The Music Man made me do it! Damn his "Think System"!! My Jupiter 416 Pocket Trumpet!

I've said for years I wanted to, half-jokingly, play the cornet or trumpet. It was watching the musical "The Music Man" many years ago that put that thought in my head!

Well, I bit the bullet, risked the ire of my lovely wife for buying YET another instrument and got a great deal for a very nice looking Pocket Trumpet! Enjoy!

The Right Tool for the Job!

A lot of my ability to start and complete projects lately has a lot to do with my lovely wife, Stacey, and her love of Elfa storage components from the Container Store!

My little closet guitar workshop was pretty pitiful using left over ikea shelving. It was rickety and unstable for any real work. Plus I couldn't leave a job out for fear it would fall off!

NOW, thanks to aforementioned parties, I have a wonderful place to work, complete with more storage, a place to keep an amp for testing and the right size and height for me to "get the job done!"

Ole #27 Custom "La Cabronita" Tribute guitar gets a Bigsby!

 My beloved tribute (to the Fender Custom Shop La Cabronita Especial) custom built guitar a great upgrade last night... A BIGSBY!!

That's right, not only does it have that great Gretsch Filtertron twang thang goin' on, now it's got that great classic Gretsch/50s/60s surf rumble back vibrato sound to keep all you dudes and dudettes rockin' all night long.

How does it sound? GREAT! Now that I have some great recording equipment, I'll have to get some licks rehearsed (so I can sound like I actually know how to play!) and upload something for all to hear!

The install was really quite easy and the custom bridge that Marc Rutter made me worked like a charm! He put some slots in the tail piece to allow the strings to pass through to the Bigsby's roller bar.

Now next up will be a new pickguard that fits the new MOJO! Black? Tort? hrm... Not sure, but I'm sure I'll post the results here!

This custom guitar also features: (besides the Gretsch Filtertrons, Bigsby B5, Marc Rutter Custom Half-bridge with Bigsby Mod) Fender S-1 grease bucket tone circuit switchable volume knob, a 3-way gibson style Switchcraft pickup selector switch, a polished aluminum electro-socket plug with a Switchcraft 1/4" jack, Sprague Orange Capacitors, 2011 Fender rosewood telecaster neck, Sperzel Locking tuners with pearloid buttons and, of course, Schaller style strap lock buttons.

Now the only other mods I can think to do, other than a new pickguard, is to switch out the trem arm for a "chet atkins" style wire arm and maybe some custom painted hot-rod graphics someday!

My first week with a Zoom R24

I wanted to post my perspective about my decision to sell my M-Audio Fast Track C600 and buy a Zoom R24 Recorder/Interface/Controller.

I worked in an analog studio from 1992-1995. It was set up with some great, albeit old, gear from the late 70s. MCI board, MCI 2" 24 Track recorder to match and much much more. I learned so much.

But since then, I've had a hard time getting back involved in recording using the computer. I am an admitted mac snob and have been using them since '87, they are all I know. So I obviously bought Logic Pro 9 to go with the C600 last year. I had used GarageBand before that, of course.

I just never bonded with that way of working and felt I needed something to bridge the gap, you know, some kind of control surface that gave me that tactile feel. I looked at the Zoom R16 the year before but ruled it out for a number of reasons: did I need 8 inputs? (Turns out YES!) Was Zoom a very good company? I had owned a G2 and thought it was dreadful. (Turns out YES, too!) Did it have good enough pre-amps? (Yup!) Would it be too hard to learn using a tiny screen, no visual on recordings like the computer, etc.? (Turns out NO, not hard & it also turns out that the lack of the "big picture" screen, I'm getting more intimate with my recordings, counting out beats, sequencing drums for the first time since 1992!)

Update on recording gear

So I took the Korg NanoKontrol and NanoKey back to Guitar Center. They really aren't built very well for what they cost and would end up seeming like toys instead of real gear. So I did a lot, I mean A LOT, of research and hesitantly took a chance on another product made by Zoom.

My first foray with Zoom was their low end guitar multi-effects unit the G2. Hated it. But with the Zoom R24 Multi-track recorder, DAW interface and controller, I was really impressed!

New Year, New Acquisitions, a Few Departures...

And a few sales at the end of the last one, too. Sadly, I turned around and sold the Roland Alpha Juno 1. I felt that it just didn't meet my needs after all, and that my Juno-Gi sounded just as good for my purposes.

Also departing: I finally sold the SKB Stage Five pedal board. Excellent unit but just more than I needed. I lost quite a bit on the deal...so word to the wise "only buy it if you think you will actually keep it! the resale is less than half!".

The G.A.S (gear acquisition syndrome) almost got me in November & December. The thought was of getting my hands on a Gretch or semi-hollow big body style guitar with Bigsby tremolo. BUT, a better idea came up...

Modding and Distorting

Thanks to the idea from my wife, I decided to invest in my custom built guitar (#27 Little Bastard) by adding a Bigsby and a new bridge. I also decided to get a proper neck for it buying a real Fender Tele neck. Much better feel and lower action too. I have yet to finish this, waiting on my friend and supplier, Marc Rutters, to custom make a bridge that will have the vintage half-bridge tele look and sound but the ability to mount the Bigsby to it. He came up with a photo of one of his full tele bridges that has slots cut to allow the strings to pass over, but he will make me a on off custom half version with 2 1/16" spacing and steel compensated saddles. I'll post pics, as soon as I have them!



I also decided that I have never truly bonded with the Way Huge Green Rhino OD pedal and will sell on ebay soon. I replaced it with the best OD I have ever heard or owned, believe it or not, the MXR Custom Badass Modified O.D.! This pedal sounds great, takes up less footprint area on my pedal board and really works well with my MXR Custom Badass '78 Distortion pedal (my favorite leave-on-all-the-time pedal!) If you haven't tried this line of pedals from MXR, I recommend doing so!

The Plugs That Bind... or doesn’t, in this case!

Never really happy with the crappy Radio Shack pancake 1/4" plugs I used to wire up my pedal board, I also splurged for some George L's! A little hard to get them put together right, I definitely recommend a cable tester if you can get one. I had to redo several for a frustrating hour and a half, but once done right, they look and sound great! Expensive but I really believe they have the clearest sound of any cable I've ever used and take up the least amount of space on a board to boot!

Logic Kontrol

Yesterday, in an effort to find a way to physically control Logic Pro better, I purchased a Korg NanoKontrol 2. It's basically a USB Midi transport and mixer control device. Bus driven, totally programmable, although after installing the Logic plug-in, I didn't have to do a dang thing to get it working perfectly! It's small, lightweight, very portable, no batteries to go bad and inexpensive. Win-Win!

Back to Lessons

On this front, last year, I decided to start up with Jeff Swain at Carolyn's Keyboards again. Focusing on early rock 'n roll, surf, rockabilly to start off with, last night we discussed "Slide" technique and started learning Santo & Johnny's "Sleepwalk". This should be really fun!

"The beat goes on..."

So the last few months have been full of buying a sailboat that needs restoring (see Our Lake Life blog), conferences, kids going back to school, birthdays, lawn work, heavy work schedules, coding seminar (See CSS for Print Designers) and learning programming, halloween, school events, sick cats,  and now election day.

In between all of this, Corey started taking piano and voice lessons with Phoebe up at Carolyn's Keyboard Corner. She's a pretty neat kid too. I immediately thought about Corey when I met her (phoebe) the first time. I thought she was a younger female teacher that Corey could better relate too. I was right. Corey is really excelling and practicing regularly. Her vocal range is already improving and she really seems to be liking the piano lessons too. I don't think she thought she would as much as she is. :)

I'm still taking accordion lessons with Bob Boyd although I've missed several lessons due to the schedule. I'll be going today. Only one more song in the 1st palmer-hughes book to go. Not sure if I'm going to continue or take a break for the winter and work on piano or something else. We'll see.

But since I started playing in 1984, this is the way it's been: stop and start, ebb and flow. I've come to see it as absolutely normal behavior, if not necessary. Otherwise I might burn out.

I enjoy playing so many instruments, sometimes I wish i'd just focus on one but they are so much fun!

I'll try to post when I can. It's been a while since any gear intrigued me. ALTHOUGH...

I got the latest Premier Guitar magazine that featured this new analog delay from Way Huge that caught my eye:

I've added it to my xmas gift list. I think it sounds great and like a lot of fun!