I Wanna Be A Shredder

The Kemper Matrix

chammann — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:32:27 +0000

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.

Ruggedized with a SKB 3U 19 inch rack enclosure

As you can see, I got the rack version of the KPA. Just didn’t like the geek handbag style of the upright version.
And I must admit, I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this fantastic guitar processor, trying out and modifying the factory settings. I have yet to profile my own amps and setups, but I can already report on the impeccable sound quality over headphones. It is really astonishing how faithfully every tone, echo, reverb, wah, compression, speaker distortion, tube crunch and what have you is being reproduced. Even feedback and other idiosyncrasies that you don’t often “need” are being realistically rendered. It really doesn’t compare to anything with “pod” in it’s name! And could you afford (or even find one to buy) a Dumble, an Orange Rockerverb, a Mesa Boogie, a Fender Twin Reverb and a whole armada of Marshalls? Their profiles, made by their lucky owners, are all on Kemper’s website, free downloads in the spirit of cooperative musicians.
For this first impression, let me just say, if I had to go to a desert island (and if it had power… ), I’d take the KPA, my Eric Johnson Strat and headphones.

One Mean MoogerFooger

chammann — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 03:05:49 +0000

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 at this name. In essence, it is a ring modulator for your guitar sounds to beat against combined with a LFO (low frequency osccillator) for the ring modulator and the original sound (I think ?!?) to beat against in turn. This doesn’t even begin to describe the sounds and otherworldly noises you can get out of this thing! The settings needed for a tremolo are some of the most conservative ones. Stray from them and you’ll find bells, trills, gongs, Starship Enterprise Phaser noises and white noise, too. Like this variation on “Layla”.
Oh, and it has a “Drive” potentiometer between the two sections to give the amp a proper kick in the crown jewels. The top potentiometer in the modulator section adjusts the mix between effect and dry signal. Yet another way to use this mean MoogerFooger is to dial this mix in rather low, choose a high-pitched oscillation (or two beating frequencies far apart… ), add drive to taste, presto, you have just made a very distinct Fuzz effect with Octave. And it goes on and on with these possibilities. Not all of them will be useful musically, but I’ve had fun experimenting with them.

A two-storied pedalboard

You’ll want to have the MoogerFooger’s dials and switches under your fingers for that, so I’ve set it up like in the picture above. Just praying that the cleaning woman doesn’t topple that! I also found that the signal connnections are critical with this effect. Granted, my pedal board is already well-populated and on 3 meter cables from the Marshall. Patching the MoogerFooger in with ordinary Fender guitar cables cut off the high frequencies, so I got Vovox 1m “sound conductors”. As the posh name conveys, they are hellishly expensive, but they work. Clear as a bell and they convey as high a tone as I still can hear.
So, on to more experiments! Currently I’m going through a breakdown of Jimi Hendrix’ best songs, and the MoogerFooger is strangely appropriate for that.

Much More Than A Busking Amp

chammann — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 03:32:56 +0000

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

chammann — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:55:00 +0000

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

A fortuitous turn of events and an abundance of guitars that no one at my house played any longer enabled another acquisition. While it seemed I had gone acoustic lately, I’ve never had the electric side of guitar music get too far out of my sight. Not with the Eric Johnson stratocaster at hand and in frequent usage. But it is almost acoustic in it’s tone spectrum. You won’t get a fat rock tone out of that one. I had been eyeing Les Pauls and had actually gotten a fair interpretation of that style with the PRS SE Bernie Marsden. But an original is an original. So I got that Goldtop 2012 Les Paul Standard. Gibson has introduced some modifications to this year’s model. Some you don’t actually notice, like the weight-relief chambering. It is still my heaviest guitar.
Some I did notice and appreciate. I’m referring to the new wiring scheme. All four pots are push-pull. The two volume pots put the humbuckers in single-coil mode (but even then they stay noise-cancelling). The neck tone pot puts the two pickups out of phase, regardless wether they are in humbucker or single-coil mode. So there you have a multitude of tone options that not only are fun to explore but lend themselves to styles you wouldn’t think of playing with a Les Paul. The signature arpeggio to “Shine on you crazy diamond” is right there with both pickups in single coil and out of phase. Ah, and one more thing, the bridge tone pot is a blower switch, when pulled, all volume and tone circuitry is bypassed and the neck pickup is at full blast.
But you don’t get a Les Paul to play Pink Floyd. As luck would have it, one of my favorite guitar blogs, Richard McCargar’s guitarlicksandtabs just posted a tutorial on ZZ Top’s “La Grange”. This is what I’m working through currently. Good fun!

Keeping Up With The Johnsons

chammann — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 07:26:07 +0000

Unboxing the Gibson Robert Johnson L-1

Most of my post on this blog have been about guitars and stuff that had
recently come into my possession, and this one is no different. But instead
of a “review” after having used the kit for a few days, this time I waited
for much longer to make up my mind about it. As is fit if the gear in
question is Gibson’s L-1 Robert Johnson signature Blues guitar. You know the
man: enigmatic Bluesman of the Thirties, said to have been in a pact with
the devil made at a Mississippi crossroads to make him play like no other.
And this he did. Recordings of 29 different pieces and two photos are all we
have left of him, but boy, does he often get referenced as a father of the
Delta Blues! Mere guitar gods like Clapton have recorded entire albums with their take on Robert Johnson’s pieces.
But let’s take a step back here. Why is it I’m so enthralled with these
signature guitar models (as evidenced by another Johnson’s guitar)? Well, to
be perfectly honest, a big part of it is pure fetishism. A superstition a
Bluesman with all his singing about Voodoo this and Hoodoo that and “my baby put a spell on me” could well relate to. A more rational reason for choosing a
signature guitar is that they tend to be better made than stock instruments
in their price range. Perhaps the designers and workmen feel honour-bound by
their relation to a great musician.
So, if we look for that quality in the Robert Johnson L-1, we get a
multi-faceted picture. As soon as you take the guitar out of it’s case you
notice how uncannily light it is. Spruce top, Mahogany sides, back and
neck, Ebony fretboard notwithstanding, the thing seems to float. To stay
with the good things, the sound profits from this lightweight construction,
it already semms to be played in half-way. Loudness is even across the strings, the tone is surprisingly full for such a small-bodied guitar but never boomy. It’s not a one-trick pony either, if you want dirty-scratchy Blues tones, that depends on the attack of your fingernails or fingerpicks if you prefer them. Especially tuned down a half-tone like RJ often did, bendings are a cinch. The neck arrived and has remained straight.

If you enter in a pact with he-who-must-not-be-mentioned, your signature will appear decades after your death on commercial musical instruments.

Filed under niceties are the traditional “The Gibson” logo and Robert Johnson’s actual signature (copied from one of his marriage certificates, they say) inlaid in mother of pearl on the headstock and at the end of the fretboard, respectively. One other thing I can’t get enough of is the fruity smell of the nitro lacquer.
Ah, the finishing… now we come to a few dissappointing niggles that I have
with the guitar. It may well be on behalf of the delicate nitro lacquer, but
I’ve seen better finishes (with Martin guitars, for example). The guitar
came with multiple fine scratches in the top layer (not through to the
sunburst color, though). Those on the top I could polish out almost
completely, but the apparent belt-buckle scratches (what’s with that on a new
guitar?) on the back are still visible. And then the bridge peg on the low
E-string wasn’t seated properly. Gibson working on it’s reputation for
being sloppy in finishing even their expensive guitars? Apparently not.
But still, this doesn’t distract from the fabulous tone. When I had a week’s
vacation recently, I got to know the guitar better and got deeper into the
Blues, and it was a happy Blues!

The Shy Guitar Hero’s Strat

chammann — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 07:22:00 +0000

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 of hair is about as radical as his appearance gets. But that’s ok. Once he plays guitar, his utter musicality starts to shine through. I’m not such a big fan of his greatest hits like “Cliffs of Dover”. In my perception, they go a bit too far in complaisance. But have you heard his latest album “Perpetual Notion”? He pulls off ambient music without boring repetitiousness (Hi there, Mr. Glass!) and shows restrained virtuosity.
If YouTube videos are anything to go by, he’s an utter guitar nerd, too. Myth has it that he prefers a certain brand of batteries in his stompboxes that have to be run down to just the right voltage to be just so. He says he can hear the difference…
So, he cares about tone, obviously. When Fender honoured him with a signature model, it must have been a chore for their craftsmen. The resulting Stratocaster is what I got in the latest shuffling of my guitar arsenal. In the long run, I didn’t get along so well with Yngwie’s scalloped fretboard. So his signature model and three other lesser guitars are on their way to the highest bidder and I bought EJ’s signature model in Palomino Metallic (a muted, coppery gold that is damn hard to photograph right) from the proceeds.
It is a deceptively simple Strat. Materials are top-notch, the quatersawn neck resonates wildly, the pickups are old-school 50-ties models that have a depth of tone that more than compensates for a bit of single coil buzz (if you’re unlucky in your HF surroundings, you can listen to the radio on this guitar). At a second glance, you notice the things left *off* the guitar at Mr. Johnson’s request and in the interest of tone. No back plate over the vibrato springs and no string trees on the headstock. The strings are still fimly lodged in the nut by staggered machine heads.
When I got it, I compared the EJ signature Stratocaster against two 2012 American Standard Stratocasters (one with an ash body, one with alder) and against another tempting signature Strat. The latter was another Eric’s model, i.e. Clapton, and yes, it has totally different, noiseless pickups. The standard Stratocasters had very transparent tones on tap that were nevertheless a bit lifeless, without a pronounced character. Workable, but nothing to write home about. EC’s Strat with the above mentioned noiseless pickups and an active midboost wiring leaned towards Rock tones and I couldn’t do a finger vibrato on the maple fretboard. No problemo on EJ’s Strat, and it had a lot of Blues tone. That was the decisive factor for me to get it. Plus, I like the idea that an obsessive-compulsive personality and a superior musician had a design influence on this instrument.

Routing and Listening

chammann — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 08:10:45 +0000

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, the FireWire Audio interface provides all connections you could wish for. There’s a different frequency response intended with a guitar amp than you’d need for mixing and mastering. Studio monitors go much lower and strive for a neutral response across the range. You won’t (and don’t want to) get that out of a tube amp even if you run it as clean as possible.

So, I got Studio Monitors from Behringer called Truth B3030A.

They do seem to deliver on their name’s promise. Speakers are a 8-inch woofer and a ribbon tweeter and of course they are active monitors. Input is by XLR or TRS plug cable and on the back they have switches to engage one high-cut and two low-cut filters. These are helpful to compensate for room acoustics and placement specifics. Studio monitors should be placed in an equilateral triangle with the apex at the listener and an angle of 60° there. Right now I can’t position them in this way, but their sound and stereo image still seems ok to me. These monitors don’t seem to be so sensitive to placement, perhaps because their bass reflex channels end at the front side.
So now I can listen to the synthesizer’s stereo output without headphones on. The Saffire Pro 14 FireWire audio interface routes in- and outputs in the following manner:
Input 1 takes an instrument cable from my guitar.
Input 2 takes a XLR cable from my Shure SM57 microphone which is listening to the guitar amp. This is my preferred method of getting an authentic guitar tone into the system.
Input 3 and 4 take the left and right stereo outputs from the synth by instrument cable.
The headphones get two ouput channels.
Output 3 and 4 are fed directly by input 3 and 4 and of course are on Monitor 1 and 2 channels as well.
Plus, there are lots of internal routing possibilities to my DAW software and monitoring software on my Linux laptop.

I found spectrography with FreqTweak especially enlightening!

With such a rat’s nest of connections (see lead image), it is easy to shoot yourself into the foot. For example, it pays to switch off the studio monitors if you’re recording the guitar amp with the mic if you don’t want to blow up everything with feedback…

Commemorative Marshall

chammann — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 03:00:51 +0000

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 came into favour in the eighties, and you got the latter amp if you wanted them. So how does this translate into a cute dwarf of an amp head? Quite good and with astonishingly little lost apart from volume!
That verdict is dependend on peripherals I use, so here goes: I play into it with my PRS SE “Bernie Marsden” that I’ve fitted wih Seymour Duncan “Pearly Gates” humbuckers. I have them set up quite high right now so that they give a brawny tone with a hint of resonance and lots of harmonic distortion once you go into the last quarter of their potentiometer range. I play the JCM1 head’s output into a Vox V112NT cabinet that has a 12 inch Celestion Greenback speaker and is rated to 25 Watts.

By the way, this is a bad idea…

For a while there, while trying out this FireWire audio interface, I piped the guitar first through it and then into the JCM1 head, but that robbed the signal of attack dynamics and also of bass, if I’m hearing this right. And what would you want with a clean guitar tone in the computer (use it in an amp modeller, but that didn’t compare to an authentich guitar tone)? I think I’ll try and mic the speaker today and see how that signal does in my DAW.
Addendum: That worked a lot better, here’s a few notes, the PRS is on the neck pickup, the amp set as specified below:
Descending Blues
So, back to the little Marshall: It is astonishing how many variations of tone you can get with the front controls and volume and tone potentiometers on the PRS. My beloved Texas Blues tone is found at Bass at 6, Middle and Treble at 4, Master Volume at 4.5, PreAmp at 6 and the Boost button pushed in. Up the PreAmp and you’re in Rock Lead tone territory, your guitar screaming and sustaining without a need for deafening volume levels. If you so desire, you *can* shake the floor with the little amp, just dime it!
Glassy tones that go well with a bit of echo are to be found if you disengage the Boost button and take back the PreAmp, compensating volume with the Master Volume. This is what I would use for the intro to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and lots of other Pink Floyd titles.
One button remaining (yes, it’s not that complicated, fostering extensive experimentation with the controls available to you!): near the speaker output at the back you can engage a resistor that reduces output to 0.1 Watts. Say goodbye to bass, then! I would only use that if a sound disturbance had to be avoided at all costs, and then I’d probably prefer the above mentioned route over the computer and use headphones.

Synthetic Holiday Project

chammann — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 01:33:05 +0000

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 sneak into her brother’s room when no one’s in the house and play his upright piano. Plus, she’s the only one in that generation of the family that’s a fan of Trance and Synthi-Pop in the vein of Daft Punk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
The latter applies to me as well, plus, I was on the lookout for a holiday project. I’m lucky that both my parents are still with us and that they live seven kilometers from the Baltic Sea. That’s were we’ve spent the summer holidays for the last few years.
This year, the project to be pursued in case of bad weather or in the mornings and evenings is ….
Multirack homerecording with a FireWire Audio interface under Linux.
No, just joking, that wouldn’t interest a prepubescent teenager one minute, and anyway, I’ve got it running so good that the difficulties of sound recording itself come to the foreground, e.g. how the fishbrötchen do you make a mixdown in Ardour?
No, since yesterday I’ve got one more input on the aforementioned Saffire Pro 14 FireWire interface. A synthesizer keyboard. Choosing it, a Moog Little Phatty Stage II was a longtime favorite. But my son rightly pointed out that this digitally controled analog synthesizer was monophonus, i.e. you can’t play chords. Did I mention in an earlier post that he’s the real musician in the family? Plus, he was at Musikmesse in Frankfurt this spring and actually played it at the Moog booth. Pondering the alternatives, I still wanted something physical to turn the knobs, adjust the sliders, not one of the ubiqitous software synths plus a Midi keyboard.
The result came yesterday from Thomann (and in the usual delivery time of a bit over 24 hours, they do have their system down!) and it is a virtual analogue synthesizer from Clavia, the Nord Lead 2X. That one is polyphonus, and emulates an analog synthesizer control interface though it’s sound engine is wholly digital. It even comes in a girlie color.
When we came back from the beach yesterday, it was time for exploration and experimentation.

My daughter hardly let me touch the keyboard!

So I put on my sound engineer hat and fought valliant battles with Ardour to record this simple two-track, two-finger Synthi-Pop mashup:
Here you can download the mp3 from my Dropbox public folder. Be brave!
Later in the evening and having read half of the manual at he beach, I sat at the synth and lost myself in the sounds, modifying them to otherworldly beeps and burps. It is an addictive thing!

Not an Ardour

chammann — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 04:44:48 +0000

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 for podcasting and multitrack recording up and running. The hardware centerpiece is a Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 FireWire audio interface. Getting it to run under Mac OS X was fairly painless, though it persisted in kicking out the FireWire disks I had connected it to in-line. This in turn laid waste to the Finder, iPhoto, Aperture and iTunes. Yes, I know I have too much processes running for audio production
Anyway, getting the FireWire audio interface to run under Linux wasn’t as straightforward. I couldn’t even get it’s FireWire connect LED to light up. Gradually, over the course of reading the fine manuals, trying out different FireWire cables and grappling with the JACK audioserver, I got the impression that this was a permissions problem. As is so often the case with Linux. And even though experts will probably cringe reading this, I solved all problems in one fell swoop by running the whole audio shebang as root. With Ubuntu Studio (realtime kernel, yeah!), you have to document your willingness to shoot yourself into the foot with “sudo passwd”, i.e. on a fresh install the root password isn’t even set. But having done that, you can log in graphically as root, start qjackctl for the JACK audioserver and then a client application like the sequencer / multitrackrecorder Ardour. The latter even creates the connections it needs automagically!

Here’s a simple two-track Ardour recording session.

So, off into another musical adventure!