Scott Fraser

I haven't played one, but I've heard them. For me, the sound of a piezo under-saddle pickup is a complete non-starter. I can't stand that sound.

Merry Christmas, a few days early.

It's the fatal flaw of the great majority of review videos. The only way to know exactly what an instrument or effect sounds like is to compare it to a completely clean version. I have no interest in hearing the contribution of the reviewer's somewhat breaking up amp.

Tales of Brave Ulysses & White Room are my top picks for best use of wah wah ever. And I wish somebody would do a remix of this whole album so we could really hear what Baker & Bruce were doing down there buried in the muddy mix.

Some things that should seem obvious are obviously not, at least to people with no experience or knowledge of what the hell they're doing. I am (not pleasantly) reminded of the time my high school band got tagged to play the school talent show. We figured more is better & louder is better than better. So, our guitarist borrowed a Bandmaster head to plug into his Bandmaster head. We already knew that the Maestro Fuzz he had kicked up the volume, so a full on amplifier should really boost the volume, like a gazillion times louder than just one Bandmaster, right? To our great surprise on show day, (we weren't smart enough to test this idea out before the big gig) it not only wasn't any louder than a Bandmaster dimed, it sounded like crap. Dimed. And now we know not to plug a guitar amplifier's output into another guitar amplifier's input. A 40 watt amp is not able to magically produce 80 watts by introducing a several volt signal into an input designed to handle several millivolts. Hey, we were 16 years old at the time, how were we supposed to know?

It pulls more current out of the output transistors than they are designed to provide, which could potentially overheat them. Mainly an issue at high power settings. As the speaker impedance is decreased, it provides less of a load, therefore allowing more current flow, until you arrive at zero ohms which is a dead short. Obviously a dead short kills your output transistors. But not instantly. I once saw one of those old, butch Peavey power amps arcing where the hot speaker terminal was touching the metal edge of the amp ramp. I bent things around a bit to provide some distance between the terminals & the rack, & things proceeded fine after that. But, to be safe, I'd try to match impedance.

Nels Cline, who has been my favorite guitarist almost as long as I've known him. We were shooting the breeze backstage a few years ago & he figured out we've known each other for almost 45 years. Julian Lage, who I sought out on Nels' recommendation. One of the few people who I've heard who I truly love everything he plays. Everybody else on my list has already, or will soon be, mentioned here, but lest anybody forget, I'll just add Adrian Belew & Robert Fripp here.

Finally, somebody who sees the MIKU as an expressive device rather than as a novelty or joke. This is so weirdly beautiful. Thanks for this.

Which is to say, the Wrecking Crew.

'I'm a Believer' is a middle of the road, plain vanilla, Brill Building pop song, with all the elements which make those things stick in the memory & sell records. I don't hate it. 'A Horse With No Name' I definitely hate.

My bass is bigger than your bass.

Yup. He referred to several features which he never demonstrated nor expounded upon. Like pitch shifting, storing user presets, the SFX settings, etc. Seems to me he just opened the box, played with it for 5 minutes, then did the video. Lame.

There was a long article/interview in today's LA Times with his ex-wife, now 78, who married Jerry Lee at 13. She said he was a ton of fun, until he got into drugs & booze & turned mean & angry. She was done with him at that point.

Might have been Y & T, aka Yesterday & Today, the band I believe is the true inspiration for Spinal Tap. I had worked on a video for them, so they put me on the guest list for their upcoming gig. Triple, not double, stacks of Marshall cabs. When they finished, same thing, stage hands carrying them off, one cab in each hand. As if.

Still dead after all these years.

Holy Shite! This guy is my new favorite guitarist. Kind of like Vince Gill meets Danny Gatton, with a generous helping of Jim Campilongo. Check this:

I want the moveable pickups on a sheet metal pickguard on a wood body guitar. And that carbon fiber guitar looks pretty great too.

Peter Green, the master, and this is one of the all time masterpieces of controlled feedback. This whole album was in heavy rotation during my high school days in the 60s. I recently heard this track on the shopping muzak in a Pier One store & I just had to stop & stand still right where I was in the aisle & take it all in. This is one of those music experiences where it gets in your DNA, 50 years go by without hearing the track, then you hear again & it was like you just heard it yesterday, & you can recall every single bend & nuance. That's what music does to us. Thank you for that Caevan.

At least in the Gretsch world there is the equally fine & very active site Gretsch-Talk. Many folks were members of both, so the community carries on.

I just happened upon the last minute of this mission as it occurred in real time. Technology is pretty awesome, to get such high resolution pix as the probe headed to impact, hitting a 500 foot wide object, 7 million miles away, at 14,000 mph. Wow, kudos to the JPL team again.

I'm just remembering that at one time, mid 1960s, it was possible to hear Ramsey Lewis playing jazz on the same radio station that was playing the Beatles, Dylan, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry, Yardbirds, etc. Bigger ears prevailed back then and jazz was seen as popular music. Glad to have had my ears stretched by Mr. Lewis.

It's digital coming out of the computer into the interface part of the fuzz, analog throughout the pedal, then converted back to digital to resume it's place in the DAW. If used just as a pedal it's an all analog device. I find it odd that their first hybrid analog pedal with digital interface abilities is a fuzz. A legendary fuzz, but not something which is all that applicable to general DAW use. I'd be interested if it were a Deluxe Memory Man, Holy Grail, Ravish Sitar, or of course a Mel9.

If EHX want to build plug in hardware versions of the xxx9 pedals I'll be all over that. Digital control of analog circuitry doesn't make it a digital circuit. Analog controls (pots) are just devices for turning voltage down. A chip can also be configured to do exactly that same function, while receiving commands from a software controller. One of the favored mixing consoles of the transitional period (1990s) when digital mixers were becoming all the rage was the Euphonix, which were all analog circuits, all under digital control. People loved them.

Yeah, don't pick up when they call. They'll stop soon enough.