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.

One Mean MoogerFooger

Ok, this thing doesn’t even look like a guitar effect, more like an analog synth washed too hot.

Tremoloes seem to get treated as the orphan of the stompbox world. Though a lot of amps have them built-in, as a dedicated guitar effect they are few and far between. Nothing out of the Thoman catalog appealed to me except for a piece of gear coming out of left field. It is the MoogerFooger by synth maker Moog, and you’re excused if your thoughts stray to some of Samuel L. Jackson’s lines in Pulp Fiction

Much More Than A Busking Amp

The little Roland Micro Cube almost buried amongst the paraphernalia of playing.

Between Christmas and New Year I‘m visiting with my parents. On previous visits, I‘ve brought a varying amount of guitar gear in order to use free time I have here for practising and also inflicting some new pieces I learned on my relatives. As I‘m seldom content with only one acoustic guitar, these transports almost invaribly turned me into my own roadie, not to speak of the limited space my Kia offers. So this time, I tried out a minuscule amp, the Roland Micro Cube. No worries in the packing department there. It is small and sturdily made and so light that people hang it from a guitar strap and go play for change on the High Street with it (it can be powered with 4 AA batteries). Once you hear that, it is a reasonable assumption that this is one of these little pseudo amps that seem to result from a generous application of shrink ray on your typical Marshall stack, Vox or Orange amp, loosing any pretention of tone or volume in the process. But this one is different. Firstly, it is plenty loud enough. Here in Germany, this has earned it the nickname „Brüllwürfel“ (shout cube). And about the tone: electronically it emulates

an acoustic guitar: this never works

a clean Jazz amp: very good for chordwork accompagnying folk songs etc.

a Fender Blackface: here you can dial in some overdrive with the gain pot

a Vox amp: another kind of overdrive on tap here

a Marshall stack: now it starts to sustain and sing

a Mesa Boogie amp: still more overdrive here for heavy work, but dial back the gain and you‘re in Texas Blues land

All these tones are eerily realistic. Of course, with a speaker as small as this, the bass frequencies don‘t carry so far, but if you sit in front of it you get a close approximation to the real thing. There are built-in effects, too, of which I like Chorus, Flanger, and Delay best. It takes external effects well, too. As you can see above, I put a tc electronic Hall of Fame Reverb in front of it. As you can‘t, I also used an Electro Hamonix Crying tone wah (that one warrants it‘s own post). And, believe it or not, that was enough to realistically imitate Hendrix‘ Woodstock version of the „Star-Spangled Banner“. Wouldn‘t have believed it myself.

Gold Standard

There lies my baby, sorry for the tips of my shoes intruding into the picture!

A fortuitous turn of events

The Shy Guitar Hero’s Strat

Please excuse the low-light, funky color photo

Eric Johnson must be the nicest guitar slinger around. At least he doesn’t present a hyper attitude like so many lead guitarists do. When you see him, the phrase “favourite son-in-law” comes to mind. Bleached strands

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

Synthetic Holiday Project

Watchen das blinkenlichten, maken das music

My daughter’s birthday is coming up, and she’s always wanted to play the keyboard more. She used to

Not an Ardour

Setting up the hardware and getting it to run under Mac OS X was entirely not the problem!

I’ve been setting up my Linux laptop for audio recording this week and I’m happy to report a measure of success. The objective was to get a setup

Soldering for St. Peter

I’m on a ZZ Top trip lately, and so I decided to put “Pearly Gates” pickups into my PRS SE Bernie Marsden Les Paul Style guitar. For the uninitiated, “Pearly Gates” ist the nickname Billy F. Gibbons has given his apparently near-heavenly ’59 Les Paul. And some heavenly tones it does have, and a beautiful ‘burst maple cap, too. For my PRS, nothing can be done about the latter, but I tought I’d try to get a grittier Texas Blues tone with those pickups from Seymour Duncan. And it was a premiere for me soldering on one of my guitars. So, here goes:

The stage is set. Note the wiring diagram from the Seymour Duncan website on my laptop.