The Kemper Matrix

A guitar processor capable of “copying” your whole setup of amp, stompboxes and built-in effects and speaker cabinet AND reproducing this setup as a preamp which you connect to your mixing board, or your active studio monitors, or headphones, or through an endstage to speakers or a PA system… How’s that for a paradigm change?
Such a wondrous box exists in the form of the Kemper Profiling amplifier.

Routing and Listening

It all makes sense after a while!

My mobile (is it mobile still? I fear by now the gear will fill the trunk of my car to capacity… ) recording studio is growing. Studio monitors are the latest addition. I found out you can’t really pipe the synthesizer‘s output over to a guitar amp and out of the amp’s speaker. Technically, you can, of course,

Commemorative Marshall

Looks kinda cute!

I’ve been trying out a Marshall JCM1 50-th Anniversary amp over the last few days. It is one of their commemorative series and represents their take on the JCM 800 in a 1 Watt format. Big, screaming lead tones

Musical Resistors*

This lil’ black box can save your hearing

It seems to me that we are listening to music at two discrete volume levels. For the most part, it is through appliances like a music player, a computer or the radio. Here the volume level will moderate even if you’re into Heavy Metal or Techno. On the other hand, if you’ve been to a concert and stood anywhere near the stage, you know that there you’ll find much higher volume levels. Think gutwrenching and tinnitus inducing. It is under the latter conditions that the typical electric Blues and Rock guitar tone came to be associated with tube amps set to the max. This started as a necessity before good PA systems came into use and has been carried on in this genre since the 60s. Even a current star like Slash will set his Marshalls to 10 on every knob and get is typical tone; easy!
Us weekend warriors that want to emulate the likes of him are in for a problem when practicing. It’s called tinnitus and hearing loss. Cranked Marshalls put out an immense amount of volume and we are not practicing in a stadium. So we need a reduction of volume but need to keep the amp cranked. For tone!
Theoretically, you’d only need a resistor between the amp and the loudspeakers for that. But it would need to be musical! And this is where a black box like the Silencer comes in

Tone vs. Cost

Fender Champion 600

This is rather embarrassing. You see, I got a very inexpensive tube amp by Fender called the Champion 600. Man, does it have tone!

What’s on Board?

Entropy at Work

Let’s have a look at my pedalboard as it is for the moment, shall we?

For Tone

No surprises here; GAS hits again.

As a beginning guitar player, you can only practice so much before your fingertips begin to bleed. But when you’re finished with your scales, powerchords, hammer-ons and pull-offs for the day, you still can

Lil’ Train, Big Voice

Outer appearances will sometimes deceive. You’d think this little piece of chromed grating on a base of tube electronics with chicken head knobs would be no more than a lame excuse for an amp, but the real kick is the lil Night Train’s range of tones. It goes from jingly and rather clean to full-on tube crunch with a few obvious settings on the dials. I have mine wired up to the speaker in my Fender Super Champ XD combo amp. The amp section in that combo luckily is connected to the speaker “downstairs” by a proper speaker cable in a plug, accessible from the rear.

Bye-Ya Lucille, Hey-Ya Strat!

The headstock says it all

I never could get on really good terms with Lucille. Another man’s lady, you know …

Palmer Pocket Amp to the Rescue!

My mobile setup (in color, desktop mess desaturated)

Well, the Ibanez bass set came yesterday. Minus the amp. This is the first time in my customer experience that Amazon has produced a partial fail. Or perhaps it was DHL that lost the cumbersome second package of this delivery. I wouldn’t put it beyond them.
Anyway, I still could try out the bass, because I had bought a Palmer Pocket Amp on a whim the previous week. That’s a neat device that integrates beautifully with my current mobile setup.