New Gear Acquisition

One Mesa Boogie Triaxis. 

When I was a teenager and learning guitar, I think like year 11 or 12, I desperately wanted one of these. But they had just come out and were over four grand. Instead, a few years later I got my ADA MP-1.

These units have come down so much as they’ve aged it’s incredible. You can get them for a grand or even less if you are prepared to wait. My unit is 240V, but has some malfunctioning LEDs and one hell of a scratchy gain pot. Despite this it sounds just superb. It needs a good service and I’ll be replacing the gain pot and fixing the LCD and just checking it over soon.

It came with brimar 12AX7s in every spot. I will look at getting some mullard or RCA blackplates and see how they suit. 

Since I’ve been playing with it, dialing in a wide variety of guitar tones is just trivial. And then you can save them for later recall. This is going to help with recording guitar a lot.

31 March Permalink

RPM Challenge

I’m going to try doing the RPM challenge this year. Going to record some of my own stuff for shits and giggles. The challenge is to record 35 minutes (or 10 songs) of material in the 28 days of February.

If you’re interested, sign up! It doesn’t matter how good your work turns out. It’s about getting creative and actually doing something!

31 January Permalink

Ronan and Riaffiora

Great Ronan’s Recording Show episode about recording Italian band Riaffiora’s album in live spaces around Venice:

http://ronansrecordingshow.com/2011/07/the-zoom-h4n-and-saint-marks-square-as-a-live-room-pt-1/

2 November Permalink

New Gear Acquisition

Got myself a Chandler Germanium Preamp. I have wanted this for a while because apparently its quite a unique beast and when one became available for an absolute bargain, I had to have one. Had to get a 2nd hand PSU to power it as well, but conveniently one came up on ebay at just the right time.

This unit sounds great. It has a wealth of tones available in it. It really is quite a tone machine with many colours available in its palette. With the feedback knob at zero the unit is open and clear, but doesn’t have much gain. The switched gain knob only gives a little bit of gain, even when on maximum, but all the settings are clean and clear. As you up the feedback, things radically change. The sound gradually thickens and warms with more feedback. As the feedback goes higher, the gain between the switch steps on the gain knob increase as well. 

It’s a little weird to start with. Basically set your tone with the feedback knob, then get your gain as close as possible to your level with the rotary gain switch. By combining your feedback and gain you can easily drive enough signal through the unit to distort it, too. It depends on the heat on your input signal. But the distortion is natural and pleasing and certainly usable. You have to be careful though when aiming for a clean sound, because the distortion comes in so smoothly you can underestimate its impact on the sound.

The only real downside to the unit I can find is the meter. It got a weird two-sensitivity switch which takes a while to come to grips with. A normal meter, either LED or VU, would be much preferred I think. It just seems a little gimmicky. Not sure if the various sensitivities have some kind of parallel meaning to the circuit or preamp. I just tended to leave it on the large gain range and just monitor for overall clipping.

Overall I’m very happy with the unit. Usurper vocal overdubs coincided with the units arrival perfectly, so tracked vocals through it and it really helped add a little magic something to the voice. Helped add some body and thickness and the ‘feedback’ sound certainly made it a little more interesting.

18 October 11 Permalink