As we're entering the Holiday season I thought it would be a good time for each of us to share a little about our favorite piece of gear. It can be an amp, software, effect pedal, tuner, looper ... you name it. So the question of the week is
What's your favorite piece of gear and why?
My favorite is the Roland Street Cube. I like the fact that you can get a lot of good tones at room volume .. and switch so easy between them. The sounds isn't as good as good tube amp .. but it's close enough and so easy to flip on and dial in a new sound (at the right volume) .. that it's my go to amp.
I had it a little loud on the video below .. so some of the distortion is from my laptop mics. Enjoy.
That is a hard question to answer. I have several guitars, and for very different reasons I like them all a lot. Just about the same is true for amplifiers, though I don't have quite as many amps as guitars. The guitar I've had the longest is a little Guild F20 acoustic that has a great big sound. The guitar I got most recently is another acoustic, built by Terry Scheffer, a friend and great luthier. It's based on a Martin OM, sounds and plays really well and has beautiful woods and inlays. The electric I've had the longest is a Strat '62 Reissue built in the 80's. The lacquer has turned kind of ugly over the years but it plays and sounds fantastic. Another one I've had for years is an Epiphone Joe Pass that I put P94 pickups in. I also swapped out the tailpiece that came with it for one that is more like an ES175's, and removed Joe's fake signature from the pickguard. It is a great sounding blues, classic rock and jazz box with great action and these days I gig with it a lot. It's about 15 years old and I've used it on a lot of gigs, but it has a poly finish that looks almost new. I guess I went overboard a little here.
Lately my favorit piece of gear is my gernandt parlor guitar that you all have seen me playing in the lessons. I really dig it. It is made by Bob Gernandt of Bryson City, NC. He makes all kinds of guitars, mandolins, mandocellos, dulcimers...and more. Check him out at gernandt.com and tell him I sent you.
I am in love with my Epiphone Joe Pass. It's only about a year old. I followed Duke's advice and found one that just felt the best to me and had it professionally set up. I replaced the floating bridge with a Gibson tune-o-matic. Plays great and sounds great. What else matters?
My favorite new piece of gear is my new Evans RE200 amplifier. It's small, light and has 200 watts of power. It's solid state but has unusual extra tone controls that give you tube like sounds and it's got tons of clean headroom. I bought it for jazz but used it on a blues recording session a few days ago and it sounded great! Responds well to a distortion pedal also! Check out their website.......
@Roger & @Bruce .. I'm going to have to check out a Joe Pass guitar. I've always wanted a larger hollow body guitar. How's the acoustic tone?
@Corey .. Yeah, that parlor guitar your playing looks really nice. Great tone.
Mike, mine is surprisingly good, but honestly not good enough to replace a good acoustic or to do acoustic gigs with. Otherwise it meets all my needs for electric jazz and blues.
The Joe Pass, with a 16 inch lower bout, is a bit smaller than the other recent, affordable Epiphone jazz boxes, like the Emperor Regent and the Broadway. It also has a slightly shorter scale (24.75 vs 25.5). To me these factors make it easy to wrestle with. On blues band gigs, I can switch from my Strat to it without feeling like I have to make a big adjustment as to where my hands and arms are positioned. The acoustic tone is great, and the volume is fine for practice, but the electric tone is, to me, fatter and richer than the bigger Epis. I'm not sure why this is, maybe because the bigger ones have that split tailpiece that accentuates the high end. I think another part of it is the rosewood bridge, which is why I didn't switch it out. Of course this is a a matter of preference, but I think the rosewood bridge gives it a woody 40's tone. I'm from SF, and one time I played a gig down in Merced, a couple/three hundred miles away. My wife came with me and the next day we took a long drive into the foothills and ended up at a winery in a small town. The woman working there had a fiddle case open behild the tasting bar and we talked a little. She was practicing her filddle tunes when no one was in the place. I went out to the car and got my Joe Pass and backed her up between tastes of wine. So you can use it acoustically in the right circumstances!
That sounds great about the Joe Pass. I have smaller hands .. so the smaller body and shorter neck should fit me well.
Great story about the winery .. wish I was there!
My favorite guitar right now is the Dean Route 66 Palomino. Also my Gibson SG.
@bluesnut .. Wow .. beautiful. I love the finish and grain on that guitar. P-90s probably sound great too!!
If you wanna hear how it sounds, follow this link. http://www.route66classicguitars.com/electric.html They have a few killer videos and they were fantastic to buy from. Just scroll down and click to look at guitar that looks like mine.
Here's a video of the Dean Route 66. He does a great job of going through all of the pick-up configurations. The playing starts around 0:40 on the timecode. I love the all pick-ups on tone around 3:15 on the timecode.
I just got an Apogee Jam for X Mas to plug my guitar into my MacBook (laptop). It's pretty cool.
I then opened Garage Band and looped a drum track and selected the Fender Super Reverb simulator and dialed up all the knobs to full, added an overdrive pedal .. and recorded this little 90 sec power chord thing.
Here's the audio
It was pretty fun .. although there is some latency (delay between when you hit the chord on the guitar and hear it in the headphones). Next step is to test some more subtle playing .. which is probably harder for the emulator (i.e. it's usually easier to simulate distortion than a warm, responsive tube overdrive).
Maybe How Long Blues with Duke's jam track!
I have to say that I am not a gear head at all. Maybe one day I will get there. Too much technology spoils it for me....
I would say its my fender tweed deluxe 5e3 circuit clone amp i have. I just seems can't makes that amp sounds bad!anything i play through sounds excelent, and its my to go amp for shows if i could mic-ed it in.
Your lucky Rwijaya, it's the hardest thing to find a great amp. I had to have a 65 Deluxe Reverb modded to get the sound I needed.
I have a 1972 (silverface) Fender Pro reverb amp that I bought in New Orleans years ago that I really dig. Probably my favorite sounding amp, when it is working that is!
thank you duke. yea, i sort of got the amp without knowing what it does. took me years to figure out how to use the amp properly. to me amp, great amp is as much important as having great techniques or guitars.
by the way, does anyone ever played epiphone zephyr blues deluxe? how big is the neck on that particular model?
Mike,
My favorite piece of gear is actually my iPad. I'll explain and then tell you why I'd like a Sonic Junction App on the iPad.
I use this for so many applications when practicing.
I snap it into a music stand that holds it firmly into place.
My sheet music is displayed on the screen with a sheetmusic APP from Musicnotes.com and I can move the pages forward or backwards with a bluetooth foot pedal as I play the piece.
I have an onboard tuner APP called GuiTune that is so handy and easy to dial in perfect pitch it's silly. They also have a Metronome app from the same writers.
I reference videos on YouTube for comparing the piece I'm working on to others or the original.
I also reference anything in my iTunes library for song comparison or reference.
I use a transpose & optional slow down APP called Anytune. The App has access to my iTunes library, I can transpose any song to the key of my choice. This is cool because I typically change the key signature in my sheet music from Musicnotes to something comfortable for my voice or a position on the fretboard I prefer. For example I could listen to Duke's Swing album song Jumpin Blues in a completely different key signature, and play a long with it.
The iPad is a great practice tool for sure.
The reason I wrote all this is I think if Sonic Junction has an iPad app, (could start with simple access and an icon). I would be watching the instructional videos in my practice chair with my iPad music stand instead of clonking my guitar over to the computer at a table bumping into it. I would also use Sonic Junction more in my regular practice sessions. As a member If I could download let's say the backing track from Jumpin Blues into my iTunes library, I could then use Anytune to transpose it and play along with it. They key is ease of use.
There are loads more apps on the iPad that in conjunction with the material coming from Sonic Junction could really enhance the user experience.
Mike you have a great concept here! I'm a big fan of what you have created.
Steve
