company & got them to agree to a refund. I sent the guitar and waited. And waited. Finally after several months I contacted them inquiring about my refund, and they gave me a hard time but they did eventually send my money back. In the meantime they asked me to write a review of the guitar. I did, saying that it had issues that made it an unplayable instrument. They never published that on their site. They only published the glowing reviews, which strikes me as exceptionally dishonest. I would never do business with this company again.

In the 70s UREI marketed a device called the Cooper Time Cube. It was essentially exactly this, substituting garden hose for the PVC. Two fixed delay channels in a gray plywood box we kept under the console. Just like this plumbing device it sounded like crap.

The Last Time. I think it was on the first or second Stones album. Would have been around 1965.

In Whitefang's defense, in recent years he had lost his wife & then suffered a mini-stroke. As a fellow widower I will always give someone a bit of a pass for behaving oddly in the wake of a spouse's passing. It takes time, years, to get back to any sort of normal. And even then, that normal is not like before.

I get all my modulation kicks these days from Leslie plugins. More organic & complex than flanging, chorusing, phasing, tremolo, or vibrato, while combining the best of all of them, along with overdrive as an added treat.

I went through a period in the late 70s, early 80s where everything I did was just awash in Electric Mistress flanging. I'm cured now, though, and will probably never use a flanger again.