After Action Report: Church Slide

First things first: I've seen suggestions that you drink coffee right before you take a nap, so when naptime is over and your body has metabolized the caffeine, you're energized and ready to go. So, as I sat awake at 1:30 am, knowing that call time was 7:30 am, I started thinking I should've had that cup of coffee right before I crashed, or not at all, instead of at 6 pm.

Anyway...

Starting at practice. Signal chain is Guitar > Wireless > Pedalboard > D/I Box > Hidden Amp > Mic > PA.

Song list starts with slide guitar. I'm not Sonny Landreth, but the song didn't need that, but it needed someone who could do it. Made me happy.

Normally, I bring my pedalboard because I know all the pedals, but I was asked to use their pedalboard, which includes a volume pedal, 2 "dirt" pedals, a compressor that I can't discern, a Line 6 DL4 delay and a Strymon Blue Sky reverb. I was hit with the following issues:

• My Number One is not optimized for slide playing. The action is high enough, but I go with Ernie Ball Extra Slinky .008-.038 which makes it hard to not accidently fret and such. 
• My Number One is a Telecaster with standard single-coils, which were not powerful enough to drive the dirt pedals to have discernable dirt, which gave me a plinky clean sound when I wanted a dirty rhythm sound, which caused me to not play the way I wanted on some of the other songs. There was enough to get enough hair on it for the slide stuff, though.
• Something caused all the hum to hum all the possible hum. 

I didn't really debug the hum at first, but eventually I learned that the hum was between the wireless (turned off the pack; hum still there) and the volume pedal (heel down; hum gone). So, most of the practice was a struggle to not just sound like a beehive. 

So, when it came time to play for real, I brought my Squier HH Tele. I love it; it's easily the lightest electric guitar I own, and I don't think I've put on new strings yet, so it didn't have the eights and the string tension was high enough for me do better with slide. The humbuckers were enough to drive the pedals to get the better distortion from the pedals, which meant that I could get enough of a rhythm crunch for the points I wanted it.

Also, I was plugged directly to the pedalboard, so no hum!

First pedal on my board is an always-on EHX LPB-1 to get my clean volume about the same level as my dirty volume. I dial my gain to the point where I'm well in the grinVd on my dirt pedals. I'm thinking 1) adding at least the capability of more output for the guitar is a good thing, and 2) perhaps I go for too much crunch on those pedals. My "lead" distortion is a Washburn Soloist, which was inexpensive and I think is beginning to show signs of failing, and I'm considering a replacement. 

The Strymon is a very ambient-safe reverb, with a shimmer set on the Favorite pedal, but I was able to make it work for the slide, and I'm thinking I need to get something, maybe more like an EHX Holy Grail to go at the end of my chain. It's really good, but not me.

So:

• Consider heavier strings
• Consider higher output pickups for the Number One
• Practice with less distortion to get better and braver
• Price a reverb pedal
• Price a lead-tone distortion pedal

After Action Report:

This was a few weekends ago, where I ably backed Greg Jones. I'm the one on the right, hiding behind my hat. You can tell it's me by the murdered-out #1.

This was after one rehearsal, and I was really uncomfortable with a lot of the material, so I spent more time looking at my feet, my chord sheets and pedalboard than is good. I'm sure most pics of me that day would look identical to this, with me not looking out at the audience. I need to work on stage presence.

Greg plays Americana, and I felt one song really worked with a slap-back guitar, along the lines of Luther Perkins. I can play a rockabilly boogie-woogie in Perkins' strange kind of way, but when it came to playing a lead, I just kinda doubled down on the rhythm. The slapback boxed me in, in a way that the dotted-eighths of the Edge and so on never really did.

But, I enjoyed the songs, playing, playing in front of people, and playing with another drummer. And yes, to get the right sound, we used a suitcase as the kick drum.

After-Warranty Report: Kliq TinyTune

I didn't just complain on my blog yesterday.

I made an Amazon review. A three-star Amazon review.

I also got the order ID, registered the Kliq pedal, and submitted a report of faulty gear.

They took my address and shipped me a new pedal. In fact, I know it's in town already.

We'll see how long the new one lasts, but I have to say their customer service is right on. After a few times playing out, I might revise and extend that Amazon review.

After-Action Report: Improvise, Adapt, Overcome

For Christmas, I asked for and received a Kliq TinyTune tuner, which I placed at the end of my pedalboard, taking off the EHX Signal Pad I had used as my mute. There are three things I needed on my board that a tuner pedal provides:

• Muting. I play in church, so it's play-sermon-play, and I like redundant volume control. I turn down both on the guitar and the volume pedal, but if I forget to turn off dirt, there can be a hum that goes to the amp and can be heard on stage, even if the sound guy routinely mutes those mics.
• Tuning. Nobody wants to sound out of tune.
• Verification. There are three systems: Guitar -> amp hidden back stage, Amp mic -> PA system, and PA -> on-stage in-ear monitors. Especially when the system is being set before or after a significant event, it is easy for problems to arise in one of these systems, and if the sound man is busy elsewhere, it can be difficult to diagnose where the problem is. With the tuner last, you can know your signal is getting to the end of your board and (likely) out to the D/I box, so the problem isn't you. This is crucial, if for no other reason than to have cast-iron evidence you can yell at your sound guy.

First time I took the board out of the house, I found that the pedal was stuck in the "on" position, meaning it was only in mute/tune position. Far better than it being stuck in bypass, but it did mean I was quiet. 

I've been torn between two pedals recently. My Washburn Soloist, switchable between overdrive and distortion, sometimes sounds acceptable and sometimes sounds horrible, so I don't trust it. My Digitech Death Metal has too much gain, and I struggle to find a way to make it sound like something other than a hive of angry bees. I've found the secret is to cut back on guitar volume. I'm still not sure of the use, but that's where I'm stuck right now, with my Bad Monkey as my go-to dirt pedal. These Digitech pedals have two outputs: To Amp and To Mixer, and I was able to use that as a splitter to allow me to feed the tuner without killing my output.

I also had extra power and the Soloist around, so I put that in the chain and turned the volume to zero to mute. I suppose I could've done the same with the Death Metal, but oh well. 

As a tuner, I'm happy with nearly everything about the Kliq. I have another tuner, about the size of two normal pedals, and the size of it makes it useless to me. The Kliq is the size of the TC Electronic Flashback Mini, so the size is right. It's bright enough and fast enough, and the price was right. I hope to get the registration and warranty issues worked out soon so I can get another tuner on my board. 

I should also mention that I broke a string mid-song. I had replacement strings, but should've had a second guitar instead (and usually do). As the SEALs say, "Two is One, One is None", so be prepared.

After-Action Report: Derp!

I was set to play on Sunday. I had all my gear together and set aside, and knowing the show-up time was 6:30pm, I was watching Disney-Pixar shorts on Netflix at 6pm when I got a text.

<you're showing up, right?>

<yeah, getting ready to show up at 6:30>

<that's when we start playing>

So there was a lot of Derp!, a hasty loading of the car, the slightest of soundchecks, and, despite all that, a reasonably decent gig. I knew the songs, mostly, so I didn't embarrass myself too much.

I did some, though. The first is the partscaster you see to your right. Despite the pots you see sticking through the control plate, it has no controls. It's pickup-to-jack. It's a partscaster, built from a factory second body from Guitar Fetish, a $5 bridge pickup from Reverb mounted to the body, and a neck salvaged from my son's first guitar, a First Act instrument where the body broke near the tremolo bridge mount. It's proudly a mongrel, and I've enjoyed it as a bedroom guitar.

But I rarely plug in my bedroom guitars, and I found while playing it, in front of people with only the most minimal of soundchecks, that the ringing highs I love while playing it unplugged turned into a shrill icepick when going through my pedalboard and the venue's amp. I generally tilt my pickups a little toward the high strings, in order to balance string volume. Plugging into my Frontman 25R with knobs at 12 o'clock, I went in with a screwdriver and reversed that. We'll see next practice how that goes.

A key part of my pedalboard is the volume pedal. I love to swell in, working with my delay pedal to get a keyboard pad effect. But, they've been having problems with hum, and so there's a noise gate on the amp mic. Which means I pick quietly and get nothing, and I pick louder and I get a surprising pop from out of nowhere. I've talked to the sound guy, and next time, I'll have time to get that worked out better.

After-Action Report: That Was Swell

Ach. I'm sure I used that one before.

This was a six-piece band: drums, bass, electric guitar, electric guitar, acoustic guitar and vox, vox, vox. I was guitar number two. My pedalboard is comp -> boost -> volume pedal -> Bad Monkey OD -> dirt 2 -> tremolo -> kill switch -> Flashback delay, set up with minimal warble and about 4 repeats. The boost was on all the time, giving me a little more volume. I plugged into a D/I box connected to a mic'd Egnator backstage, and there was a grounding issue that lead to a persistent buzz in the connection. I know that's not my board's fault, so that's not an issue that I'm going to spend too much mental energy on.

I had a recurring lick in the first song that required slide, and I liked it, but there were three notes, defining a D chord: A- F# D-A-F# D-A. I had my pedals set to make my slide sing -- comp, boost, Bad Monkey, delay -- and I rode the volume pedal. I'm told the effect was great, that my parts worked well within the song, but I am not a huge fan of standing around with a muted guitar, waiting for the end of the chorus for my part to come around again.

Much of the rest of the set list had me taking the place of the keyboard, playing long swelled chords to take the place of a synth pad. Another guitarist suggested I tune between songs, especially while doing that, because sour notes run into a delay pedal stay sour a long time. Problem is, I own a tuner pedal, but I don't use it because it's huge and I want the pedalboard space. So, I've been using a headstock tuner. I love it, I really do, but I left it on another guitar, which I noticed in practice, and somehow, it had been left on and now is dead, which I noticed right before we started to play.

I love that phones and tablets now have tuner apps, but while they're great for bedroom players, they really don't work onstage, especially if they're playing music over the PA while you're trying to tune. So, I was stuck with no way to determine if I'm in tune.

The SEALs say "two is one, one is none", and I left myself with no means of tuning.

Tuner pedals have other benefits besides being able to tune. First one is that they're a kill switch. I don't play with terribly high gain, but even when you don't have a rig that'll make horrible noise without you if you don't kill the signal, they're useful. Another wonderful thing about tuners is that you can use them to tell where your signal problem is. Put the tuner toward the end of the board and, if you can still tune, you know that the problem causing no audio is after the board.

So, next on my guitar pedal wish-list is a tuner. Thinking a used Korg PitchBlack or the like.

Beyond that, I'm thinking that something that's less OD and more distortion would be a good addition, so I can get a solid angry GRR when I need it. My previous dirt 2, a Washburn Soloist, has recently started being the quietest thing ever, which is exactly what I do not need. Of course, I have a Digitech Death Metal pedal that contains all the gain, which makes it unusable for any music I expect to play. I think getting something Klon-like will be in the same class as the Bad Monkey, so the EHX Soul Food is off the table, so I'm thinking about something fuzzy, like a Big Muff Pi.

I like the idea of adding a reverb pedal, like a Catalinbread Topanga or EHX Holy Grail Nano, but the venue I play in is large enough that it gets that effect naturally.

I played decently, at least as far as being-in-tune could carry me. I enjoyed myself and, by and large, didn't bring the side down. Most problems were beyond my control, so I didn't worry about them. If the only things to mention in the after-action are technical issues, then it's a good day.